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September 21 and 22
2 days, 2 disciplines, 2 ways to participate – defining our professional roles and uniting to build more equitable, accessible and inspired communities.
#2GETHER2022
On-Demand Session
At this moment in time, we cannot ignore that there are explicit, data-driven, and lived correlations between social equity, public health, and resilience. The Living Urban Districts research begun in March 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic further revealed health and equity disparities in our communities. This research is a mixed-methods qualitative and quantitative framework, providing both narrative and data-based context for urban districts. The framework includes an innovative spatial-normalization grid for analyzing different data geometries, testing the existing public realm (parks, rights-of-ways, civic plazas) in Shock scenarios (COVID-19), and producing real design recommendations that actively work towards equity, sustainability, and resilience. The research aimed to answer this question: “How does the public realm influence social equity and public health? And how does it contribute to resilience at the district scale?”. This methodology can be replicated for any district project, and guide planners towards real and tangible design solutions for the public realm. The methodology from this research is currently being applied to various districts across the US and Canada. Specifically, this case study aims to highlight gaps in access to equitable and culturally appropriate public realm (streets and their sidewalks or curbside spaces) in the study area and propose design and policy interventions that can be implemented to provide residents equitable access to resilient public spaces. During the session, the team will dive deeper into the technological tools and methods of the Living Urban Districts framework and give an overview of how this was implemented in San Francisco and Toronto. The session is intended to be run as an informative discussion with the audience: the speakers will present some of the tools used during the project, and how it can be used across scales and project-types around the world.