Tag Archives: Resiliency

RSVP for Upcoming event: Leadership Through Landscape

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Special Event: Leadership Through Landscape

Leadership Through Landscape
Exploring the Power of Place and
Its Influence on Public Leadership and Sustainability Policy

June 6, 2013 ~ 6:00 PM

Artisphere ~ 1101 Wilson Boulevard ~ Arlington VA 22209

Mayor Bob

Join the Virginia Tech’s Metropolitan Institute (MI) and the Arlington Economic Development (AED) in welcoming back Sir Robert Harvey to Arlington, VA. Introduction from the Right Honorable Michael Moore, New Zealand Ambassador to the United States.

For the past 25 years Bob Harvey (still known affectionately as Mayor Bob) has infused the diverse dimensions of sustainability throughout his work as an elected official, international peace envoy, President of the New Zealand Labour Party, businessman, and most recently Chairman of the Auckland waterfront authority. A charismatic speaker and visionary thinker, Harvey came to sustainability through his strong personal and professional bond with the amazing landscape of Auckland’s west region. As a young leader of a local surf club at Karekare Beach, Harvey’s respect and reverence for Waitakere’s rugged coastline and temperate rainforest set the foundation for one of his first political activities — advocating for national legislation that permanently protects the Waitakere Rainforest and Ranges from encroaching suburban development. For Mayor Bob, Leadership through Landscape does not end with acts of conservation and preservation, but becomes a starting point for a dialogue with nature, understanding the landscape, listening to the landscape, and learning from the landscape in ways that reflect the values of New Zealand’s indigenous Maori culture. Building on these themes, Mayor Bob will offer his insights and observations on how sustainability leaders in the US can leverage their own landscapes to support their work in making sustainable communities.

MI and AED welcomes the Right Honorable Michael Moore, New Zealand Ambassador to the US, for introducing Mayor Bob; and commentators, Jay Fisette, Vice Chair, Arlington County Board and Susannah Drake, ASLA, AIA, Principal, delandstudio, New York City.

 The Full Flier is available here.  Please RSVP by June 4th.

A Pre-Conference Roundtable: What Next? The Future of Brownfields Research in Policy and Practice

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Brownfields 2013 bannerFor individuals heading to the 2013 EPA National Brownfields Conference, a pre-conference roundtable has been organized by Georgia Tech, Virginia Tech, St. Louis University and Ryerson University. This roundtable will explore the latest developments in Brownfields research as well as discuss opportunities for future collaborations among researchers, practitioners and policymakers.

Coffee and light breakfast fare will fuel the brainstorming!

This is an excellent opportunity to hear directly from policymakers and practitioners on their research ideas and needs.

Click here to RSVP.

Discussing Resilience at the Federal Reserve

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Selected from amongst 180 submissions, Joe Schilling, Maggie Cowell and Lauren Bulka presented a poster while attending the Federal Reserve System Community Development Research Conference, “Resilience & Rebuilding for Low-Income Communities: Research to Inform Policy and Practice,” hosted at the Renaissance Hotel in Washington, DC from April 11-12, 2013. The conference brought together a range of researchers, practitioners and policymakers involved with the community development field to discuss collaborative strategies for working with and for low-income communities, as well as to highlight new evidence-base research ideas and data approaches.

FBR2The poster  presented, “Pursuing Adaptive Resilience: Building Institutional Capacity, Designing a Cohesive Policy Framework and Reclaiming Vacant Properties in Cleveland” sets forth a resilient policy system for reclaiming vacant properties.

The work draws on Schilling’s ten years of participatory research in part through the National Vacant Property Campaign.

Please see the FRB handout for more information.

Schilling assists the City of Newburgh with the launch of its Code Enforcement Initiative

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Schilling MI Photo

Director Joe Schilling

Joseph Schilling, Interim Director of the Metropolitan Institute and Professor and Program Director of the Urban Affairs & Planning Program-Alexandria, partnered with Kermit Lind, retired Cleveland Marshall College of Law professor in the City of Newburgh, NY to head the launch of its new Strategic Code Enforcement Initiative.  Both are law professors with extensive experience in helping cities rebound from near catastrophic conditions.  Click here for more details.

Highlight on Community Resilience Conference

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The Center for Community Security and Resiliency (CCSR) convened its third annual Conference on Community Resilience in Davos, Switzerland. Cosponsored by the Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech, the conference was held immediately prior to the Global Risk Forum, the world largest meeting on risk assessment and consequences, also held in Davos. Both the CSSR and the Metropolitan Institute, whose emerging research is focused on resiliency in metropolitan regions, are located in the National Capital Region.

Maggie Cowell, assistant professor, Urban Affairs and Planning, School of Public and International Affairs; and Joe Schilling, interim director, Metropolitan Institute, participated in the event.

For more information, please visit: http://ncr.vt.edu/highlights/Highlight-112912.html

Resilience in Planning – Starting a Discussion

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“Resilience is a term much bandied about these days in the planning and development professions. Buildings, plans, economies and even cities are expected to be resilient to unforeseen externalities in a world of rapidly changing technologies, climates, and cultures. With this in mind, Kevin C. Desouza and his colleagues at the Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech would like to engage you, the planning and development community, in a discussion of what exactly it means to be resilient in a planning context, whether this is a laudable goal, and, if so, how we can achieve it.”

Read more at Planetizen and join the discussion here.

Letter From the Director – Wrap-Up of the First Semester

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My first semester as Director of the Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech (MI) is drawing to a close. Similar to my 60 day update, I would like to share with you selected achievements and strategic activities of the institute. The institute is now home to a number of blossoming research efforts, including a policy informatics network, expanding work on citizen engagement, critical looks at development patterns in distressed cities, and the local and global patterns of community resiliency.

Roundup on Grants and Proposals
We continue to diversify our funded research portfolio. Joe Schilling led the Metropolitan Institute’s effort to partner with the German Marshall Fund and Cleveland State to manage, mentor, and evaluate a new executive fellowship program as part of the Obama Administration’s Strong Cities, Strong Communities initiative which seeks to build capacity in six economically distressed cities—Cleveland, Detroit, Memphis, New Orleans, Fresno, and Chester, PA. Joe and his colleagues at Cleveland State will assess the impacts from the fellowship while mentoring roughly 30 professionals over a 3-year period. Maggie Cowell and I received a seed grant from the Institute for Society, Culture, and Environment to build a research program on designing resilient networks for local communities. Read more about the project here. We received an IBM Center for the Business of Government grant to study the role of citizen apps and its influence on governance. Read more about the project here. We are hoping to hear positive responses on several grant proposals we currently have under review.

New and Emerging Partnerships
An institute’s strategic alliances are one of its most valuable assets. Building winning partnerships takes time and effort, and the payoffs for both parties are not immediate. We have spent a great deal of time and effort to connect the Metropolitan Institute with our industry, non-profit, and government friends. We have formed a partnership with ACT for Alexandria, a community foundation dedicated to stimulating philanthropic giving on the local level within Alexandria, VA. The ACTion Alexandria project is a new citizen engagement platform with interactive tools to make it easier for residents to take an active role in addressing community problems. The institute will partner with Act for Alexandria and use the ACTion platform to design and test practices that encourage citizen participation using online tools. Read more on this project here. Tentative collaboration agreements are in place or being cultivated with a number of other organizations including the American Red Cross, the US Green Building Council, the International for City/County Managers Association (ICMA), and City and County of San Francisco, among others. Within Virginia Tech, we continue to work closely with our partners in the Northern Capital Region and Blacksburg on a number of collaborative efforts.

Please continue reading for updates on our work in Community Resiliency, Policy Informatics and exciting international outreach and our vision of the future.

Continue reading →

Faculty Fellow Showcase: Margaret Cowell

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Professor Margaret Cowell, assistant professor in the Urban Affairs and Planning program in the School of Public and International Affairs and Faculty Fellow to the Metropolitan Institute, shared some of her background and research highlights recently.

 Q: Please tell us a bit about your academic background.

I attended Brown University in Providence, RI, with the intention of becoming a medical doctor, however an undergraduate urban studies course sparked my curiosity and I quickly became obsessed with the subject and took every city-based course I could. I had the opportunity to study abroad in Cork, Ireland, a post-industrial city that felt much like the towns I’d grown up near in upstate New York, and a little like Buffalo or Cleveland. During my time abroad, Cork was seeing some growth with the ‘Celtic Tiger’ and my time there showed me another face of urban development in distressed areas.  I then pursued a Masters degree in planning at the University of Buffalo – another excellent location for studying urban development in shrinking cities. Several years working and conducting research at the Federal Reserve Bank cemented my love for research. Driven by a desire to develop my own research agenda, I went back to school to pursue a PhD at Cornell University, working with Rolf Pendall and Susan Christopherson on transitional economies and regional resilience.

Q: What are your main research projects at the present time?

Currently, I’m working on a book manuscript to help us better understand how larger cities of the Midwest responded to deindustrialization in the 1970s and 1980s. The research is built on interviews I conducted with development officials, civic leaders, public officials, and private sector representatives in Buffalo, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Columbus, Detroit, Indianapolis, Milwaukee, and Pittsburgh to get a sense on the decision-making process and the economic development planning response crafted in each of these places. Continue reading →

IBM Center for the Business of Government: Citizen Apps as a Democratizing Technology

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The Metropolitan Institute is pleased to announce a new grant from the IBM Center for the Business of Government for our research project, Citizen Apps as a Democratizing Technology:  Challenges and Opportunities for Federal Agencies. This project will be conducted as part of the institute’s policy informatics portfolio with Kevin Desouza serving as the Principle Investigator.

Most US federal agencies have embraced President Obama’s vision for 1) greater transparency, 2) increased citizen participation, and 3) greater collaboration. A critical outcome of these initiatives is the willingness of federal agencies to engage with citizens around open-data initiatives and the creation of technology for solving public policy problems – ‘citizen apps.’ We are witnessing an increasing proliferation of ‘citizen apps,’ i.e. applications designed by citizens and developers to solve public policy challenges. Federal agencies are not only opening up data reservoirs, but are also incentivizing the development of citizen apps through competitions. In this research project, we propose to study citizen apps and the federal programs that fostered (incentivized) their creation.

There are many reasons why it is beneficial to involve citizens in the governance process. One, it opens up problem solving opportunities where citizens can participate. Second, it serves as a forum to increase the diversity of thought and knowledge brought to a problem. This increases the potential for innovation by engaging many minds to solve complex problems. Citizen participation leads to greater collective intelligence and hopefully more robust solutions for social issues. Third, it allows citizens to solve problems that a government agency might be challenged to address. Finally, it empowers the vision set forth by former President John F. Kennedy, “Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country.” Citizen app programs normally come in two broad flavors. One set of citizen app programs are fueled by government open-data initiatives. In these cases, a government agency makes data available to the public and the public in turn responds by using this data creatively to generate technologies (the apps) that better the lives of citizens. The second set of citizen app programs is where a government agency issues a challenge or problem to the public. The public then responds by building solutions to the challenge. In this case, the government may incentivize the development of the apps through issue of recognition prizes and funding. This success of both types of citizen app programs depends on the dynamic collaboration of government agencies, app developers, and the citizenry. To date, our knowledge on what makes for successful collaboration among these three players is limited.

There are a number of design considerations that need to be addressed when building citizen app programs from the nature of incentives provided to goals of the apps, the motivations that drive citizens to create the apps, and how (and where) to deploy the apps, the involvement by the agency (e.g. staff time to interact with app developers), level and amount of data availability, and creation of problem-solving communities and forums, among others. In this research project, we will uncover design considerations that government executives need to bear in mind as they initiate citizen app programs. We will also compare and contrast citizen app programs to arrive at a set of best practices by looking at critical success factors that led to citizen app programs that were highly successful.

Our research project will thoroughly inventory and study the range of citizen apps to understand the typology of the apps, the data they use, the problems they address, the motivation of the designers, the usage by citizens, and the impact on government and governance. We propose to discover and define the inter-relations between the government agencies, the app developers, and the citizens. While our focus will be on studying citizen apps generated out of programs commissioned by the federal government, we will also look at programs started by progressive states (e.g. New York, California, etc).

The results of the final report will benefit public sector government executives, public managers, and the public-at-large in several ways: 1) it will enable government executives to avoid common pitfalls when incentivizing citizen app programs (for e.g. placing emphasis on the frontend, i.e. the creation of apps, and ignoring the more challenging aspect of ensuring that the apps are diffused into the agency’s work practices or to citizens); 2) it will enable public managers to understand the landscape of citizen apps, the motivations of citizens who create them, and the factors that drive their usage; and 3) it will enable federal agencies to better engage citizens into the policy setting process through supporting technology development thereby increasing the chances of more effective solution generation for policy problems.

Examining Public Participation in ACTion Alexandria

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The Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech has entered into an agreement to partner with ACT for Alexandria to advance the design of citizen engagement platforms. Kevin Desouza, Director of the Metropolitan Institute, will lead a team of researchers who will work in collaboration with ACT for Alexandria personnel to examine public participation on the ACTion Alexandria platform. The team will look at how user interactions on the community platform can guide design choices that promote more robust forms of citizen engagement.

ACT for Alexandria is a community foundation founded in the the fall of 2004 by a small group of citizens who came together to decide how best to stimulate philanthropic giving to improve the lives of the most vulnerable in their community. The ACTion Alexandria project is a new citizen engagement platform which provides interactive tools that make it easier for residents to take a more active role in addressing community problems. ACTion Alexandria connects individuals to nonprofit organizations they want to support, but with a strictly local focus. Individuals have the opportunity to take action on behalf of nonprofits working to improve the community.

“ACT for Alexandria is excited about partnering with the Metropolitan Institute to further refine and grow the ACTion Alexandria platform as a model for others nationally,” said John Porter, Executive Director of ACT. Tracy Viselli, the Project Manager for ACTion Alexandria, added “the possibilities for this platform working with the institute are endless.”

According to Desouza, “ACT for Alexandria is a prominent player in the non-profit space. We are excited to partner with them to study the dynamics of public participation in action. The ACTion platform gives us access to real world scenarios of how citizens use technology to engage each other.”

This initiative will advance the work being done in Policy Informatics at the Metropolitan Institute. “Designing better collaborative and participatory platforms remains a critical challenge in the public arena. We are not only interested in this project from a research point of view but also from a design and policy point of view,” says Desouza. The Metropolitan Institute will be analyzing information on user behavior on the platform, designing experiments to test various strategies for increasing engagement on the platform, and contributing to the design of the overall platform.

Desouza explains, “Collaborating on this effort allows us the opportunity to make a difference in our community. The MI is based in Alexandria and we want to be part of the community. ACT for Alexandria provides an amazing array of services, from scholarships to leadership training. ACTion Alexandria is where the idea of community engagement meets the newest technological innovations.”