City Profiles / Medium Cities / Huntsville, AL

Huntsville, Alabama

Huntsville, Alabama, may be best known for its aerospace, military and technology industries; it is home to NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, the Army's Redstone Arsenal base, and the Cummings Research Park—the second largest research park in the U.S. The city, however, is working to ensure that industrial production not come at the price of a degraded environment. Due to the area's porous bedrock—a feature of karst geology—surface water and groundwater are highly interconnected. For a planned development in a groundwater recharge zone, Hunstville teamed up with the Tennessee Valley Authority and engineers, land planners and environmental scientists from the Center for Economic Development and Resource Stewardship (CEDARS) to design the region's largest minimal-impact industrial park. CEDARS' design minimizes stormwater runoff and facilitates groundwater recharge of the aquifer, and will serve as a model for other industrial parks. It will also preserve half of the site as farmland. Protecting open land ranks among Huntsville's top priorities—the city has around 46,000 acres of green space.