Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative
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Co-Creating Green Space in a Fast-Growing City
Highlights
Port St. Lucie, Florida added more than 55,000 residents in just five years, surpassing 250,000 residents by 2026 and making the city one of the fastest-growing in the nation. At the city’s annual Citizen Summit, which draws about 1,000 residents and helps shape the city’s strategic plan, a top concern from attendees was access to nature: open land and preserves were quickly disappearing as the city grew.
Mayor Shannon Martin and the Port St. Lucie City Council made green space development the city’s key priority, enlisting City Manager Jesus Merejo, Deputy City Manager for Strategic Initiatives & Innovation Kate Parmelee, and other team members who participated in the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative. They were challenged by the city’s original design: promoted in the 1960s as an affordable subdivision on former swampland, Port St. Lucie had been carved into private lots, with little public land set aside. The city had developed some parks, but many residents were unaware of the amenities and locations.
$3.3 million
in new grant funding sought to support access to nature and resilient, multifunctional green spaces
Through the Initiative’s Innovation track, the city took up human-centered design, learning, in Parmelee’s words, “how to better listen to our residents, how to co-create with our residents.” One relevant peer-reviewed study from the Initiative on collaborative innovation, analyzing a long-running community cleanup program in Buffalo, New York, found that work of this kind succeeds when it does three things: city staff, partners, and residents define problems and build solutions together; residents experience tangible change; and city hall builds a collaborative muscle it can use on other work.
Residents in a Port St. Lucie park with Kate Parmelee, former deputy city manager for strategic initiatives & innovation (foreground) and civic designer Nikki Zheng (right).
Staff connected with more than a thousand residents and generated 1,000 ideas, with an interdepartmental innovation team identifying a portfolio of innovations that made up the new “Naturally PSL” initiative, ranging from a green land bank to a conservation corps. Nikki Zheng, a Bloomberg Harvard City Hall Fellow and graduate of the Harvard Graduate School of Design, spent two fellowship years on improving access to nature and bringing the portfolio of ideas to life. Residents had said they did not know which land the city already owned, so Nikki mapped it, and she authored the city’s winning application for the National Civic League’s All-America City Award, given to ten US communities a year for inclusive civic engagement in solving local problems. Zheng joined Parmelee and other city employees, Vice Mayor Jolien Caraballo and residents who helped co-create Naturally PSL at the competition where they performed a skit that outlined the City’s story and Naturally PSL initiative, securing the first All-America city designation in the City’s history. Following her Fellowship term, Port St. Lucie hired Nikki to keep innovating for residents as a civic designer, deepening a commitment to green space improvements even as the city builds innovation capacity across the team.
Mayor Shannon Martin with civic designer and former Bloomberg Harvard City Hall Fellow Nikki Zheng.
Parmelee said resident input continues to guide the city’s priorities, shaping the policy decision to create a conservation land bank. The Land Bank gave the city a new way to act when a 100-home development proposal came forward, the city purchased the parcel instead, the first of more than 280 acres it now stewards through Naturally PSL. The city is also launching its first nonprofit to sustain the funding stream for that work. Once ranked last among the 100 largest U.S. cities for park space, Port St. Lucie climbed 27 places in a single year. Residents who helped define the problem have stayed involved in fixing it, for example by turning out for the volunteer conservation corps Zheng built. At the conclusion of the Innovation Track, Parmelee was challenged to spread this way of working through City Hall. One way she chose to approach it was to bolster the city’s strategic planning process with human-centered design techniques learned through the program, at the Council level and throughout city departments. Council members and department directors now build the annual strategic plan collaboratively, using data together, and developing a higher regard for staff expertise—seeing, Parmelee said, insight and years of experience the city had never fully tapped. More directors have stayed with the city because they feel they can have an impact and a voice and the city is engaging in cross-departmental collaboration like never before, building collective impact.
Residents gather to co-create a vision for Port St. Lucie green space.
Innovative citizen engagement methods have traveled through the Initiative’s network too. De’Carlon Seewood, city manager of Columbia, Missouri, and a member of Parmelee’s cohort of senior leaders in the Initiative’s Class of 2024, heard her describe the Citizen Summit, sent his team to Florida to learn from the Port St. Lucie team, and Columbia now runs its own similar event.
Kate Parmelee of Port St. Lucie describes the city’s work to other senior city leaders at the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative, August 2026
Through the innovation track we were able to clearly capture the resident voice, which made it much easier for the policy makers to make some really hard decisions and significant investments to advance the top priorities of residents.Kate Parmelee, Former Deputy City Manager for Strategic Initiatives & Innovation
Port St. Lucie, Florida
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