Environmental Placemaking: Building Community for Environmental Justice

This online showcase is part of a series that captures the work of the HumanitiesX fellows and students at DePaul University. Throughout 2025, four teams of HumanitiesX fellows created unique community-engaged, project-based courses in the humanities. These new courses were taught in autumn 2025. To learn more, check out course showcase posts from past cohorts on the HumanitiesX website.

2025 HumanitiesX Community Fellow Claudia Galeno-Sanchez, showcasing a community flower bed planted in partnership with her nonprofit, Women for Green Spaces, and a local public school (photo by Amanda Lautermilch).

The Course

Green spaces in cities can serve critical ecological and social functions, such as fostering social interactions, building communities, and conserving nature. This 300/400 level course, cross-listed in DePaul’s department of Geography & GIS and the MA in Sustainable Urban Development, explored how community members can engage in environmental placemaking, intentional practices that forge a collective identity for community green spaces as shared ‘places.’

Our community partner organization, Women for Green Spaces, is engaged in environmental placemaking in Pilsen, an environmental justice community in Chicago overburdened with pollution, underserved by green space, and currently experiencing rapid gentrification. The class worked with Women for Green Spaces to create learning materials and activities that advocate for more and better green space in Pilsen and educate about the neighborhood’s history of environmental injustice. The students’ work, which was exhibited at a community-wide event geared towards elementary students and their families at the end of the quarter, will serve as a foundation for a future environmental justice curriculum in local schools.

Through this process, students learned to apply concepts from readings and lectures to analyze lived experiences in Pilsen that informed their final project. They navigated the ethics of doing community-based research and making recommendations for a community that was not their own, an experience that will inform their future academic and professional pursuits. Finally, the community event challenged students to articulate the importance of environmental placemaking as an environmental and social justice strategy.

The Project

The course’s final project was a set of learning materials for elementary-aged children that could be incorporated into a curriculum on environmental justice. Students worked either individually or in pairs on topics they developed through readings and fieldwork. The topics were environmental gentrification, community and belonging, placemaking, and environmental repair and native gardens. Through a series of drafts and in-class workshops, and with artistic assistance from our course Student Fellow, students developed a poster explaining their research and created hands-on activities for children to engage with the topics. These activities included a zine on environmental gentrification with an urban-planning coloring activity, a Where’s Waldo-style image search game, playing cards featuring native plants and pollinators, and a placemaking activity booklet to design your own space.

Zine on environmental gentrification created by Michael Dombrowski (photo by Amanda Lautermilch). Placemaking coloring book created by Nathale Nicoletti. Native plant and pollinator playing cards, printed in both Spanish and English, created by Teagan Bryan and Olinda Gomez.

Students developed their topics after multiple visits to Pilsen, which included guided walking tours with our community partner and guest lectures from community activist and DePaul alumna Victoria Romero and famed muralist Hector Duarte.

Students on a Pilsen walking tour, entering El Paseo community garden (photo by Sadie Peterson). Gabriell Carpenter with her poster on community and belonging (photo by Amanda Lautermilch).

Students also toured the DePaul Art Museum with curator Ionit Behar to think through how best to present material on community organizing and political resistance to a popular audience. Of particular relevance was the Young Lords exhibit on display at the museum in the fall quarter. Students also visited DePaul’s Idea Realization Lab to think through the formats their activities could take. Student fellow Sadie Peterson created a screen-print design used to make tote bags at the community event.

Student Fellow Sadie Peterson with the screen-print design of the Women for Green Spaces headquarters (photo by Amanda Lautermilch). WGS headquarters (photo by Claudia Galeno-Sanchez). Claudia, realizing that the screen-print design is of WGS headquarters (photo by Taylor Sellers-Varela).

This work was presented at a community event the last week of class. Students engaged with community members and saw how children interacted with their activities. The event also included a screening of a short documentary about Women for Green Spaces, “Sueños De Una Monarca,” by filmmaker (and DePaul alumnus) Julián Trejo Bax. Despite the challenges of conducting a community event in a neighborhood so heavily impacted by ICE activity, the event was a success, a joyful celebration of the work Women for Green Spaces does. As one student commented, the event itself was an example of environmental placemaking.

Students working on their hands-on activities with children at the community event (photo by Winifred Curran). Class photo at the community event (photo by Amanda Lautermilch).

Finally, to preserve the students’ work for future development by our community partner, students received an introduction to creating Story Maps from Geography professor Connie Johnston. Two students collected the data and images from all the groups to produce a collective Story Map that will be available on the Women for Green Spaces website (in process).

The Team

Environmental Placemaking was designed and deployed by a team of a faculty member and a community partner, with assistance from a Student Fellow.

Community Fellow Claudia Galeno Sanchez is the executive director of Women for Green Spaces, an organization that she started to unite women in leadership roles to expand green spaces and increase the number of pollinators in Pilsen (and beyond). Her home is a butterfly sanctuary and a work of art, reflecting the neighborhood’s culture and identity. Claudia shared the history of environmental justice issues in Pilsen and her own work for Women with Green Spaces, leading field trips to share examples of environmental placemaking. Her activism served as inspiration that one person can, in fact, make a difference.

Faculty Fellow Winifred Curran is a Professor of Geography & GIS. Her research is focused on the effects of gentrification. She has conducted community-based research in Pilsen for over 20 years.

Student Fellow Sadie Peterson is a sophomore Geography & GIS major and Spanish minor. As a Student Fellow, Sadie introduced the students to the public humanities with a presentation early in the course and helped design and prepare many of the learning activities, attending workshops at the Idea Realization Lab to support students with their projects. As a talented artist, Sadie inspired students to think creatively about their final projects and helped them realize their visions, while also designing and planning many essential elements of the community event.

Lessons Learned

1. Placemaking is a powerful resistance strategy. Placemaking can seem like an amorphous term, but over the course of the quarter, through readings, walking tours, and guest lectures, students saw how active a process placemaking is and how important it is to creating a sense of community and belonging in a historically marginalized community like Pilsen. Students came to see how placemaking strategies had helped to shape Pilsen’s resistance to gentrification and how their own work was part of this placemaking strategy.
2. Art connects us. In engaging with muralist Hector Duarte, the murals in Pilsen, the DePaul Art Museum, and thinking through their own creative activities, students learned how essential art is to connecting people with place and history and how it can help in communicating complicated topics. As Hector Duarte shared with the class, he sees his art as a way to motivate people, to express something magical with which all people can connect. This encouraged students to think more creatively not only about how to present their own research but also about reassessing what counts as best practice in urban planning and community engagement.
3. In project-based courses, every element is in service to the final goal. The project-based nature of the class really helped us focus on how each constitutive element, from individual readings to class field trips, was important and how it contributed to our final project and event. Students commented that seeing the direct connections between class material and the final project increased their learning and made the work feel more impactful. Working on a final project and community event also helped motivate students through stressful elements, including time constraints and fears about the ICE activity happening in Chicago during the course.

Next Steps

Winifred Curran will continue her work on environmental justice with Women for Green Spaces. Materials from the class will continue to be available for future community events and will, hopefully, be part of a future environmental justice curriculum for young learners in Pilsen. We will work to make the materials and Story Map more widely available online and to spread this project as an example of community-engaged work. Elements of this course will be incorporated into Winifred’s Urban Planning classes in the spring and beyond.