Building Inclusive Parks

During the summer of 2021, we set out to learn about how people interact with an urban public park that attracts a highly diverse set of users in order to support the work of building parks that include everyone. We share what we learned from our investigation in the story map, Learning from Lake Phalen. Click on the down arrow [below] to expand the story on this page.

Building on this work, we conducted mobile interviews with regular visitors at Lake Phalen Regional Park in St. Paul, Minnesota. Interview participants led researchers on a “tour” of the park, narrating what they find engaging and/or concerning about the park with regard to matters of belonging and feeling connected to place. This is an ongoing project and we share the multiple ways that people interact with a single place in the story map, Lake Phalen Park: One Place, Many Perspectives [Link forthcoming].