What is Town+Gown?
Town+Gown is a systemic action research program that aims at increasing evidence based analysis, information transfer, and understanding of the City's built environment. The City's built environment serves as an ideal laboratory for those working in the City's physical spaces and in the built environment disciplines. Town+Gown links academics and practitioners on projects, with practitioners working on projects as equal partners with the academic partners.
What does "built environment" mean?
The built environment is a recognized multi-disciplinary field consisting of five disciplines — management, economics, law, technology and design. These disciplines are plotted on a matrix, with the horizontal axis representing a continuum from 'hard' (paradigmatic) to 'soft' (non-paradigmatic) disciplines, and the vertical axis representing a continuum from the applied disciplines to the pure disciplines. Town+Gown has modified the original expression of the core disciplines to make them more suitable for the program, adding geography to encompass the urban planning field and adding the engineering disciplines as key components of design, as indicated in the chart below:
View Chart above as [PDF]
Why was Town+Gown created?
As unresolved built environment issues become more apparent, there has been an increased need for additional research activities in the built environment.
Town+Gown's response to this need scales long-standing structural hurdles that have made increasing built environment research difficult over the years. These include low levels of investment, low levels of public sponsorship, inadequate linkages between research and application, and the fragmented nature of construction industry.
How does Town+Gown work?
Town+Gown facilitates partnerships between academics and practitioners on built environment research projects (the Research), generating discussion and follow-up research (the Reflection) aimed at making changes in practices and policies (the Action).
The Research
The Research Agenda is the key tool to move this systemic action system program along. Before each academic year, Town+Gown works with participants to develop a City-wide Built Environment Research Agenda, which is distributed to all participants. The questions are expressed broadly to form an umbrella research concept under which the schools and the practitioner partners can work together to craft more defined projects. Town+Gown supports the academic-practitioner collaborations during the academic year.
The Reflection
Town+Gown disseminates research results and fosters on going discussions. The annual review, Building Ideas, abstracts the project reports, which are available to Town+Gown members. Town+Gown also organizes collaborative symposia and other events, bringing academics and practitioners together to focus on the results of research.
The Action
Most research projects lead to follow-up research that will support future changes in practices and policies.
Who participates in Town+Gown?
Town+Gown is open to all who wish to participate:
• Gown consists of academic institutions with departments and
graduate programs in fields that overlap with built environment disciplines.
• Town consists of built environment practitioners. Within Town, there is one subgroup consisting of public owners and another consisting of other
practitioners, interested in supporting projects.
• Advisory consists of practitioners who wish to be updated
periodically about the program but not actively participate.
What does "systemic action research" mean?
Systemic action research is a type of cooperative inquiry involving both practitioner and academic as equal partners in knowledge creation. It accepts multiple modes of inquiry and analysis to generate research results, the purposes of which support changes in practices and policies via a collaborative feedback process.
Systemic action research is appropriate for complex and dynamic social systems, like the built environment, where issues require the relevant context in order for participants to understand and analyze them. Conducted via an open process, with multiple perspectives and research methodologies, systemic action research activity becomes a broad iterative feedback process consisting of research, reflection and action, termed "action learning sets." Action learning sets, repeated over time within a systemic action community, can provide the necessary evidence-based research to move the complex social system along.
What can Town+Gown do for members of Town?
• Develop a coherent and comprehensive built environment research agenda with your relevant questions
• Wide dissemination of Research Agenda gets your research questions in front of all participating schools, increasing the chances that applied research will result
• Provide continuity for large issues, so that one project can lead to various follow-up projects over time
• Identify cross-agency and multi-disciplinary issues so that more than one school can work on pieces of same question
• Bridge academic/practitioner divide for research questions picked up by the service learning programs as well funded research with as professors and Ph.D. students
Makes contacts and manages relationships with academic programs, faculty advisors and student teams from project inception to "peer" review
• Make contacts and manage relationships with academic programs, faculty advisors and student teams from project inception to peer review
• The academic consortium contract currently under development for built environment research will be available to all public owner members of Town
• Publish Building Ideas annually, abstracting students' work, presenting the results of all projects, and making the final reports available to members of Town+Gown
• Sponsor collaborative discussion events for consideration of completed work among Town+Gown members as a foundation for possible changes to practices and policies
What can Town+Gown do for members of Gown?
• Provide a comprehensive and coherent City-wide research agenda with real and relevant questions for use by experiential and in-service learning programs to develop capstone projects, workshops, studios and internships, and by professors in developing courses, case studies, and academic research projects
• Bridge the divide between academics and practitioners for experiential and in-service learning programs
• Make introductions and help manage relationships with practitioner partners from project inception to peer review
• Provide opportunities for academics to engage with public policy makers on place- and data-based inquiries and analyses
• Increase exposure of applied academic work product among practitioners
• Publishes annual Building Ideas, which presents your program and students' work to a wider audience of built environment practitioners
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Town+Gown membership grows each year as the program cycles through each academic year.
The Gown in Town+Gown: Participating Schools and Programs
Public Administration and Policy
Columbia School of International and Public Affairs
NYU Wagner School of Public Service*
New School Milano School of Management and Urban Policy
CUNY Baruch School of Public Affairs
Pace University Graduate School
Urban Planning
Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation
CUNY Hunter College, Graduate School, Departments of Urban Affairs and Urban Planning
Fordham Urban Studies Program
Rutgers University Blounstein School for Planning and Public Policy
Engineering
NYU Polytechnic Institute
CUNY Grove School of Engineering, City College of New York
Manhattan College Engineering School
Cooper Union School of Engineering
New York Institute of Technology
Columbia Fu School of Engineering, Center for Technology, Innovation and Community
Engagement
Architecture
New School Parsons School of Design
New York Institute of Technology
Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation
Cooper Union School of Architecture
Pratt School of Architecture
Real Estate Development and Construction Management
NYU School of Continuing and Professional Studies, Schack Institute of Real Estate
Law
Brooklyn Law School Clinical Program
New York Law School Center for Real Estate Studies
Business Administration
Manhattan College School of Business
*Includes Urban Planning program
The Town in Town+Gown: Participating New York City Public Practitioners
People from various practioner entities participate in Town+Gown. The following practitioner entites have indicated their interest in partnering on questions in the Research Agenda.
City of New York
Department of Buildings
Department of City Planning
Department of Citywide Administrative Services
Department of Cultural Affairs
Department of Design and Construction
Department of Environmental Protection
Department of Health and Mental Hygiene
Department of Housing Preservation and Development
Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications
Department of Parks and Recreation
Department of Sanitation
Department of Small Business Services
Department of Transportation
Landmarks Preservation Commission
Law Department
Mayor's Office
Capital Project Development
Environmental Coordination
Long-Term Planning and Sustainability
Management and Budget
Operations
New York City Economic Development Corporation
New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation
New York Chapter of Lean Construction Institute
Metropolitan Transportation Authority
Port Authority of New York and New Jersey
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