Public Ecologies: An Experimental Infrastructure at Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie proposes to develop a comprehensive plan for Midewin, a 15,000 acre reserve opened in 1996 by the U.S. Forest Service at the former site of the U.S. Army's Joliet Arsenal, on the edge of metropolitan Chicago just off Route 66. Only 3% of the reserve is intact prairie; most of the site is comprised of abandoned farmland, overgrazed pasture, and the ruins of a munitions plant. While the Forest Service plans to 'restore' a complex of prairie ecosystems over the next 25 years, a prairie reconstruction at this scale is unprecedented, and there is almost no scientific knowledge available to inform decision-making. A group of evolutionary biologists from the University of Illinois at Chicago, known as the Initiative for Urban Ecology, has proposed a series of controlled ecological experiments at Midewin. Known as the Great Restoration Experiment (GRE), the project will address entire ecosystems and their regional effects, and serve as the primary scientific resource for the development of the national prairie's new ecosystems.

During her fellowship term, Grimes will develop a plan for the GRE infrastructure that supports both scientific inquiry and public engagement. Her intention is to devise a public format for ecological inquiry that is popular and pragmatic. For Grimes, Midewin's public experimental infrastructure has the potential to become a particular form of spectacle, where time, space and scale are collapsed as evolution is made tangible. Its design calls for new forms of the plan, where management controls are abandoned for the immersive, reciprocative interventions of design. The Public Ecologies project will define and elaborate an adaptive development strategy for such a plan – one that relies upon a 'plastic' sense of the public, reconfiguring material and social resources into new natures and producing another sense of commonwealth. She will organize a public symposium at Van Alen Institute to address these questions and review a proposal for the planning and design of the Midewin experimental infrastructure.