Look at streets and parks laid over the old runways of Robert Mueller Municipal Airport — one of the more remarkable planning stories in recent American history. Mueller Airport opened in 1930 and served as Austin's primary commercial airfield for nearly seventy years, its runways eventually hemmed in by the city that had grown up around it. In 1999, when the new Austin-Bergstrom International Airport opened southeast of downtown, Mueller closed.
Rather than sell the land to the highest bidder, the City of Austin engaged community groups, developers, and urban planners in a decade-long collaborative process to imagine what the 700-acre site could become. The result — the Mueller neighborhood — opened in phases beginning in 2007 and has become a nationally celebrated example of new urbanism: mixed-income housing, walkable streets, parks, schools, retail, and medical facilities integrated into a coherent community. Dell Children's Hospital occupies the site of the old terminal.
Solar panels generate power. Parks follow the lines of old taxiways. One-third of the units are deed-restricted affordable housing.
Mueller is Austin imagining what it could build if it tried — imperfect, ongoing, but genuinely ambitious.