Students help empower residents of once-ravaged Boston neighborhood

Julienne Chen, left, and Anna Karwowska comment Nov. 29 on some of the posters of their Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative project, on display in Sibley Hall's Hartell Gallery. They were among the Cornell graduate students who helped the grass-roots community organization use sophisticated planning tools to map its neighborhood, one of Boston's poorest, as part of a city and regional planning course. Luke Walker/University Photography

By Linda Myers

Students in a Department of City and Regional Planning course at Cornell have been working all fall with a community-based organization in one of Boston's poorest neighborhoods, helping it identify the technology it needs to shape its future. Their project is called "Building Bridges Between Community-Based Organizations and Technology," and their operating style has been to seek community opinions every step of the way.

On Nov. 29 in Sibley Hall's Hartell Gallery, the students presented the fruits of their efforts and welcomed Jason Webb, one of the leaders of the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative (DSNI), who praised them for responding to "our entire list" of needs and listening to community ideas rather than imposing top-down solutions. "When you have a strong partnership like this one, the house can only get stronger," he said.

Now celebrating its 20th anniversary, the Boston-based community organization is responsible for the building of affordable housing in a triangle of land in the city's Roxbury/Dorchester sections and the cleanup of that area, which had been pock-marked with remnants of fire-ravaged homes and abandoned lots filled with garbage and debris. DSNI's newest challenge: how to keep its programs going during tight fiscal times.

"Dudley triangle is the only neighborhood in the country to have obtained eminent domain, and, with it, the right to control the land and development process," noted Michelle Thompson, MRP '84, Ph.D. '01, a visiting lecturer and instructor who teaches GIS (geographic information systems) Applications Workshop, the CRP course that spearheaded the students' project. Thompson said that one of the project's goals is to give DSNI the tools it will need to stay vibrant and effective in the current era of diminishing federal, state and local funding. "By having power over data, you can control your destiny," she observed.

The students' project made active use of GIS, an internationally used planning tool that combines disparate layers of information about a place to provide a better understanding of it. For example, a community using GIS can analyze environmental damage, view crimes in a neighborhood over time; track municipal plans to eradicate those and other problems; show growth patterns in the residential housing market; and find the best location for a new business.

The student team presented its results under the banner of Sibley Consulting (named for the campus building where the CRP program is housed). The group included Leila Aman, Julienne Chen, Anna Karwowska, Joshua Lee, Jason Luger and E.J. Neafsey, undergraduate and graduate students in such programs as urban and regional studies, city and regional planning, and crop and soil sciences. DK Yoon, a teaching assistant for the course, also was acknowledged at the presentation.

Neafsey showed how the Dudley Street community group now will be able to analyze data spatially on subjects important to its future, such as the neighborhood's actual borders, changes in housing values and land use over time and the owners of major parcels of land in the surrounding areas. He said: "It's important that the community take a leading role, understand the data and, eventually, own it. The technology can help but it must be applied in a way that's consistent with their values." Displaying a map showing the location and type of hazardous waste remaining in the neighborhood as well as potential biohazards nearby, he said: "People can use this to hold their [larger] community accountable" for needed cleanups and safety measures.

Isaac Kremer, a project volunteer and graduate student in historic preservation, showed a plan he helped develop to revitalize the current DSNI Web site and incorporate the relevant data for community members and others to access. The best way to sustain such an informative, empowering Web site, he said, is to make sure that decisions about site content are "participatory" and to find and train people within the organization to build and maintain the site.

While the Dudley Street community "didn't need us to determine what maps they needed," Aman said, she showed how new technological tools offered fresh, innovative ways of looking at parcels of land within the neighborhood and surrounding area. "[Parcels] can now be displayed, queried and analyzed visually, both individually and within a spatial context," she said. Aman recommended several tools to organize data, including a geodatabase and Intelligent Middleware to Understand Neighborhoods, a project to be continued with Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

"City and Regional Planning has a long tradition of connecting our students with cutting-edge projects," said Kenneth Reardon, associate professor and chair of the department. "We're looking to create a place in the university where the most committed and effective scholars can partner with community-based organizations like Dudley." Reardon spoke of the importance of service learning to a Cornell education and cited other, similar partnerships with communities in Rochester, Binghamton and New York's Catskill region where Cornell planning students also are involved in resident-led planning and development.

Key sponsors of, and contributors to, the DSNI project include the Cornell Public Service Center, the Cornell Office of Statistical Consulting, the Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI) and the city of Boston.