Interdisciplinary practice, informed by both rigorous science and community members as experts within the process, is vital to ensuring planning and design efforts result in more resilient and equitable cities. This means, in our interdisciplinary teams, we must ensure we understand the language we use, the scales we approach our work from, the way our values inform practice, and how doing all of that well opens the door to innovative urban work maximizing ecosystem service benefits, climate resilience, and equitable outcomes for individuals, families, communities, and entire regions. This session gives real world examples of how science and scientists have been integrated into community- and stakeholder-driven large-scale planning to site-scale design work throughout Texas.
Results/Conclusions
The Healthy Parks Plan for Travis, Bastrop, and Caldwell Counties utilized over 60 different data points addressing socioeconomic vulnerability, environmental risk, community health disparities, and park access to help prioritize where parks investments throughout the three counties would have the most impact on quality of life and health for the communities that need help most. While technical stakeholders advised on methodology and variable selection, surveys of a larger stakeholder group including community leaders, informed how data were weighted in the specific context for the region. Various components of the analysis and the final results were uploaded to an open source platform that has guided grant applicants in supporting their funding applications with this rigorous analysis. Over $3 million in parks funding has been awarded regionally based on the project. In our development of Healthy Park Design Guidelines, “design tools” were initially selected through a regional community engagement process but were backed up by peer-reviewed research garnered through an extensive literature review to ensure recommendations were tied to their potential health and resilience impacts. A similar framework is being used to develop a Built Environment Toolkit for the Episcopal Health Foundation and their partner clinics to understand the connection between social determinants of health, the built environment, and opportunities for clinics to intervene outside of clinic walls to advocate for better community health outcomes.