Research

Restoration, Salvation and Climate Adaptation

Sierra Brown — Tue, 22 Oct 2024 23:00:00 +0000

Restoration, Salvation and Climate Adaptation Sierra Brown Tue, 10/22/2024 - 17:00

Sierra Brown

The third floor of the Museum of �鶹ӰԺ was exceptionally lively for a Thursday evening in late September. Guests filled the galleries, where colorful hues and intricate floral patterns from hand-painted artifacts adorned the walls. Spicy aromas of chai tea wafted through the museum’s halls, mingling with the hum of footsteps and conversation.

The Restoration, Salvation and Climate Adaptation symposium drew a crowd of over 80 academic researchers, design professionals, city leadership and Environmental Design community members to the museum. The symposium took place in conjunction with Elemental: Tajik Arts, a public exhibition that celebrates the work of 16 ENVD students who spent much of their summer speckled with paint and perched high on scaffolding as they meticulously restored the exterior west face of the Dushanbe Teahouse.

“The work was a bit exhausting and sometimes physically hurting for them. They have to hold postures with their hands or with their bodies on the floor,” Associate Teaching Professor Azza Kamal described of the students’ summer work. “To be honest, it was nothing close to what you have seen in the symposium, they were very articulate, well dressed, which I think is a good takeaway about the good work it takes also to deliver.”

In the second iteration of the special topics course, History and Historiography of Environmental Design: Restoring the Dushanbe Teahouse, students explored the intersection of cultural heritage, restoration and sustainability within the context of Central Asian culture and architecture. Visiting Researcher Maruf Mirakhmatov, a renowned Tajik artist and grandson of the artisan who helped build the Teahouse, returned to �鶹ӰԺ to co-teach the course with Kamal and facilitate the restoration.

While similar in scope to the course’s previous rendition, led in 2018 by Associate Professor Shawhin Roudbari and Nate Jones, ENVD Assistant Director of Advising & Professional Development, Kamal aimed to expand the focus this year to cover the pressing issues of climate change and resilience. “Restoration is part of climate adaptation. Preserving buildings saves a lot from the landfill and deconstruction minimizes emissions,” she noted.

Historic preservation is nothing new to Kamal. Her academic studies, professional experience and research pursuits have taken her from the Middle Age-era craft districts of Cairo to the historic neighborhoods of modern-day San Antonio. As one of eleven commissioners in San Antonio, her role involved collaborating with the Office of Historic Preservation (OHP) and the community to preserve historic and culturally significant areas while allowing for mindful development.

“What we need to preserve matters and how we keep the materials matters. Some of the these buildings are constructed with much better quality materials with longer life span than the standard building materials now,” she shared.

Kamal pointed out that despite the importance of restoring buildings, especially when they hold cultural significance, such as the Teahouse, historic buildings are not always the most ecologically fit. They rarely meet modern green building standards such as energy efficiency, water use and indoor air quality.

However, with the current national discourse to interconnect preservation with climate adaptation strategies, there is a hope that with careful retrofits, municipalities could improve the performance of historic structures and landmarks, so they can be climate-ready.

Last month’s symposium brought together a multidisciplinary panel of academics, artists and city officials to discuss these efforts. According to the night’s keynote speaker, Distinguished Professor of architecture and historic preservation at Roger Williams University, Hasan-Uddin Khan, it all comes down to stewardship.

Stephanie Phillips, a circular economy senior manager for San Antonio’s OHP and one of the night’s panelists, agreed. “The stewardship of the built and living heritage exists in the same vein as stewardship of the natural environment,” she commented.

Phillips’ work deals primarily with deconstructing aging buildings at the end of their life spans. This slower but more intentional process produces less waste and emissions than machine-heavy demolition and generates more jobs in skilled labor. Panelist Jonathan Koehn, the director of �鶹ӰԺ’s Climate Initiatives Department, spoke about deconstruction work being done locally, including the recent deconstruction of a �鶹ӰԺ community hospital where 94% of the building waste products were recycled and diverted from landfills.

In his keynote presentation, however, Khan warned that part of our identity is lost when we lose historic buildings, even in deconstruction. He spoke of the importance of upholding the culture of restoring buildings using traditional techniques, something the ENVD students were able to experience this summer while suspended up on scaffolding.

The symposium underscored the importance of balancing cultural heritage with sustainability and resilience, reminding attendees that restoration is not just about preserving the past but adapting it for the future.

“We can learn from the past, but we need to look forward,” Khan stated in his final remarks. “At the end of the day, architecture isn’t about buildings, it’s about people.”

The Restoration, Salvation and Climate Adaptation symposium drew a crowd of over 80 academic researchers, design professionals, city leadership and Environmental Design community members to the museum. The symposium took place in conjunction with Elemental: Tajik Arts, a public exhibition that celebrates the work of 16 ENVD students who spent much of their summer speckled with paint and perched high on scaffolding as they meticulously restored the exterior west face of the Dushanbe Teahouse.

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CEDaR, Redesigned

Anonymous — Mon, 09 Oct 2023 21:03:39 +0000

CEDaR, Redesigned Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 10/09/2023 - 15:03

Sierra Brown

With its bright yellow walls and large black lettering, the Community Engagement, Design and Research Center (CEDaR) in the Environmental Design building is hard to miss. But with a single door and no indoor windows to reveal the room’s inner workings, the mystery surrounding what goes on behind those walls is palpable. “The space is a little bit closed right now,” Shawhin Roudbari, ENVD assistant professor and CEDaR’s co-director said. “Even if the yellow is very calling and is screaming ‘yes CEDaR is here!’ it still doesn’t open the doors.”

One way to open the doors might be to redesign them.

CEDaR is one of 75 research hubs housed within the CU �鶹ӰԺ campus community and is the only one that has a direct relationship with the Program in Environmental Design (ENVD). Through community-oriented services and projects, the center fosters innovative research and education around critical urban challenges. “CEDaR has a long history of engagement,” Jota Samper, ENVD assistant professor and Roudbari’s co-director of CEDaR explained. “What we’re trying to do is connect academic research and environmental design with our communities.”

CEDaR also strives to engage directly with design students by bringing them on as research assistants and including them in community collaborations. During the 2022-2023 academic year, the Center hired over a dozen students and funded projects centered around transformative urban design, cultural geography and participatory, anti-racist planning. “It’s a unique opportunity for undergrads to participate in this kind of work. It’s really rare,” Roudbari expressed.

But despite the Center’s long history and active engagement practices, Roudbari noted that most ENVD students may be unfamiliar with CEDaR and its work. When he and Samper first began their careers at ENVD seven years ago, CEDaR was a “thriving, upcoming place.” The COVID-19 pandemic, however, diminished the capacity of the Center to engage with both the community at large and the students within the program.

Over the past year, the two directors have been working to rebuild momentum lost during the pandemic and reorient the Center in a new direction. They’ve secured a permanent home for CEDaR in ENVD 213, put in a small amount of “elbow-grease” and “DIY-renovation" work and have been actively socializing the space. But they also have aspirations to make the space even better.

After receiving a grant through the Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program (UROP), the Center funded initial research to collect input on what a redesign of the space might look like. The research involved gathering ideas and feedback through workshops both within the ENVD community and through engagement with outside architects, professors and students. Significantly, student assistants have been key in leading this research and compiling potential design plans to present to donors in order to make the redesign feasible.

The second phase of the project will involve workshops, prototyping and implementation. “We want a space that is flexible, transformable and open,” Samper noted. “Furniture that ensures the space is open to big meetings with room for workstations for all of our research assistants and ourselves.” The directors hope that the newly designed space will serve as an intermediate between a classroom and a meeting room—a place that captures CEDaR’s mission to integrate student and faculty interactions into meaningful community design work.

Among their external projects, the folks at CEDaR aim to play a more active role in evolving the culture around research and engagement within the ENVD community. Through open monthly meetings, CEDaR will continue to be a place to discuss pressing urban issues, host research workshops and create community-informed designs. The CEDaR directors hope that the redesign process, and perhaps knocking down a few bright yellow walls, will help make these efforts a little more visible.

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Crown Institute, CEDaR host nature-based social prescribing programing

Anonymous — Wed, 26 Apr 2023 21:15:17 +0000

Crown Institute, CEDaR host nature-based social prescribing programing Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 04/26/2023 - 15:15

Sierra Brown

On Wednesday, April 12, a buzzing group of health care professionals, city planners, parks department representatives, educators, and community members came together to discuss the growing evidence that time spent in nature can support both mental and physical health. “Nature-Based Social Prescribing and Programming: Route to Wellness” was a day-long event organized through a collaboration between the Renée Crown Wellness Institute and the Community Engagement, Design and Research Center (CEDaR). The occasion featured four innovative professionals who have engaged in research and programs centered around connecting communities to nature to address key health issues.

Nature-based social prescribing refers to a non-medical community referral system in which people interact with the outdoors as a method to promote health and well-being. While significant, the concept is not necessarily new. Historically, health professionals and city planners worked closely together to design integrated outdoor spaces within urban centers as a response to unsanitary conditions and health concerns.

“If you look at the goals of the City Beautiful Movement that spread across the United States during this period, they were about public health as much as beautifying cities,” Louise Chawla, a CEDaR fellow, stated in her opening remarks.

As advances in medical technology rose in the mid-20th century, health clinicians, and their patients, largely moved indoors. To address the obesity crisis in recent decades, health professionals have started once again to work with city planners to encourage people to exercise outdoors with a focus on active transport by walking and biking.

But according to Jill Litt, professor of environmental health in the CU’s Environmental Studies Program and one of the four panelists, “Telling people to exercise more doesn’t work.” Litt, whose research focuses on the health benefits provided by community gardens explained that “rather, engaging someone in an activity or space that they love is a good place to encourage change.” In her work, she found that gardens provide a model system for changing behavior and improving health, including increasing physical activity and fiber intake and reducing levels of stress and anxiety. According to her research, the evidence base supporting nature-based programming (such as gardening) as a health intervention continues to strengthen.

Unlike the more traditional medical prescriptions, the panelists discussed that nature-based prescribing can and should be informed by community knowledge and designed with community culture in mind. Another panelist, Nooshin Razani, an associate professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) School of Medicine, recommended a socioecological model that integrates social norms and culture shifts when promoting nature for health. In partnership with San Francisco’s Parks Department, Razani’s work invites identified patients to join in monthly park outings with an emphasis on free, unstructured outdoor play to encourage “moments of ‘Ah’ and wonder.” These moments, shared between family and friends, expanded participants' definition of community to include time spent in nature.

The power behind community, and community relationship to nature, became a central theme throughout the program. Ashby Sachs, a recent PhD graduate from the Environmental Studies Program and a current postdoctoral fellow in the Barcelona Institute for Global Health, focused her discussion on loneliness reduction in teen parents through nature and social connection. Wesley Tate, Medical Director for the National Trauma Foundation and board-certified psychiatrist, outlined the practice of mindfulness-based nature therapy work for people struggling with mental health. Both panelists promoted the idea of using community-based models, rather than medical-models to address health issues.

"We're experiencing the biggest mental health crisis ever recorded, and we simply can’t rely on the medical experts to fix these things,” Tate explained.

The session finished with an afternoon of small group planning and coordination to discuss potential partnerships for advancing the practice of nature-based social prescribing and evaluating it through research. Break-out groups were asked to discuss who, in fact, should be responsible for delivering nature programming for mental health. The consensus was that this responsibility shouldn’t be put solely on health experts, but rather should be shared in partnership with nature providers such as parks departments, educators, designers, and planning professions—in other words, everyone in attendance. The groups stressed the importance of collaborating once again and reconnecting their relationships to community and to nature.

After all, as Tate aptly put it, “Nature is not new, we’re just re-discovering it.”

A day-long event was organized through a collaboration between the Renée Crown Wellness Institute and the Community Engagement, Design and Research Center (CEDaR). The occasion featured four innovative professionals who have engaged in research and programs centered around connecting communities to nature to address key health issues.

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ENVD 4361 Dissent by Design mini-exhibit "Situating Dissent"

Anonymous — Thu, 12 Sep 2019 16:24:17 +0000

ENVD 4361 Dissent by Design mini-exhibit "Situating Dissent" Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 09/12/2019 - 10:24

The ENVD 4361 Dissent by Design mini-exhibit "Situating Dissent" will be housed in the environmental design gallery, located in the front entrance of the building, from September 12 to September 19.

In this mini-exhibit, students explore definitions for hegemony, injustice, dissent and equity. Students look to the words of activists, scholars, artists and designers, and seek manifestations in the built environment.

This exploration is a response to a question all designers are wondering a bit about: “why should environmental designers understand dissent?”

The set of definitions and images considers dissent as a precursor to equity and situates dissent in response to injustices that arise from hegemonic ideologies.

The ENVD 4361 Dissent by Design mini-exhibit "Situating Dissent" will be housed in the environmental design gallery, located in the front entrance of the building, from September 12 to September 19.

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Recovering �鶹ӰԺ's tree canopy through community engagement

Anonymous — Fri, 07 Jun 2019 17:23:33 +0000

Recovering �鶹ӰԺ's tree canopy through community engagement Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 06/07/2019 - 11:23

The Community Engagement, Design and Research Center (CEDaR) is a research organization affiliated with and housed in the Program in Environmental Design. CEDaR works with local governments and partner organizations to complete community-based, integrated ecology projects, which address critical urban issues through environmental design.

In partnership with the City of �鶹ӰԺ, CEDaR, along with principal investigators Michael Szuberla and Sara Tabatabaie, are analyzing residents’ baseline knowledge of the Emerald Ash Borer and proposing ways to address the infestation through environmental education efforts, as well as public-private partnerships.

The Emerald Ash Borer was discovered in �鶹ӰԺ in 2013. This small beetle, which burrows under the bark of ash trees disrupting the flow of nutrients and water, is predicted to cause a 25 percent decline in �鶹ӰԺ’s tree canopy in the next five to 10 years.

Szuberla (left) is a PhD student working with Brian Muller, an associate professor in environmental design and director of CEDar, and is researching how knowledge is built and spread in community gardens. His dissertation will argue that community gardens have value beyond the vegetables they produce.

Tabatabaie (right) completed her PhD in environmental studies, specializing in environmental health in November of 2018. Her dissertation investigates how design features of streets, trees and shade, in particular, affect people’s perception of the street for physical activity.

When the City of �鶹ӰԺ identified the Emerald Ash Borer as a significant threat, the Urban Forest Strategic Plan was created. According to bouldercolorado.gov, the plan was approved in 2018 as a comprehensive assessment of a 20-year plan for the �鶹ӰԺ urban tree canopy developed with extensive input from the community. The overarching goal of this plan is to restore the tree canopy to pre-ash borer levels, which is 16 percent coverage.

As the beetles take their toll in �鶹ӰԺ, the ash trees will need to be cut down safely before dying completely, and replaced with a new set of diverse trees. So far, the city can manage this process on all of �鶹ӰԺ’s public property but has very minimal control over how private landowners will choose to remedy the infestation on their own property.

Seventy-seven percent of �鶹ӰԺ’s total tree canopy is on private property, so landowners, residents and business will need to be educated on proper tree management.

In addition to managing the current infestation, the city will focus on preventing another high percentage loss of tree coverage due to a pest or disease. Private property owners will be encouraged to work together to plant diverse tree species.

“In the 1950s and 1960s, the City of �鶹ӰԺ planted each neighborhood with only one type of tree for uniformity and aesthetics,” Szuberla said.

“Now, �鶹ӰԺ is working to diversify the species of trees throughout the city, but they also need to educate citizens, so that when they are selecting trees to put on their own property they keep in mind what species their neighbors already have and try to select different species.”

Both Szuberla and Tabatabaie have designed a survey to capture the baseline knowledge of residents on the Emerald Ash Borer and to learn more about their remediation plans. The City of �鶹ӰԺ sent out this survey to 30,000 residents in March 2019. Szuberla and Tabatabaie will complete their data collection and analysis this summer as they plan to interview more residents and conduct several focus groups in �鶹ӰԺ.

The results of this survey, along with interviews, will be shared as a report with the City of �鶹ӰԺ. The survey results will also be presented at the Association of Collegiate School of Planning (ACSP) Annual Conference in South Carolina in fall 2019.

The ultimate goal of their research is to develop an effective planning framework to address tree infestation issues in cities and to change the conversation so that cities in the future can maintain healthy tree canopies and ecosystems.

“Urban resilience literature has been more concerned with short-term natural disasters, rather than long-term events with impacts that may not be noticed right away,” Tabatabaie said.

“We are trying to integrate as many factors as possible such as socioeconomic factors and knowledge level of residents.”

Learn more about the project.

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�鶹ӰԺ Teahouse restoration course to publish book

Anonymous — Mon, 10 Dec 2018 18:26:17 +0000

�鶹ӰԺ Teahouse restoration course to publish book Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 12/10/2018 - 11:26

This fall, Shawhin Roudbari, assistant professor at the Program in Environmental Design, led the history and historiography course that took on restoring the �鶹ӰԺ Dushanbe Teahouse. His students are now working in small groups to write six chapters of architectural theory and criticism for a book that will give readers a new way to think about the Teahouse, in it's architectural, social and political context.

"An aim of the project is to coach students in writing publication-level texts and being recognized for doing so," Shawhin Roudbari, assistant professor at the Program in Environmental Design said.

The book will include documentation of restoration work through photography, sketches and an architectural analysis of the Teahouse through 3D models and diagrams. It will also include an introduction to the project by Nate Jones, academic advising coordinator at the Program in Environmental Design.

Those interested in the publication will be able to find the finished book in local bookstores, the �鶹ӰԺ Teahouse and websites like Amazon in early-mid spring of 2019.

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Growing Up �鶹ӰԺ Director, Mara Mintzer's, TEDx Talk to be featured on TED main platform

Anonymous — Wed, 07 Nov 2018 23:07:48 +0000

Growing Up �鶹ӰԺ Director, Mara Mintzer's, TEDx Talk to be featured on TED main platform Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 11/07/2018 - 16:07

TED has selected Growing Up �鶹ӰԺ Director, Mara Mintzer's, TEDx Talk to be featured on their main platform launching on November 7th at 4:00 pm EST. Her talk, "We let kids design our city -- here's what happened," will be available at go.ted.com/maramintzer. The talk is based on her work with Growing Up �鶹ӰԺ (GUB), a program of the Community Engagement Design and Research (CEDaR) Center; GUB integrates young people's ideas into �鶹ӰԺ city planning.

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Introducing: MIT CU �鶹ӰԺ Urban Informality Interest Group

Anonymous — Wed, 05 Sep 2018 20:52:16 +0000

Introducing: MIT CU �鶹ӰԺ Urban Informality Interest Group Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 09/05/2018 - 14:52

Originally posted on Medium.com

We are excited to announce the launch of the Urban Informality Interest Group. This was inspired by our dialogue at the MIT World Real Estate Forum earlier this year and is a collective effort of MIT Professor Dennis Frenchman, UC-�鶹ӰԺ Assistant Professor Jota Samper, MIT Ph.D. Student Rida Qadri, MIT Lecturer John Kennedy and myself, Kate Mytty.

We see an opportunity to develop and advance the research, practice and education around urban informality with a particular point of view: that of design, planning and urban development. To do this, we are establishing an interest group to build a collaborative working relationship across and within institutions. If you are working on something similar and interested in engaging on this, please reach out to create@mit.edu.

�鶹ӰԺ: Urban Informality Interest Group

Informal Settlements and the Informal Economy have traditionally been approached by scholars and agencies as spaces of scarcity — with insufficient services, goods, and even ideas. Modern approaches towards addressing urban informality dwell on the improvement of the inadequate qualities of such spaces. Be this, housing, products, markets, or services. While this is true at some level, this one-sided view erases a significant reality:

Informal settlements are serving as the urban solution to the incapacity of the formal market to provide housing to one-third of the world’s urban population.

The informal economy is the source of income for more than half of the world’s working population.

Given informal settlements are the most common form of urbanization and the informal economy is the most common vehicle for income generation suggests that Informality is not a pathology but the norm.

The reality of informality is then more nuanced. This context of scarcity and need creates the milieu for innovation in which products and services are invented without the ties to modern and cumbersome infrastructure or lengthy and problematic bureaucratic processes. This inventiveness, that we sometimes call ingenuity, is the result of the calculated process of the invention in response to scarcity and away from traditional structures of power. Products that result of such methods have the possibility of being tremendously transformative. In this twenty-first century, we see new products being developed that blur the line between formal and informal processes, regulations and markets. Products like Uber, Airbnb and the likes are challenging well-established markets by capitalizing on the flexibility of informal procedures. Cities around the world are grappling with how to respond to these flexible dynamics embodied by both large corporations and people-led development in informal settlements and the informal economy.

We at the Urban Informality Interest Group are interested in contributing to the knowledge of such development of new products, tools, and markets that can emerge from that ingenuity of communities working in these places, under special conditions that push them to invent out of the box solutions to the needs of our twenty-first century.

Visit the Informality Interest Group website

Read the blog

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Social Justice and Activism in Design

Anonymous — Fri, 24 Mar 2017 21:43:28 +0000

Social Justice and Activism in Design Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 03/24/2017 - 15:43

In January, Assistant Professor Shawhin Roudbari traveled to Santiago, Chile with ENVD undergraduate research assistants Alicia Gonzales and Kristina Lu. The trio conducted fieldwork on social justice and activism in design through visual experience and interviews with various architects, planners and professors.

A month before the trip, the team identified a list of people to interview. This allowed them the opportunity to meet with ArchDaily Founder and Editor in Chief, David Basulto.

“They have a huge influence and responsibility to help shape the architecture world, but I had no idea that the global impact was so great,” Lu said about ArchDaily.

Roudbari, Gonzales and Lu made their way to Valparaíso, the second largest metropolitan area in Chile, known as a global hotbed of community activism.

“I think the context is the first part of understanding social justice and activism,” Gonzales said. “The city itself is already telling you with graffiti and murals that there is something here people want to say, and they’re saying it through drawings and pictures, etc…”

For Roudbari, the context of Santiago is much different from what’s available in �鶹ӰԺ. The experience allowed for a better understanding of global perspectives, culture and societies.

“Trips like this, I think are valuable, because not only do we see it and feel it… but, we also take a little bit of that culture back to our program and share with each other.” Roudbari said.

The larger, overall project will last 3-5 years for Roudbari. His ultimate goal is in the works and will showcase the global perspectives on political engagement in design. But for now, he believes the trip was most successful in other ways.

“Part of the thing I’m excited about and that I value is that it lives on in their [Gonzales and Lu] lives, and they take those lessons with them,” Roudbari said.

After the trip, Gonzales and Lu enrolled in an independent study with Roudbari to code, analyze and find notable themes in their data. The findings will be used in, what Roudbari categorized in three different areas, “teaching, research and student’s lives.”

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