Creative Placemaking for Productive Landscapes: Imagined Futures for Aaran's Pond

This poster examines three alternative pondscape designs to address community concerns about Aaran’s Pond, a stormwater pond in the University Area Community near the USF Tampa campus. Stormwater ponds are important forms of green infrastructure used to mitigate and adapt to flooding in the Tampa Bay area. These ponds also can help attenuate the flow of nutrients into the bay, which can cause harmful algal blooms that impact people and ecological habitats. With increasing frequency and intensifying flooding events due to climate change, some stormwater ponds, such as Aaran’s Pond, are becoming less effective at flood management and increasingly characterized by poor water quality due to excessive nutrient pollution that negatively impacts the health of the pond ecosystem and the people who rely on it. This research draws on data from over 100 freelisting surveys to analyze community concerns and interests about pond redevelopment using Smith’s S salience index. The results were used to derive three alternative redevelopment designs that feature principles of creative placemaking.

The Weather Climate and Society REU program invited 10 students from across the US to conduct research projects related to disaster-vulnerable communities in Florida and other extreme weather-affected areas. These projects were interdisciplinary, integrating social science and physical science aspects of severe weather, climate, and related disasters through field work, interviews, and/or spatial analysis of secondary data in GIS. The PI of this REU is Dr. Jennifer Collins.