Past the Parcel: A Workshop Using Neighborhood Data to Align Climate, Health and Equity Priorities in Design

Join us for an in-person workshop at the BSA.

The body of evidence linking building design and operations to environmental, health, and social challenges is both vast and fragmented. New databases are continually coming online with the promise of depicting a wide array of environmental exposures, social injustices, health disparities across populations, and vulnerabilities to climate change. Green and healthy building regulations and best practice guides offer a toolbox of design and operations strategies that could be used to respond to the exposures and vulnerabilities made visible through these dashboards. But, they currently do not help users tailor their project to the environmental exposures and population health needs specific to the site and surrounding neighborhood.

This hands-on workshop will introduce participants to a two-step, validated prioritization process that combines neighborhood data with participatory community engagement to bring design teams, community groups, and local government into alignment around a common vision for a proposed real estate project. Workshop leaders will walk participants through how they developed a Health Situation Analysis (HSA) of an active project in Boston, MA and then use that data to simulate a participatory community engagement process designed to support stakeholders in co-creating a common vision for the project that generates new value for all participants.