UC Irvine

My research focuses on the processes through which partners interact to integrate and cultivate nature in cities in order to promote healthy communities and social-ecological systems. This scholarship is timely and important given the scale of environmental change humans living in cities are driving globally. Cities both contribute to and experience changes such as increased flooding and higher temperatures, with vulnerable populations bearing the brunt of these impacts, while also having less access to the benefits that nature can provide. Cities are also highly networked places with the potential to be leaders in piloting and leveraging solutions to the world’s most pressing social-ecological challenges. Utilizing an interpretive methodology, I spent one year with a university center for urban resilience in Los Angeles, attending meetings and carrying out over 40 semi-structured interviews conducted with practitioner and knowledge community participants in the region. My dissertation explains how universities navigate their relationships with partners focusing on legitimacy, inclusion and the fluidity between the two concepts. Recommendations are provided on how to bridge legitimacy and inclusion to strategically benefit policy and planning partnership efforts. This dissertation also shows how partner narratives of urban nature are dynamic, shifting over time and diverse across space and groups. Recommendations are provided on how narratives can be a tool to better understand partner perspectives, identify synergies and divergences among narratives, and develop more inclusive policy and planning processes. This dissertation also evaluates a university led urban environmental stewardship mapping and assessment project (LA STEW-MAP), including better understanding practitioner perspectives. Recommendations are provided on how the LA STEW-MAP process can be improved to operationalize a social-ecological systems approach and as a community engagement tool.