About Riverway
 Riverway stands out in riverfront parkland revitalisation in a fashion that generates extensive recognition, opening up the river habitat to greater access by residents and tourists, whilst protecting and enhancing its natural beauty.
Riverway was conceived by Thuringowa City Council as a standard of ecological sensitivity and river management, while simultaneously providing an exciting environment for the city’s young and expanding community to enjoy a variety of water-based and waterfront activities.
As a result there are four unique river precincts, each distinct in objective and approach, such that Riverway as a whole is presented as a microcosm of the diversity of river settings that may be found across the world’s tropics.
Riverway stretches along 11km of the Ross River, with nodes at Pioneer Park, Loam Island, Apex Park and the Ross River Dam.
The nodes of Riverway that already have been completed include Pioneer Park and Loam Island, with Pioneer Park being located in the heart of Thuringowa along the Ross River and strategically positioned for connecting the city to the river.
Pioneer Park is the activity centre of Riverway, connected directly to the Thuringowa central business district and integrating culture, sport, dining, shopping, living, business life and passive recreation.
Pioneer Park
Pioneer Park is a hub where the Thuringowa community, visitors and tourists can enjoy a multiplicity of activities – sport, entertainment, swimming, performing arts, visual arts, dining, shopping and passive recreation – in one of Queensland’s most spectacular river settings.
Pioneer Park is unique in the way these activities, the buildings and landscape are interrelated, coupled with a clear focus on the integration of energy, water and waste management with enriched natural biodiversity. It is emblematic of the way that people and nature can co-exist to create a synergy of social and environmental sustainability.
The Village Boulevard forms the basis of city/park integration. It is extended through the park in a linear pedestrian spine to the river edge. This pedestrian spine forms the heart of Pioneer Park, providing a central focus for community activity on the waterfront.
Two major public building/landscape components are activating the spine on opposite sides. The first is the Riverway Arts Centre and lagoon precinct designed to be interactive and mutually interdependent. The second is the Riverway Sports Centre combining two of Australia’s passions – cricket and Australian Football League.
A third critical component of the spine is the Village where restaurants, cafes, bars, specialty shops and local businesses will be ‘critically’ massed for mutual support.
The concepts for the combined Arts Centre / lagoon precinct and the Sports Centre led to an idea that the whole of Pioneer Park could be unique in forming an integrated ‘land art’ work.
The ‘environmental art’ ethos at Riverway is focussed upon social diversity. It integrates recreational fun in the form of a dual swimming lagoon with the cultural activity of theatre and gallery. In this way, people visiting to swim, picnic or play sports might be attracted to also participate in cultural interests, and vice versa.
The ‘green roof’ to the Arts Centre represents an innovative solution to the question of incorporating built form within the parkland without resulting in a decrease in the amount of green space. It also performs vital heat reduction, water management, air purification, aesthetic and acoustic functions. It lowers interior temperatures by dramatically reducing the roof surface temperature.
The Riverway Arts Centre (housing a performance space and art gallery), is devised as a ‘geographical’ formation with the parkland rising over its roof from one end and the lagoon-facing end evolved as a series of serrations where water enters the built environment and vice-versa.
The sports centre’s grandstand is conceived as a form continuous with the grassed berms which surround the oval.
The resulting structure forms the basis of a distinctive design approach of built and landscape integration across the remaining parkland, including a series of serpentine-shaped landscape mounds winding around the park and forming buffers to the adjacent roadways.
The overall program is focussed upon showing how the environmental and ecological systems work as a means of informing the wider public about the sensitivities of riverine environments and how they might be best managed.
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