Leveling the Landscape: Landscape Performance as a Green Infrastructure Evaluation Tool for Service-Learning Products

Area of Science:

• Environmental science
• Urban planning
• Community resilience

Background:

• Catastrophic flooding from Hurricanes Harvey and Florence necessitates resilient community redevelopment along U.S. coasts.
• Socially vulnerable communities require special consideration in designing resilient public spaces.
• Community visioning and neighborhood design are crucial but challenging for communities with limited collaborative capacity.

Purpose of the Study:

• To examine the utility of landscape performance models in evaluating master plan parameters for community resilience.
• To assess the feasibility and performance of service-learning products in vulnerable communities.
• To provide an objective evaluation method for community-led resilience planning.

Main Methods:

• Utilized landscape performance models to evaluate proposed master plan parameters.
• Focused on Manchester, a Houston community vulnerable to flooding.
• Integrated local conditions and community feedback into the evaluation process.

Main Results:

• Landscape performance models objectively evaluated costs and performance measures of service-learning outputs.
• Demonstrated the models' capability to assess feasibility of conceptual plans.
• Provided data-driven insights for community-led resilience strategies.

Conclusions:

• Landscape performance models are effective tools for evaluating the practical implementation of community resilience plans.
• University-community partnerships using service-learning can be enhanced by objective performance evaluations.
• Objective evaluation supports informed decision-making for disaster recovery and resilient redevelopment.