Step 3 • Explore Potential
Artwork: Sylvia Gomez, Bogota
Start to imagine what might be possible
Next, it’s time to start work on recruiting support to grow your community, taking action and collecting the evidence you’ll need for your portfolio and application.
This is the beginning of a rewarding and ongoing journey that will become part of your urban area’s future. Even when your National Park City is established, your exploration and understanding will evolve, develop and deepen.
In your application portfolio, we’ll want to see that you’ve explored these questions, within your campaign group and with people across your urban area. Doing this will help improve your understanding, involve more people and as a result, strengthen your National Park City thinking, arguments and activities.
Keep Questioning
- What is a National Park City?
- What if my urban area was a National Park City or a member of the Family?
- What difference would it make?
What would the benefits be? - What would the costs be?
- Who would it be good for?
- Who would support the idea?
- What has my urban area already done that could help in our application?
- Who would not like the idea?
- How could it be made effective?
- How would it work in practice?
- What could it achieve?
Recommended Legwork
These are some other things you can do as part of your exploration:
- Physically explore your city taking photos of challenges, opportunities, projects and anything you think is relevant to your mission.
- Research what’s already been done, and is being done, to make your city greener, healthier and better for nature.
- Remember that landscapes, including cities, are places that are made-up of the action and interaction of natural, cultural, social, built and perceptual elements.
- Meet people from different places and communities to ask them what they think of the idea.
- Conduct a survey, consultation or other research on people’s opinions.
- Hold a gathering for people to come together to discuss and develop thinking, ideas and projects.
- Organise an exhibition.
- Create films, podcasts or written stories about people, projects and places in your urban area or your National Park City’s journey.
- Make a map of your urban area to help people see opportunities to enjoy it or make it better.
Involve People From Across Your Community
If you want your National Park City to flourish, you’ll need regular input from a wide range of people and groups.
One of the beautiful things about the National Park City idea is that everyone who lives in your urban area is included in some way. Everyone will have the potential to benefit and contribute to it every day, even if they are not aware of it. This could be as simple as taking someone on a walk or allowing plants to flourish in a garden. Your challenge is to make them aware of this, and inspire and support them to be positive beneficiaries – and hopefully contributors.
It’s really important that you involve a diverse range of people as early as possible in your campaign – ideally from your first meeting. This will make your National Park City more resilient, effective and equitable, and will help you bring on board more people and places.
Try to proactively include and create opportunities for people from different geographies, ethnicities, ages, genders, sexual orientations and religions. Make sure your team, speakers, champions, survey respondents and contributors represent the diversity of people in your city and actively challenge structural norms that lead to the exclusion of individuals and groups.
It is likely that many groups of people will not hear about your events, think they are for them or even feel welcome. It’s important to proactively work to overcome those barriers. This is something we’ll be actively looking for in your portfolio application.
A great thing about the National Park City approach is that it attracts people with different interests. This is true for personal interests (for example, gardening, running and art), societal benefits (such as health, education, productivity and the economy) and economic sectors (including travel, health, tourism and corporate responsibility).
Diversity is Key
- Make sure diversity is central to your work:
Value and celebrate your urban area’s diverse people, places, ecologies and cultures. - Organise meetings in different parts of your urban area.
- Make sure minority voices are represented and heard.
- Check that any panels or events you organise are gender neutral and diverse.
- Monitor consultations or surveys to make sure you’re hearing from people with different interests and priorities.
- Make sure your teams include people from different backgrounds.
"Diversity and inclusion must be at the very heart of a National Park City, as it needs to create a culture of belonging for all its citizens, ensuring that the movement is representative of all demographics of any given city. Belonging happens when we can all recognise, celebrate, and value our differences as a group, so that the collective ‘we’ expands to include peoples of all identities. When people are able to feel like they belong somewhere, they want to stay there, grow there, and find more people like them to work with. This circle of belonging is essential to expanding the reach and impact of all our work going forward, and it is key to making cities across the world greener, healthier and wilder.”
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