Ground
Works

Our team of forest scientists, landscape architecture faculty and students, and communications staff collectively develops virtual, embodied forest experiences. These experiences enable us to invite those who care about forest landscapes to think together with us about positive futures for our working landscape. Conventional decision making processes often aim to communicate static scientific information to constituents through data and written form, limiting the agency of individual recipients who are not offered avenues for meaningful contribution to the ideas they receive. Our work is a direct challenge to this dynamic, developing an alternative way of working that uses three-dimensional, visually immersive, artistic virtual reality models to create a shared space for iterative idea generation. In this shared space we welcome community members, landowners, policymakers, and many others to experience the virtual forest and share ideas about ways of sustainably managing the land towards a more sustainable climate future. Each of these groups has different and often competing goals that are not easily resolved through discussion and feedback processes such as community meetings or stakeholder focus groups. In contrast, the virtual forest has allowed participants to identify shared values about the working landscape which result in buy-in and connection to the land, its management, and others who care about the working forest. This has resulted in advocacy for sustainable forest management, adoption of sustainable forest management practices, and critical feedback which has helped the academic team to hone and refine our virtual forest models.

ArtPlace America (ArtPlace) was a ten-year collaboration among a number of foundations, federal agencies, and financial institutions that supported the field of creative placemaking – the intentional integration of arts, culture, and community-engaged design strategies into the process of equitable community planning and development. Within this mandate, ArtPlace conducted the “Translating Outcomes” research initiative from 2015 to 2020 – an incremental, segmented approach to building creative placemaking knowledge for and with a diverse range of community development practitioners. Recognizing that comprehensive community development is composed of many professional disciplines, ArtPlace identified ten segments of the field that are often separated out as distinct municipal agencies, university departments, or funding streams: Agriculture & Food, Economic Development, Environment & Energy, Health, Housing, Immigration, Public Safety, Transportation, Workforce Development, and Youth Development. The Translating Outcomes research design took this segmentation as its road map and set out to analyze, make legible, and give language to how arts and cultural practitioners have long been partners in helping to achieve each of these sectors’ goals. For each of the ten sectors, ArtPlace engaged countless partners to conduct research, convene cross-sector working groups, publish field scans, and create resources specific to each sector. The effort was explicitly participatory, designed to elevate the knowledge and expertise of community residents, artists, and community development practitioners through interviews, convenings, and research review. As a hybrid institution straddling funding, policy, advocacy, and grassroots spheres, ArtPlace occupied a unique and privileged platform that allowed it to catalyze multidisciplinary research and action at the scale of this initiative. After providing a review of the published outputs and the work it has seeded in other sectors, I share in the following a reflection on both the conditions required to cultivate such cross-sector communities of practice and the opportunities for further scholarship that may impact vibrant ecologies of research.