CEDaR

CEDaR, Redesigned

Anonymous — Mon, 09 Oct 2023 21:03:39 +0000

CEDaR, Redesigned Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 10/09/2023 - 15:03

Sierra Brown

With its bright yellow walls and large black lettering, the Community Engagement, Design and Research Center (CEDaR) in the Environmental Design building is hard to miss. But with a single door and no indoor windows to reveal the room’s inner workings, the mystery surrounding what goes on behind those walls is palpable. “The space is a little bit closed right now,” Shawhin Roudbari, ENVD assistant professor and CEDaR’s co-director said. “Even if the yellow is very calling and is screaming ‘yes CEDaR is here!’ it still doesn’t open the doors.”

One way to open the doors might be to redesign them.

CEDaR is one of 75 research hubs housed within the CU Boulder campus community and is the only one that has a direct relationship with the Program in Environmental Design (ENVD). Through community-oriented services and projects, the center fosters innovative research and education around critical urban challenges. “CEDaR has a long history of engagement,” Jota Samper, ENVD assistant professor and Roudbari’s co-director of CEDaR explained. “What we’re trying to do is connect academic research and environmental design with our communities.”

CEDaR also strives to engage directly with design students by bringing them on as research assistants and including them in community collaborations. During the 2022-2023 academic year, the Center hired over a dozen students and funded projects centered around transformative urban design, cultural geography and participatory, anti-racist planning. “It’s a unique opportunity for undergrads to participate in this kind of work. It’s really rare,” Roudbari expressed.

But despite the Center’s long history and active engagement practices, Roudbari noted that most ENVD students may be unfamiliar with CEDaR and its work. When he and Samper first began their careers at ENVD seven years ago, CEDaR was a “thriving, upcoming place.” The COVID-19 pandemic, however, diminished the capacity of the Center to engage with both the community at large and the students within the program.

Over the past year, the two directors have been working to rebuild momentum lost during the pandemic and reorient the Center in a new direction. They’ve secured a permanent home for CEDaR in ENVD 213, put in a small amount of “elbow-grease” and “DIY-renovation" work and have been actively socializing the space. But they also have aspirations to make the space even better.

After receiving a grant through the Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program (UROP), the Center funded initial research to collect input on what a redesign of the space might look like. The research involved gathering ideas and feedback through workshops both within the ENVD community and through engagement with outside architects, professors and students. Significantly, student assistants have been key in leading this research and compiling potential design plans to present to donors in order to make the redesign feasible.

The second phase of the project will involve workshops, prototyping and implementation. “We want a space that is flexible, transformable and open,” Samper noted. “Furniture that ensures the space is open to big meetings with room for workstations for all of our research assistants and ourselves.” The directors hope that the newly designed space will serve as an intermediate between a classroom and a meeting room—a place that captures CEDaR’s mission to integrate student and faculty interactions into meaningful community design work.

Among their external projects, the folks at CEDaR aim to play a more active role in evolving the culture around research and engagement within the ENVD community. Through open monthly meetings, CEDaR will continue to be a place to discuss pressing urban issues, host research workshops and create community-informed designs. The CEDaR directors hope that the redesign process, and perhaps knocking down a few bright yellow walls, will help make these efforts a little more visible.

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Crown Institute, CEDaR host nature-based social prescribing programing

Anonymous — Wed, 26 Apr 2023 21:15:17 +0000

Crown Institute, CEDaR host nature-based social prescribing programing Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 04/26/2023 - 15:15

Sierra Brown

On Wednesday, April 12, a buzzing group of health care professionals, city planners, parks department representatives, educators, and community members came together to discuss the growing evidence that time spent in nature can support both mental and physical health. “Nature-Based Social Prescribing and Programming: Route to Wellness” was a day-long event organized through a collaboration between the Renée Crown Wellness Institute and the Community Engagement, Design and Research Center (CEDaR). The occasion featured four innovative professionals who have engaged in research and programs centered around connecting communities to nature to address key health issues.

Nature-based social prescribing refers to a non-medical community referral system in which people interact with the outdoors as a method to promote health and well-being. While significant, the concept is not necessarily new. Historically, health professionals and city planners worked closely together to design integrated outdoor spaces within urban centers as a response to unsanitary conditions and health concerns.

“If you look at the goals of the City Beautiful Movement that spread across the United States during this period, they were about public health as much as beautifying cities,” Louise Chawla, a CEDaR fellow, stated in her opening remarks.

As advances in medical technology rose in the mid-20th century, health clinicians, and their patients, largely moved indoors. To address the obesity crisis in recent decades, health professionals have started once again to work with city planners to encourage people to exercise outdoors with a focus on active transport by walking and biking.

But according to Jill Litt, professor of environmental health in the CU’s Environmental Studies Program and one of the four panelists, “Telling people to exercise more doesn’t work.” Litt, whose research focuses on the health benefits provided by community gardens explained that “rather, engaging someone in an activity or space that they love is a good place to encourage change.” In her work, she found that gardens provide a model system for changing behavior and improving health, including increasing physical activity and fiber intake and reducing levels of stress and anxiety. According to her research, the evidence base supporting nature-based programming (such as gardening) as a health intervention continues to strengthen.

Unlike the more traditional medical prescriptions, the panelists discussed that nature-based prescribing can and should be informed by community knowledge and designed with community culture in mind. Another panelist, Nooshin Razani, an associate professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) School of Medicine, recommended a socioecological model that integrates social norms and culture shifts when promoting nature for health. In partnership with San Francisco’s Parks Department, Razani’s work invites identified patients to join in monthly park outings with an emphasis on free, unstructured outdoor play to encourage “moments of ‘Ah’ and wonder.” These moments, shared between family and friends, expanded participants' definition of community to include time spent in nature.

The power behind community, and community relationship to nature, became a central theme throughout the program. Ashby Sachs, a recent PhD graduate from the Environmental Studies Program and a current postdoctoral fellow in the Barcelona Institute for Global Health, focused her discussion on loneliness reduction in teen parents through nature and social connection. Wesley Tate, Medical Director for the National Trauma Foundation and board-certified psychiatrist, outlined the practice of mindfulness-based nature therapy work for people struggling with mental health. Both panelists promoted the idea of using community-based models, rather than medical-models to address health issues.

"We're experiencing the biggest mental health crisis ever recorded, and we simply can’t rely on the medical experts to fix these things,” Tate explained.

The session finished with an afternoon of small group planning and coordination to discuss potential partnerships for advancing the practice of nature-based social prescribing and evaluating it through research. Break-out groups were asked to discuss who, in fact, should be responsible for delivering nature programming for mental health. The consensus was that this responsibility shouldn’t be put solely on health experts, but rather should be shared in partnership with nature providers such as parks departments, educators, designers, and planning professions—in other words, everyone in attendance. The groups stressed the importance of collaborating once again and reconnecting their relationships to community and to nature.

After all, as Tate aptly put it, “Nature is not new, we’re just re-discovering it.”

A day-long event was organized through a collaboration between the Renée Crown Wellness Institute and the Community Engagement, Design and Research Center (CEDaR). The occasion featured four innovative professionals who have engaged in research and programs centered around connecting communities to nature to address key health issues.

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Third-Year Landscape Architecture Students Design for Eco-Healing Near Marshall Mesa Site

Anonymous — Tue, 04 Oct 2022 16:45:26 +0000

Third-Year Landscape Architecture Students Design for Eco-Healing Near Marshall Mesa Site Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 10/04/2022 - 10:45

In the summer of 2022, a group of collaborators from the City of Boulder Open Space and Mountain Parks (OSMP), Growing Up Boulder, CEDaR and ENVD began meeting about the concept of eco-healing–the ways in which connecting to nature can help communities process and heal from traumatic disaster events and create educational opportunities around climate change and natural disasters.

Growing Up Boulder conducted community engagement activities with the Boulder Valley School District (BVSD) and students from Whittier Elementary school that focused on exploring emotions around climate change and the super fires of today. Within the first few weeks of the fall 2022 semester, a third-year landscape architecture studio, instructed by Teaching Assistant Professor Emily Greenwood, has expanded on the work carried over from summer.

Students began their design project with an exploration of emotion and tying that emotional connection into what is typically referred to as the initial research phase. In mid-September, representatives of the multi-agency collaboration presented at the Colorado Open Space Alliance conference on Eco-Healing with youth: Inspiring Emotional Resilience through Wildfire Interpretation and Climate Action. Third-year landscape architecture students will spend the rest of the semester designing interpretive education opportunities along the Marshall Mesa (and adjacent) trailhead that will be presented to OSMP and folded into the future designs for those trailheads.

Third-year landscape architecture students take on designing interpretive education opportunities along the Marshall Mesa (and adjacent) trailhead that will be presented to OSMP and folded into the future designs for those trailheads.

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Growing Up Boulder

Anonymous — Fri, 18 Sep 2020 21:41:38 +0000

Growing Up Boulder Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 09/18/2020 - 15:41

Did you know that children and youth can contribute meaningfully to Environmental Design?

Growing Up Boulder (GUB), a program of Community Engagement Design and Research (CEDaR), has an office in ENVD room 213. We partner with CU, the City of Boulder, and the Boulder Valley School district to get young people's ideas into current planning projects. Since 2009, GUB has worked with 6,000 children and youth on over 100 city projects, Interested? GUB seeks committed volunteers and semester-long interns.

Check us out at growingupboulder.org.

Did you know that children and youth can contribute meaningfully to Environmental Design? Since 2009, GUB has worked with 6,000 children and youth on over 100 city projects. Learn more.

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Recovering Boulder's tree canopy through community engagement

Anonymous — Fri, 07 Jun 2019 17:23:33 +0000

Recovering Boulder's tree canopy through community engagement Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 06/07/2019 - 11:23

The Community Engagement, Design and Research Center (CEDaR) is a research organization affiliated with and housed in the Program in Environmental Design. CEDaR works with local governments and partner organizations to complete community-based, integrated ecology projects, which address critical urban issues through environmental design.

In partnership with the City of Boulder, CEDaR, along with principal investigators Michael Szuberla and Sara Tabatabaie, are analyzing residents’ baseline knowledge of the Emerald Ash Borer and proposing ways to address the infestation through environmental education efforts, as well as public-private partnerships.

The Emerald Ash Borer was discovered in Boulder in 2013. This small beetle, which burrows under the bark of ash trees disrupting the flow of nutrients and water, is predicted to cause a 25 percent decline in Boulder’s tree canopy in the next five to 10 years.

Szuberla (left) is a PhD student working with Brian Muller, an associate professor in environmental design and director of CEDar, and is researching how knowledge is built and spread in community gardens. His dissertation will argue that community gardens have value beyond the vegetables they produce.

Tabatabaie (right) completed her PhD in environmental studies, specializing in environmental health in November of 2018. Her dissertation investigates how design features of streets, trees and shade, in particular, affect people’s perception of the street for physical activity.

When the City of Boulder identified the Emerald Ash Borer as a significant threat, the Urban Forest Strategic Plan was created. According to bouldercolorado.gov, the plan was approved in 2018 as a comprehensive assessment of a 20-year plan for the Boulder urban tree canopy developed with extensive input from the community. The overarching goal of this plan is to restore the tree canopy to pre-ash borer levels, which is 16 percent coverage.

As the beetles take their toll in Boulder, the ash trees will need to be cut down safely before dying completely, and replaced with a new set of diverse trees. So far, the city can manage this process on all of Boulder’s public property but has very minimal control over how private landowners will choose to remedy the infestation on their own property.

Seventy-seven percent of Boulder’s total tree canopy is on private property, so landowners, residents and business will need to be educated on proper tree management.

In addition to managing the current infestation, the city will focus on preventing another high percentage loss of tree coverage due to a pest or disease. Private property owners will be encouraged to work together to plant diverse tree species.

“In the 1950s and 1960s, the City of Boulder planted each neighborhood with only one type of tree for uniformity and aesthetics,” Szuberla said.

“Now, Boulder is working to diversify the species of trees throughout the city, but they also need to educate citizens, so that when they are selecting trees to put on their own property they keep in mind what species their neighbors already have and try to select different species.”

Both Szuberla and Tabatabaie have designed a survey to capture the baseline knowledge of residents on the Emerald Ash Borer and to learn more about their remediation plans. The City of Boulder sent out this survey to 30,000 residents in March 2019. Szuberla and Tabatabaie will complete their data collection and analysis this summer as they plan to interview more residents and conduct several focus groups in Boulder.

The results of this survey, along with interviews, will be shared as a report with the City of Boulder. The survey results will also be presented at the Association of Collegiate School of Planning (ACSP) Annual Conference in South Carolina in fall 2019.

The ultimate goal of their research is to develop an effective planning framework to address tree infestation issues in cities and to change the conversation so that cities in the future can maintain healthy tree canopies and ecosystems.

“Urban resilience literature has been more concerned with short-term natural disasters, rather than long-term events with impacts that may not be noticed right away,” Tabatabaie said.

“We are trying to integrate as many factors as possible such as socioeconomic factors and knowledge level of residents.”

Learn more about the project.

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Growing Up Boulder Director, Mara Mintzer's, TEDx Talk to be featured on TED main platform

Anonymous — Wed, 07 Nov 2018 23:07:48 +0000

Growing Up Boulder Director, Mara Mintzer's, TEDx Talk to be featured on TED main platform Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 11/07/2018 - 16:07

TED has selected Growing Up Boulder Director, Mara Mintzer's, TEDx Talk to be featured on their main platform launching on November 7th at 4:00 pm EST. Her talk, "We let kids design our city -- here's what happened," will be available at go.ted.com/maramintzer. The talk is based on her work with Growing Up Boulder (GUB), a program of the Community Engagement Design and Research (CEDaR) Center; GUB integrates young people's ideas into Boulder city planning.

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