Three of Our Projects Dedicated to Social Equity are Honored by Fast Company’s World Changing Ideas Awards

The Neighborhood Livability toolkit analyzes social equity metrics alongside standard built environment metrics using a process that’s easy for designers and planners. And by telling the social equity story of a neighborhood with “bite-sized” and accessible data types (e.g. population density, access to transit, racial diversity, proportion of low-wage workers), the team believes designers will be better equipped to facilitate necessary conversations with clients and community stakeholders around the direct impact that urban design policy has on long-term social equity outcomes.

“As urban designers who work at the neighborhood scale, our work is quite literally changing people’s lives,” says urban designer Guangyue Cao. “We can use existing data that’s all around us to create a more holistic definition for what ‘good’ looks like at a neighborhood scale. The more points we gather, the more intelligent the database will become.”

Project team: Guangyue Cao, Annie Ryan | San Francisco, California 

The team identified five key parameters that define the success of the testing process: mobility, accessibility, speed, flexibility, ease of implementation and scalability. Under this framework they created a two-part solution would have retrofitted school buses into on-the-go testing centers. Eventually, the team partnered with New York City Relief to deploy portable, folding, “pop-up” care booths for healthcare workers to engage with community members in a safe, meaningful way.

For designer Jordan Hanson, one of the most satisfying aspects of this project was its scale and timeline. “The pop-up-care unit allowed us to get to the root of a single problem to design a meaningful solution in a matter of weeks instead of months and receive immediate user feedback,” he says.

These design solutions are easily replicated across the world as a low-tech, DIY system that can be quickly adopted by underserved communities, enhancing equity, empathy, and public safety. “By bringing the testing unit directly to the population that needs it, we reduce inequities in testing and provide the community with the opportunity to make empowered decisions about their health,” says project designer Iv Shqevi.

These deployable healthcare units respond in real-time, gathering essential geolocation and test-result data, allowing a real-time data feedback-loop to help authorities with strategic decision-making.

Project team: Mariana Giraldo, Jordan Hanson, Iv Shqevi, Katie Johnson, Matthew Malone, Robert Goodwin, Michael Woods | New York, New York; Enlai Hooi | Copenhagen, Denmark (Schmidt Hammer Lassen Architects); Paul McConnell (Arup) 

The pathways are designed to include indoor and outdoor seating, offering a series of distributed co-working pavilions with a dedicated broadband signal and controlled acoustics to enhance productivity. The framework not only considers a decentralized office environment, but also one that supports a healthy and active life-work balance throughout the day.

“Many of the pedestrian routes are already established. But where the pedestrian connectivity breaks down is navigating the precarious, wide avenues that frame the National Mall,” principal Carl Knutson says. “This solution seamlessly integrates into the existing pathways into an accessible urban network that focuses on health, safety, and wellness.”

Project team: Carl Knutson and Armando Nazario | Washington, D.C.