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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 apply the City’s Neighborhood Activation Study methodology, lifecycle cost benefit analysis and various frameworks holistically to clusters of capital projects in neighborhoods to increase infrastructural resiliency (and thus community resiliency) and assess whether re-thought clusters of projects can be done for less or the same amount of investment. This working group also focuses on making existing community-based processes more effective in translating community infrastructural knowledge.
- 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 has been 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). The IWR working group will continue to support future workshops and any resulting multi-megacity research projects involving NYC.
Research Agenda