Community Engagement

Our work on Community Engagement includes scenario development, co-teaching with a local environmental justice nonprofit, participation in the Green Roof Research Alliance, and the Seeds of Good Anthropocenes research project. Continue reading for an introduction to this work and links for more information.

Scenario Development

The USL is co-leading the Urban Resilience to Extreme Weather (UREx) Scenario Working Group, which develops scenarios through extensive stakeholder engagement and modeling approaches that explore alternative pathways for critical infrastructure transitions in each UREx city. The objective is to promote visionary thinking among local residents — including but not limited to policymakers, planners, scientists, and engineers —through the development of desirable and plausible scenarios that analyze potential pathways through which they can achieve more resiliently designed infrastructures.

WE ACT Partnership

USL Fellows are working with members of WE ACT in Northern Manhattan and the Bronx on a range of environmental and distributive justice projects. In 2022 we worked WE ACT on the the Climate Ready Uptown Plan (CRUP), a guide and map to help Northern Manhattan community members understand their individual risk to climate related disasters – specifically extreme heat, coastal and inland flooding – and provides pertinent information to help prepare themselves and their families. Designed by WE ACT for Environmental Justice in partnership with East Harlem COAD, Harlem Emergency Network and Urban Systems Lab, the Plan is tailored to residents of Northern Manhattan to better understand their flood risk. From the onset, CRUP was designed with community at the forefront. Learn more here.

https2---cdn.evbuc.com-images-64430097-202725922942-1-original.20190625-163608.jpg

Green Roof Research Alliance

Our research on green roofs is closely linked with teaching and outreach. The New School’s Green Roof Ecology course — a collaboration with local partners at Brooklyn Grange — gives students a chance to study actual sites and develop related design projects. As part of the Green Roof Researchers Alliance since its inception, USL cosponsored the organization’s State of Green Roofs in NYC Conference with the Audubon Society. Visit https://www.greenroofsnyc.com/ to learn more about Green Roofs in NYC.

Seeds of Good Anthropocenes

The Seeds of Good Anthropocenes project is a collaboration with the Stockholm Resilience Centre funded initially through Future Earth. Our aim is to counterbalance dystopian visions of the future that may be inhibiting the ability to cooperate effectively on problem solving. USL is working with project participants to solicit, explore, and develop a suite of alternative, plausible “good anthropocenes” — future scenarios that are socially and environmentally desirable, just, and sustainable. Articles related to this project have been published in journals such as Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment and Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability. The paper “Bright Spots: Seeds of a Good Anthropocene” (2016) won the Ecological Society of America’s Innovation in Sustainability Science Award in 2019.