Being almost done with my group project for ENVS 220, Urban Green Spaces and Development in Portland, I have learned a lot about conducting situated research with limited resources. First, I am pretty proud of the work my whole team put in to put this project together, and I think it turned out pretty well. We have some great looking GIS maps and some pretty good statistics to back them up. However, I think the biggest problem with our project was that it was just too broad. The conclusions we came to were interesting, but not all that unique or unheard of, and it felt like we were just proving things people already knew. This is apparent in our conclusion in which we couldn’t say much more than to be more careful with the placement of urban green spaces. Hopefully, if nothing else, we highlighted some of the negatives of urban green spaces that many scholars are quick to ignore.
The background, where we conducted qualitative research with the current conversation around urban green spaces seemed to produce the most interesting and productive results we found. By synthesizing many of the current and prolific talk about urban green spaces, we were able to see interesting trends in the discourse. For example, it was interesting to see that most all publications were scientific, scholarly articles about the benefits of urban green spaces. We had to look to find popular articles or publications that were critical of urban green spaces. This was a nonobvious result and informed and framed the rest of our research. From this, we tried to be more critical of urban green spaces and put it in a publicly appealing manner in order to differentiate our research from the majority.
However, it felt we we still didn’t differentiate ourselves enough. If I were to do this project again, I would focus on a much more niche aspect, specific to Portland, that we could really find interesting and unique results on. If we had the time and resources to conduct a comprehensive analysis of green spaces in Portland, it might be different, but with our limitations, it would have better to focus on something more specific than just population development in relation to urban green spaces. Yet, because of this, I learned a lot about conducting situated research for next time. Also, it was very useful to see the research tools we learned in previous labs being used practically without a set procedure; it felt much more akin to actual research methods.