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Town+Gown
Town+Gown Working Groups
Our working groups provide the “architecture” for action research to focus on what we need to know to make changes in practice and policy. The working groups develop research projects with experiential learning programs and synthesize and translate the results to serve as useful resources for policy makers.
- Urban Resource Recovery (URR): This working group focuses on changes to City agency construction practices and policies that would leverage the City's capital program to support closing construction and demolition “waste” material loops and support a local circular CDW economy.
- Construction Culture+Data (CC+D): This working group advances the work of the prior Systemic Construction Data Analytic (SCDA) working group to investigate the drivers of cost increases and schedule delays to produce insight for construction process management as well as investigating new technologies for construction management.
- Resilient People, Places and Projects (RP3): This working group seeks to leverage analyses of public capital projects—both infrastructure and public buildings—and related processes to optimize resiliency of the artifacts and thus the places where they are located and people who use them.
- Toward a "Smarter" City: Utilidors (Utilidor): Town+Gown has been focusing on “under the roadway” and the idea of multi-utility tunnels—or utilidors—for some time. The Utilidor working group has focused on life cycle cost benefit analysis modeling of implementing utilidors, modeling to identify opportunities for innovative subsurface design, and changes to current practice based on knowledge gained from various research projects.
- Water In and Water Out—Innovative Water Research (IWR): Town+Gown began supporting city agencies in connection with workshops for the UNESCO Megacities Alliance for Water and Climate (MAWAC) initiative for the European North American Region (ENAR). Since the U.S. is no longer in UNESCO, the IWR working group will continue to support multi-U.S. city research projects involving NYC that evolve.
Research Agenda