Park planning and design will

• Capture and preserve the spirit of place.
• Understand the place, including the past and its inconvenient truths.
• Acknowledge a site's complexity and embrace it.
• Protect the essential character.
• Understand tensions; integrate multiple values and perspectives.
• Assess the resource; know what's flexible and what cannot change.
• Value a site's history and purpose. Preserve design spirit but allow things to evolve.
• Use design sensitively to incorporate changing needs and demands.
• Conserve relationships and experiences not just objects.
• Be flexible but do not lose essential values
• Make design decisions that are informed by the resource.
• Allow for change in historic places - history is not over.
• Use the historic resources to structure contemporary design.
• Use transportation effectively, sensitively. Make it a good experience. .
• Elevate the human spirit through sensitive and integrated resource planning
• History, stories, and nature create bioregion identity
• Preserve cultural and natural habitat.
• Harmonize the place with the historic/cultural meaning
• Recognize how resources are interrelated

This is important because

• Flexibility is needed for viability.
• Change may be needed for the resource to survive.
• Connections to people to nature and culture are important
• Resources are finite.
• We have a responsibility to future generations
• There are opportunities for renewal
• It Inspires stewardship
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 Core design considerations

• Create Guidelines that "preserve the idea of place" without stifling change.
• Revise the Secretary' of the Interiors Standards to embrace new technologies, ideas.
• Strike a balance between "making" history and "preserving" history.
• Design for the experience of place. Have designers more directly engaged in the research (environmental and cultural) of a place.
• Embrace sensitive, inspirational and flexible avenues.
• Know the site first - walk it, sleep it, experience it.
• Eliminate traditional distinctions between nature and culture - are outdated and not serving us well
• Define limits of acceptable change.
• Have balanced discussion - not necessarily balanced approach when resource values and needs vary greatly.
• Respect historic design principles while adapting to future needs.
• Avoid erasing the past.
• Find the flexibility in historic preservation guidelines and standards.
• Allow for designer judgement. Design decisions need to preserve character-defining features.
• Develop and employ metrics for evaluating sustainability in terms of economic, societal, and environmental factors throughout the broad range of resources.
• Engage in site-specific planning and design details.
• Create opportunities for visitors to learn about park resources experientially at multiple levels of complexity and depth.

Outstanding Examples

• Yosemite Falls
• Cavallo Point