Ellen Grimes's Public Ecologies proposes to develop a comprehensive infrastructure plan for ecological experiments at Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie, a 19,000 acre reserve opened in 1996 by the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) at the former site of the U.S. Army's Joliet Arsenal. Located just off Route 66, the reserve is the largest single piece of open land in metropolitan Chicago. Although officially the first national tallgrass prairie, only 3% of the site is intact prairie, and the majority of the landscape is comprised of abandoned farmland, overgrazed pasture, and the ruins of a munitions plant. While the USFS plans to restore the complex of prairie ecosystems over the next 25 years, a prairie reconstruction of this scale is unprecedented, and the Center for Research in Urban Ecology at the University of Illinois Chicago (CRUE) has proposed a series of controlled landscape-scale ecological experiments to serve as the primary scientific resource for the development of the national prairie's ecosystems. Managed by the USFS and CRUE, the ecological experiments and their infrastructure will range across approximately 2,500 acres, an area about three times the size of Central Park. The experiments will include carbon sequestration analyses, investigations of nutrient and energy fluxes, and studies of the interactions among mammals, birds, and plant life — and importantly, as part of the educational missions of both the USFS and CRUE, they will be publicly accessible.

During her fellowship at Van Alen Institute, Grimes is planning the physical infrastructure that will bring advanced ecological inquiry into the public realm at Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie. In partnership with the USFS and CRUE, Grimes's role is to physically lay out Midewin's ecological experiments and to create a dynamic public interface with those experiments — thereby enabling unique alliances between scientific researchers and the general public, and producing shared understandings of the role that prairie ecosystems play in human culture and metropolitan life. Practically speaking, this involves the planning and development of infrastructure for scientists and visitors, including fencing, pathways, roads, storage, laboratories, classrooms and viewing areas. More broadly, Grimes's efforts to make ecological inquiry public raise a series of important questions about our understandings of nature, science, design, and metropolitan experience: How can new models of nature that embrace risk and indeterminacy change the design of public infrastructure? What roles should design play in the planning and management of public lands and ecosystems? If ecosystems are a design problem, how does the work of designers change? What past, present, and future styles of life, forms of experience, and material realities are enabled by ecosystem infrastructures? How do these experiences and sensibilities shape our understanding of public life?

To explore these questions, Grimes is organizing and presenting a two-part series of public conversations as part of her fellowship work in residence at Van Alen Institute. As a form of active research in Grimes's development of a proposal for Midewin's experimental infrastructure, the unscripted dialogues will bring together architects, historians, urbanists, and ecologists for discussion and debate on the relationships between design and land use planning, ecological theory and the public realm. The conversations will take place around a topographic model of the site, and will be supplemented by extensive documentation and analyses of the site's geographic, socio-economic and historical contexts and precedents.