Lana Garcia

Lana’s research is centered at the intersection of embodied environmental ethics, socially just urban planning and land use, deliberative democracy, and social solidarity. Broadly, she explores how green spaces can be multi-functional in terms of public health benefits, community unification, transportation corridors, and spaces that can address environmental challenges like flooding and heat island effects. Her research aims to discover how to transform urban green spaces from contested and often unequal spaces into parts of the cityscape that can offer just solutions to social, economic, and climate challenges.

 

Lana’s prevailing focus is on how urban public greenspaces can be places where individuals connect to embodied contact with non-human nature and where social solidarity can be produced. Her current research interrogates how the experience of awe in greenspaces might contribute to the cultivation of paying attention to one’s environment and to others. It also investigates what role experiences of awe can play in deliberative and ecological democracy.