Situated in Kelowna’s Lower Mission neighbourhood, DeHart Community Park is a 3.6-hectare landscape that sensitively integrates intensive active and passive programming into a high-performance, climate-positive framework. Carbon accounting was embedded into the design process from project initiation. Carbon and capital budgets were treated as parallel constraints, and the park was designed for 2080 climate projections to ensure long-term sequestration and resilience. The design was informed concurrently by a robust, site-based engagement process that advanced collaboration and built trust, and by guiding principles established to provide a best-practice-driven structure for the pursuit of a climate positive park. The result has been a community park with an aesthetic that is new for the region, with fuzzy, dynamic edges instead of crisp, static ones. The park has become a vibrant social hub and a living laboratory for the city's sustainability and greenhouse gas reduction objectives.
