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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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.”  

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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.

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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 . 

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From June through the end of July, environmental design students were sent out to design with a community rather than for a community. 

Designers Without Boundaries (DWB), an academic scholarship program for first-generation and underrepresented students in ENVD, debuted their Design Competition in late June, to provide students the opportunity to work collaboratively with other students during the summer break. The competition presented three different case studies for groups to choose from, the Boulder Shelter for the Homeless, Ponderosa Mobile Home Community and Arapahoe Ridge High School. Three teams, made up of three students were up for the challenge. 

Each group had to submit their design proposals by July 23 for the judges to deliberate. The panel included Assistant Professor Shawhin Roudbari, Lecturer Sara Tabatabaie, DWB advisors Roberto De Mata and Fernando Martinez, as well as, ENVD students Victor Gonzalez and Lauren Oertel, and DWB alumni Ann Dang, LOA Architecture, and Ivan Patino, Workshop 8. 

The team JCT Associates was announced as the winner was announced during the a presentation held last Thursday. 

View Winning Submission

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Over the past two weeks, students in Instructor Siobhan Brooks’ landscape architecture studio have been exploring Boulder County, learning firsthand about the structure of community parks and their role in regional recreational planning. The studio will be collaborating with the City of Longmont’s senior planners and landscape architects to develop masterplan schemes for a future community park in southwest Longmont. 

During the first week, students visited Foothills Community Park, Sandstone Rand and Dry Creek Community Park. This week, students launched their site reconnaissance analysis phase, with a site visit to the 80-acre Sisters of St. Francis property. The studio was accompanied by City of Longmont Senior Project Manager Steve Ransweiler, PLA.

During the first clear and cool day of the semester, Brooks and the students enjoyed marching through the cornfields, hopping across irrigation ditches and investigating riparian zones.

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For one environmental design course, adjusting to remote-learning due to the novel coronavirus pandemic has encouraged a positive educational opportunity. Associate Professor Susannah Drake asked students in her 1002 tech course to design educational posters providing information relating to COVID-19. 

“They did an amazing job!” Drake said. 

Fourteen students submitted their own version of how to overcome the pandemic, from handmade drawings and paintings to digital graphics. 

For Joshua Dusbabek, his poster was designed to illustrate a message titled “Til the Light Burns Out.” 

“The statement I am attempting to make is perhaps that one of the amazing things COVID-19 has done for us is made us realize the importance of the little things,” Dusbabek said. 

He described the “little things” as activities such as hanging out with friends and enjoying the world “around us.”

“The questions this piece begs, however, is will we be able to have a greater value for the little things after this is all over?” Dusbabek said. “Or, is our appreciation for the little things and our profound sense of equality going to be short-lived?” 

Tianyi Dai, another student in Drake’s tech course, took a different approach for her poster’s message. At first glance, a viewer will notice illustrations of healthcare workers chasing away virus “blobs” off the page of the poster. 

“I wanted to say that there are so many heroes fighting for us,” Dai said. “They are trying [their] best to keep us safe.”

Other students used graphical cues to highlight the severity of the pandemic and to promote prevention guidelines provided by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.  

“I created my poster in Photoshop,” Kayla Vaartjes, an architecture major said. “I used the compositional principles of asymmetry, tension, contrast and figure-ground.”

Following the completion of the assignment, Drake encouraged her students to submit their work to the , a competition seeking work that promotes public health and safety messages, as well as messages that promote mental health, well-being and social change. 

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While teaching remotely, Environmental Design Instructor Betsy Johnson and her family are volunteering their time to help others during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Scrolling through Facebook, Johnson read a post from Boulder Community Health, noting they were accepting donations of homemade masks.  

“I have been sewing for years and have a lot of random scraps at home,” Johnson said. “That seemed like a great way to get involved from home and keep us busy.”

With two kids now at home, Johnson said they are trying their best to stay positive. Her daughters help cut fabric and make signs for the hospital, and Johnson sews and delivers the masks. She sews her handmade masks using her grandmother’s sewing machine from the 1950s.

The homemade masks are not considered to be medical grade and are for general public use.

“They are great for going to the grocery store or other essential services, and keeping your hands away from your nose and mouth while in public, especially when you can’t wash your hands immediately,” Johnson said.

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The Rural Project, a new organization in Environmental Design, seeks to engage and empower communities in rural Colorado through design-based activism. Recently, the student-run organization took a trip to Berthoud, Colorado for a project site visit. ⁣⁣Currently, the group is working with the Berthoud Habitat for Humanity to design a site for a future Habitat for Humanity community, which will have 9-11 homes.

Design goals include creating a sustainable community that is environmentally conscious and pays homage to the rural character of the site. ⁣

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In September, lecturer Danielle Bilot installed a pollinator habitat at the Rayback Collective in Boulder in collaboration with the City of Boulder, Justin's Nut Butter, Butterfly Pavilion and the CU Bee Club. It is a continuing effort between the City of Boulder and CU Environmental Design to create habitat across the city and further studies on the variety of applications for our praxis research. 

The CU Bee Club and Danielle Bilot also participated as an education vendor at the Bee Boulder Festival, an annual event that brings the whole city together, especially families, to learn about the 950+ different bees in Colorado and how they can help in their own homes. Our table offered a "take one, leave one" seed bomb activity where kids and parents could take home their own seed bombs to plant in the spring while leaving one for us that we will plant along Boulder Creek in spring. 

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