PLA.CE Boston

This event is part of Intersections: Equity, Environment + the City, a multi-day symposium November 6–13, 2021 brought to you by BosNOMA and Women in Design on intersectional and participatory design processes in Boston. View the full symposium schedule here.

About the Session

Boston city provides 2300 acres of open spaces allowing 98% of Bostonians to live within 10 minute distance of a park. These parks and open spaces should be used as a positive resource to increase and develop local capacity to address climate change issues. It is important to design and create open spaces which help negate urban heat island effect by making them more permeable and green. Yet, as Boston moves towards its Climate Change and Resilience goals, many low-income neighborhoods such as Roxbury and Dorchester find themselves excluded from the resiliency engagement efforts for the city.

PLA.CE Boston! (Play and Celebrate Boston) is a participatory workshop initiative that facilitates equitable neighborhood-scale resilience by rejuvenating public spaces in the city through play and celebration in Boston, especially engaging with residents of Dorchester and Roxbury. Our aim is to address social and environmental issues by bridging the gap between the use of open space and developing local resilience capacity. The workshop aims to engage residents to identify and re-envision unused and deteriorated parks, open areas and parking lots with a focus on creating sustainable and resilient places within the neighbourhood. From bringing local neighborhood organizations, actors and networks together for pop-up events to community driven re-design of public spaces, the heart of PLA.CE Boston! workshops lies in its ability to actively engage with communities in sustainable city planning and design.

Speakers

Ranu Singh
Architect and Urban Designer, Utile Design

Ranu Singh is an architect and urban designer with over 7 years of experience working on design and planning projects. Her interest lies in developing research based design solutions that integrate sustainability and equity with functional and aesthetic design solutions. Working at the intersection of design and planning, she has designed and led several projects on housing, disaster resilience, environmental planning and urban design in the USA and India. A graduate from the Masters of Science in Urbanism Program at MIT, she is currently working on market-rate and affordable housing projects at Utile Design. Ranu has published several research papers, articles and books with her current research focusing on developing design methods for retrofitting triple deckers in Massachusetts towards net-zero energy design and sustainable drinking water planning in Maharashtra, India.

Kate Mytty
MIT D-Lab, Co-Founder MIT CREATE

Kate is actively invested in understanding and contributing to generative spaces and places digitally and physically and raising our collective awareness around often erased histories. She has spent much of the last decade teaching, learning and contributing to efforts around public markets, street vending, waste management, and grounded innovation. She co-founded MIT CREATE, a program in designX within the MIT School of Architecture and Planning, to support collaboration and action towards social justice within our cities. Through Build Up, she contributes to a collective that uses digital tools for peacebuilding and works with others who are doing the same. Kate and her partner regularly make spaces, whether studio spaces, public parks, and their home for learning around technology, history and cities, for collaborative art, music and for community gatherings.

Riddhi Shah
RSB Planners

Riddhi Shah is trained as an architect from NMIMS, India. With a masters in Urban & City Planning from MIT, she brings an innovative approach for urban development in community design, conservation, housing and infrastructure development. Riddhi has special interests in developing stimulating environments for children in urban areas. Riddhi is currently developing a resilience strategy for affordable housing in the USA with focus on sustainability and climate change equity. She currently leads her firm RSB Planners based in India.