The Tea
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Roxbury Youth Explore Urban-Planning Solutions to Extreme Heat HIS SUMMER, 25 high school students from Roxbury studied how extreme heat affects their communities and the city, and what role urban planning and design have in mitigating it. The program, which ran for the month of July, was offered by UMass Boston’s Department of Urban Planning and Community Development and its Sustainable Solutions Lab in partnership with the Boston Planning and Development Agency (BPDA), Boston Public Schools, and Roxbury Community College. The 2023 Summer Program in Urban Planning, now in its second year, introduces youth of color from environmental justice communities to careers in urban planning, design, and development. It is part of 2023 Expanding Boston’s Pipeline for Youth of Color in Urban Planning, a citywide
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project launched by the BPDA, Boston Public Schools, UMass Boston, and Boston Architectural College that is aimed at increasing the percentage of non-white urban planners in Boston from 5 to 25 percent over the next 20 years. The BPDA supported this program with an award of $100,000. The program also received generous support from the Conatus Foundation. As part of the program, students toured Roxbury’s historic Wakullah Dale neighborhood, used temperature sensors to record air temperatures at various public sites, conducted interviews with residents to understand how they cope with increasing temperatures, and researched design practices that alleviate urban heat islands. The high school students found that the air temperatures were, on average, 10 degrees warmer in Roxbury than the temperatures recorded
at Logan Airport, which is where Boston’s official temperature is measured. A subgroup of the students also worked with local urban designers to come up with guidelines and proposals for a new children’s playground to be constructed on the Roxbury Community College campus near historic Dudley House. The youth presented their extreme heat results, trends they found in their interviews, and their design ideas and guidelines at an event at Roxbury Community College on July 27. Their work will be compiled in a report that will be publicly available this fall. For more information on the summer program, or to get a copy of the report when available, contact Ken Reardon at kenneth.reardon@umb.edu or email the Sustainable Solutions Lab at ssl@umb.edu.
Fall 2023
