The San Francisco Bay Area workshop will consist of plenary speakers, short presentations, case studies, and work sessions organized around the following three tracks:
Track One:
Visitor Experience
In park systems of all levels, the design and planning process is inextricably linked with goals for visitor experience. Shifts in demographics, transportation shortfalls, a changing economic climate, a greater awareness of universal accessibility, and rapidly changing communications technologies demand that we rethink traditional design approaches to interpreting and accommodating visitor needs. This track will develop preliminary design principles that address such topics as design approaches to interpreting park stories, making parks accessible to all populations, changing park uses, new communications technologies, and welcoming and orienting the visitor.
Sample themes:
- Connecting people to natural, historic, and urban parks
- Design responses to changing expectations and uses of parks
- Telling the Park story
- Making the Park experience accessible physically, emotionally, intellectually, and virtually
- Getting to the park
- Healthful living
- Reaching out to new constituents through design
- Welcoming the visitor
- Other themes
Track Two:
Preservation, Recreation, and Environmental Stewardship
This track will explore the many challenges of designing public parks for visitor use while ensuring the highest levels of preservation and environmental stewardship. Many public parks, whether national, state or regional, were created or set aside because of their intrinsic natural or cultural values. Therefore, preserving natural and cultural resources while shaping the physical landscape for visitor enjoyment remains a vital objective. Furthermore, parks - whether urban, suburban, or rural - exist within a dynamic ecosystem that goes far beyond a park’s official boundaries. Often these systems are being impacted by many external factors such as global climate change, transportation demands, and large scale population shifts. How we foster stewardship through long term education and learning is an essential component of future park planning. This track will develop preliminary design principles that consider such themes as parks and ecosystems, park transportation - to, from and within, stewardship education, design aesthetics, and competing preservation goals and guidelines.
Sample themes:
- Climate change and design response
- Fostering a conservation ethic
- Celebrating heritage resources
- Protecting and enhancing ecosystems
- Integrating transportation/transit systems
- Park design and conservation through partnerships
- Integrating preservation goals with new design demands
- Other themes
Track Three:
Design Imperatives
This track will consider such design imperatives as public participation, park design expectations, regulations, budgets, and competing priorities. In today’s public and political climates, budgets often drive design outcomes, changing demographics and environmental pressures require new and varied design responses, community participation in the design process is expected, codes and regulations may be incongruous with site goals, and designers can be mired in a host of obstacles that can derail even the most well-organized planning process. This track will develop preliminary principles that address the best process to design and create parks, to review operations of existing parks, and to know when and how to change a park’s design in response to shifting imperatives.
Sample themes:
- Civic engagement and the design process
- Constrained budgets, changing funding expectations, and management realities
- New models for public parks and park systems
- Design evaluation and adaptation
- Growing greener to create a smaller carbon footprint
- Energy conservation
- Styles and standards
- Contextual design
- Modernism vs. historical precedents
- Other themes
