Partner Mend Collaborative Austin, Texas, United States
Community health and ecological health in urban environments are interwoven and inextricable from one another. When ecological systems in cities suffer, so does community health. The distribution of parks, green spaces, and trees is often inequitable, with communities of color and low-income populations typically having lower access to parks and green spaces, and less tree canopy coverage. As a result, both community health and ecological function suffers in these neighborhoods.
As designers of the built environment, landscape architects and urban planners are increasingly looking to the sciences to help them make design decisions that support ecological and human communities and help to rebalance these historic inequities. When designing parks, streetscapes, and other public places to support community health and ecological integrity, the fields of ecological science and public health provide the scientific underpinnings designers can use to make their design decisions. However, designers must also work with community members to understand their needs, lived experiences, and visions for the future of their communities. Therefore, in addition to using scientific data to make design decisions, designers also engage in democratic, participatory design processes to learn what people want, attempt to quantify those outcomes, and create designs for public places. Ideally, these two processes of inquiry are brought together to create a design that positively impacts community and ecological health.
This session will focus on how these processes can merge together in three ways: 1. Performing geospatial suitability analysis to identify locations where parks, green infrastructure, and other features would have the greatest impact on improving community and ecological health by integrating environmental data (e.g.. tree canopy, urban heat islands), socioeconomic vulnerability (e.g, low-income, foreign-born), community health (e.g. prevalence of diabetes and hypertension), and parks access (walking distance to parks). 2. Merging the results of the suitability analysis results and the results of community engagement to identify areas of investment and design features that will have the greatest impact on community and ecological health. 3. Utilizing scientific literature to create evidence-based design strategies, and then performing goal audits throughout the design process.
