Patterson Park is one of three ongoing projects Earth Stewardship Initiative fellows assisted during the annual ESA meeting in 2015. Fellows identified addressing public perception of ecological design in the park as the focus on their contribution. The Patterson Park project is presented as a case study demonstrating how ESI’s framework can be used to develop real-world solutions for sustainable cities. I will discuss the fellows’ multidisciplinary approach to integrating public perception concerns (e.g., safety, aesthetics, usage, sense-of-belonging) with ecological and design objectives, focusing on both the process and results of the project. I will also highlight challenges and strategies of the experience from the fellows’ perspectives.
Results/Conclusions
Fellows found that designing viable interventions for Patterson Park required substantial consideration of how the site’s social dimensions could align with its ecological needs. Challenges for fellows included determining how best to utilize skills from their respective backgrounds for the project, prioritizing and connecting multiple stakeholder objectives, and developing real-world solutions that met available resources of stakeholders. By working through ESI’s designed experiment framework, fellows were able to design solutions to meet the multifaceted needs of the park, adapting new strategies and learning outcomes that can provide further insight into how the framework can help ecologists address arising social and ecological challenges in urban environments.