DUSP Domestic Projects 2015

DEPARTMENT OF URBAN STUDIES AND PLANNING

Massachusetts Institute of Technology 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Building 7-337 Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139–4307 dusp.mit.edu

DOMESTIC PROJECTS 2015 > ECONOMIC

DEVELOPMENT, HOUSING, AND DESIGN

> ENERGY,

SUSTAINABILITY, AND ADAPTATION

> HEALTH

AND THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT

> NETWORKED > URBAN

CITIES AND MOBILITY

RETROFITTING AND NEIGHBORHOOD PLANNING

DEPARTMENT OF URBAN STUDIES AND PLANNING

DOMESTIC PROJECTS >> ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT, HOUSING, AND

DESIGN Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative’s (DSNI) Design and Planning Workshop Part of a ongoing commitment of DUSP to work with DSNI on projects ranging from the building design, housing, energy, food systems, education, economic cooperatives, community arts and citizen engagement.

Places: Dudley Street Neighborhood in Roxbury, MA Faculty: Ceasar McDowell Partner: DSNI South Portland Economic Development Plan Formulating an economic development plan for a city in southern Maine.

Place: Portland, ME Faculty: Karl Seidman Partners: Rockefeller Brothers Fund, CoLab Immigration and Hispanic Growth in the US Analyzing the association between Spanish toponymy and Hispanic demographics in order to understand the historical resilience of culturally driven demographic settlement patterns.

Place: Various Faculty: Albert Saiz Working Cities Challenge Evaluation initiative to advance collaborative leadership and improve the lives of low-income people in Massachusetts smaller cities.

Place: MA Faculty: Karl Seidman Partner: Federal Reserve Bank of Boston Revitalizing Urban Main Streets Supporting vitality and improvement of neighborhood commercial districts through preparation of commercial district plans.

Place: Boston, MA Faculty: Karl Seidman and Susan Silberberg Partners: Boston Main Streets Program, Allston Village Main Streets Real Estate Roundtable Commercial Property Capital Consumption Study Empirical study of the nature and magnitude of capital consumption in U.S. commercial property.

Place: Various Faculty: David Geltner

>> ENERGY, SUSTAINABILITY, AND ADAPTATION

Boston Resiliency Districts The project identifies portions of the city at risk for flooding to inform the creation of resiliency districts with a customized suite of interventions to balance the impacts of flooding on critical infrastructure and key city services with the cost of building traditional flood protection measures.

Place: Boston, MA Faculty: Alan Berger Partners: The US Department of Energy, NStar Energy Efficiency Market Transformation Initiative Planning and technical assistance to advance commercial building energy efficiency in support of sustainability and economic development. Create tools and lessons for widespread replication of strategies.

Place: Bellevue, WA; Cambridge, MA; Las Vegas, NV, Minneapolis, MN; and Passaic County, NJ. Faculty: Karl Seidman Partners: CoLab, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Sustainability, Planning, or Economic Development Offices in five partner cities.

New England Climate Adaptation Project Using down-scaled risk assessments and intensive stakeholder assessments to build role-play simulations to test the proposition that extensive involvement in collective decision-making exercises will build public awareness of climate change risks and make it easier for public officials to organize collective risk management and adaptation efforts.

Place: Barnstable, MA; Wells, ME; Dover, NH; and Cranston, RI Faculty: Larry Susskind, Ezra Glenn, Patrick Field Partners: National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, University of New Hampshire; NERRS sites in MA, RI, NH and ME, and chief elected officials in the four host communities, National Estuary Research Reserve System, and the Consensus Building Institute.

Off-Shore Wind Energy: The Status of State and Federal Efforts Assess state and federal efforts to promote and regulate off-shore wind energy projects. Analyze the cost and environmental implications of new technology (e.g., floating wind turbines), multi-state cooperation, federal licensing procedures and state spatial planning efforts.

Place: East Coast of the United States Faculty: Larry Susskind Partner: National Science Foundation

DEPARTMENT OF URBAN STUDIES AND PLANNING Massachusetts Institute of Technology

DOMESTIC PROJECTS Strategies for Urban Stormwater Wetlands Designing urban constructed wetlands as multifunctional sustainability features for cities to improve ecosystem services, re-use water, and create amenities.

Place: Los Angeles, CA; Houston, TX Faculty: Alan Berger, Heidi Nepf Fostering Sustainable Consumption in U.S. Cities Generate high-quality information about what works and why in urban sustainability programs; create a protocol for conducting systematic assessments of urban sustainability programs.

Place: U.S. cities Faculty: Eran Ben-Joseph Enabling Citizens and Owners to Invest in Green Infrastructure This project studies the existing obstacles to investment in green infrastructure, and seeks to build new tools, policies, and processes in order to enable actors at all levels, including citizens, neighborhoods, institutions and city agencies to realize the city’s ambitious environmental goals.

Place: Philadelphia, PA Faculty: David Hsu Partner: USEPA >> HEALTH AND THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT

Effects of the Built Environment on Physical Activity of Older Women To examine the association between measures of neighborhoods built environment, physical activity and obesity outcomes among older women.

Place: CA; MA; PA Faculty: Eran Ben-Joseph Partners: NIH, Harvard University Social Impact Investing for Health The project investigates the effects of transit-oriented development investment on neighborhoods and their residents. Using a “Quadruple Bottom Line” approach to selecting projects that includes a consideration of community, environmental, and health impacts in addition to financial returns.

Place: MA Faculty: Mariana Arcaya Partners: Conservation Law Foundation, Massachusetts Department of Public Health, Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies, Urban Imprint, Metropolitan Area Planning Council

Making Sense of Community Gardens Explains the nature of the communities in various Boston-area community gardens, by assessing them through the use of a variety of methods.

Place: Community gardens in Boston, Cambridge and Somerville, MA Faculty: Larry Vale Partners: Various neighborhood organizations Resilience in Survivors of Katrina The project aims to understand the mechanisms by which disasters affect the mental and physical health of vulnerable populations over the long-term. Analyses are designed to investigate how individual- and communitylevel factors shape recovery trajectories.

Place: Various Faculty: Mariana Arcaya >> NETWORKED CITIES AND MOBILITY

Bus Rapid Transit Corridor Design Examine the relationship between the design of bus rapid transit systems and the planning and design of urban environments in Boston and Mexico City.

Place: Boston, MA Faculty: Chris Zegras Partner: MBTA City Digits To develop and pilot test innovative resources and tools that support high school students’ learning of mathematics by designing modules to investigate and analyze themes related to the local, urban context.

Place: Brooklyn, NY Faculty: Sarah Williams Partners: Brooklyn College, Center for Urban Pedagogy, National Science Foundation Lighting, Value, and Land Use Across the 50 Largest U.S. Metro Areas Development of a metropolitan scale lighting index of the country’s fifty largest metro areas to investigate possible linkages between lighting and economic vitality.

Faculty: Alan Berger, Carlo Ratti, Sarah Williams Partner: Philips

DEPARTMENT OF URBAN STUDIES AND PLANNING

DOMESTIC PROJECTS Crowd Sourced City Workshop To investigate the use of social media and digital technologies for planning and advocacy by working with planning and advocacy organizations to develop, implement, and evaluate prototype digital tools.

Place: Boston, MA, New York City, NY Faculty: Sarah Williams Partners: Center for Urban Pedagogy; Community Labor United; The Cypress Hills Local Development Corporation; Made in the Lower East Side, miLES

Shrinking Cities - Abandoned Sites Taking a former petroleum refinery site whose owners themselves wish to invert the site’s history as an oil refinery and its reputation as a source of neighborhood blight, the project investigates current condition in order to generate formal, programmatic, and socioeconomic reversals of that condition.

Places: Various Faculty: Brent Ryan Partner: Exxon Mobile

Healthy Aging, Travel Behavior, and Neighborhoods To understand the relationship between residential settings (urban, suburban, age-restricted) and active travel choices among older adults.

Place: Boston, MA Faculty: Eran Ben-Joseph, Chris Zegras Partner: US DOT

Land Use & Community Planning Working with Somerville, MA over the course of three years, students prepared plans for the city’s Winter Hill/ Magoun Square area, a designated gateway for Union Square, and the Brickbottom/McGrath neighborhood.

Each of these projects presented a vision and key recommendations.

Place: Somerville, MA Faculty: Susan Silberberg, Terry Szold Partner: City of Somerville Planning Division

Emerging Digital Learning Tools and Environments A collaboration aimed at supporting teachers in their efforts to use emerging digital learning tools and environments, especially in the areas of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM).

Place: Various Faculty: Eric Klopfer Partners: Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, MIT Office of Digital Learning Emotional Travel: Pride, Dependence and Social Bias Examines human emotions associated with travel behavior, including car pride, car dependence, implicit social bias in mode choice, and emotional responses to waiting.

Place: Various Faculty: Jinhua Zhao >> URBAN RETROFITTING AND NEIGHBORHOOD

PLANNING Networks in Community-Based Planning Examines the extent to which New York State’s Brownfield Opportunity Area (BOA) program reconfigured the organizational networks of communitybased environmental justice organizations and community development corporations that received BOA grants.

Place: New York Faculty: Justin Steil Resilient Cities Housing Initiative Assesses global efforts to produce affordable housing in ways that also contribute to economic livelihood, environmental well-being, personal security and community self-governance.

Places: Various Faculty: Larry Vale

The Role of the Urban in Judicial Conceptions of Social Rights and Property Rights Analyzes the judicial decisions to understand how courts’ diverging conceptions of urban space and of property rights shaped their decision making. It also looks at historical census and other data to explore how changing urban demographics related to ordinance passage and how the ordinances shaped the creation of local NAACP chapters and acts of racially motivated violence.

Place: Various Faculty: Justin Steil West Philadelphia Landscape Project Founded in 1987, the Wedst Philadelphia Landscape Project is an action research program that links community development and environmental restoration.

Among the key discoveries of the project is the high correlation between buried floodplains and vacant land in inner city neighborhoods.

Place: Philadelphia, PA Faculty: Anne Whiston Spirn Partners: Philadelphia Water Department, CoLab, Aspen Farms Community Garden