April 2023 - Parks & Recreation - 47

Embracing
Regenerative
Design
H
By Mary Chow
ealth and Wellness, Equity, and Conservation - these are
NRPA's Three Pillars. They also are concepts and ideas that
are priorities for many organizations across the United States
and Canada. The challenges that underlie them regularly permeate
the conversations architects and designers have with cities, communities,
and park and recreation professionals. Common questions include:
* How can we create facilities that
do no harm and contribute to a
better natural environment?
* How do we conserve natural environments
and habitats while
providing healthy outdoor spaces
for people to gather?
* How do we embed resiliency and
flexibility into our facility designs,
so they can withstand increasing
environmental degradation?
* What role should publicly funded
community
buildings
play
during extreme weather events?
* How do we create equal access
for all community members to
amenities and programs?
Defining Regenerative
Design
Given the challenges we face in
today's society, all three of these
pillars are priorities for the built environment
in the places and spaces
that serve our communities. This is
why the design industry is shifting
from sustainable to regenerative
design. Broadly defined as design
that reconnects humans and nature
through the continuous renewal of
evolving socioecological systems,
regenerative design moves beyond
basic,
high-performance design
toward renewal-focused solutions.
With sustainable design, the architecture
industry
has
worked
toward achieving net-zero carbon,
water and waste in many facets of
the built environment. With regenerative
design, the industry is moving
toward realizing net-positive
benefits in these categories while
accounting for the interconnectedness
of environment, equity, and
health and wellness.
What We Measure Matters
How can we tell if something is truly
regenerative? We must be intentional
about measuring it. For example,
design firm HDR created a
tool that, for nearly any building or
environment, helps us set renewalfocused
impacts and metric-driven
targets for our projects. The real
benefit of the tool lies in its ability
to incorporate data from many
different publicly available sources
and use that to contextualize and
customize the benchmarks a project
should be working toward.
The tool also accounts for the
fact that different metrics mean
different things to different owners,
users, buildings and environments.
It allows stakeholders to select the
most relevant factors for their project
and set regenerative targets in
those categories.
" Social equity is a guiding principle
for many park and recreation
organizations. We use the regenerative
design tool to put social equity
into context. Understanding
a community's history and demographics
directly informs how we
approach outreach, " shares Whitney
Swanson, AIA, of HDR, who
has served as project manager on
library and community center projects
in Denver. " For example, on a
recent project, it informed our decisions
to make all of our materials
available in dual languages, to host
engagement events in conjunction
with other well-attended community
events, and to have virtual
engagement options in place to
capture the perspectives of those
not in attendance. This site-specific
engagement process led to a robust
PARK S ANDRECRE AT ION . OR G | APRIL 2 0 2 3
| Parks & Recreation
47
Six strategies for moving toward regenerative
park and recreation environments
April 2023 - Parks & Recreation

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of April 2023 - Parks & Recreation
