Working Groups
Each semester, HUUSL board members lead working groups with specific goals related to improving Harvard and community urbanism. Products from these groups may include research papers, ordinances, surveys, policy proposals, letter-writing campaigns, opinion pieces, art pieces, presentations, and more!
Spring 2024
Cambridge City Council Partnership
Board leaders: Miah Ebels-Duggan, Clyve Lawrence
Working with Councillors Burhan Azeem and Jivan Sobrinho-Wheeler, HUUSLers will engage with municipal policy & planning processes through advocacy and ordinance writing. The advocacy team will help advance open streets programs on Memorial Drive and engage with community members on bike lane projects. The policy team will work to reduce car dependency and reshape land use in Cambridge by writing an ordinance limiting the space developments allocate to parking.
Urban Studies Secondary Working Group
Board leaders: Kayla Springer, Kimmy Thompson
This semester, HUUSL will be kicking off a group working toward an urban studies secondary for undergraduates. We will be assisting faculty in building the groundwork by conducting a survey or a similar appraisal of interest among the student body in an urban studies secondary. Members will likely meet regularly (weekly or bi-weekly) with tasks including survey assembly and execution.
Environmental Justice Project: Reimagining Boston with Equitable Resources
Board leaders: Hassan Looky
Working with Conservation Legacy, a national nonprofit dedicated to supporting local-based conservation efforts, HUUSL will be conducting research on government underinvestment into marginalized communities and how that has contributed to their infrastructure (or lack of infrastructure) in Boston. Furthermore, we will be thinking of possible policy solutions to tackle the problem.
University Mobility Survey
Board leaders: Clyve Lawrence
With a grant from the Salata Institute, HUUSL members will partner with student groups from the Kennedy School and Graduate School of Design on the distribution of a university-wide mobility survey. The survey aims to seek campus input and support MBTA and Bluebike subsidies for students, in line with similar programs at universities across Greater Boston. We will have at least two pubbing strategy meetings in February and/or March; these will begin after the survey is ready for distribution.
Spring 2023
Visualizing Racial Displacement in Boston (History, Data)
Board leaders: Clyve Lawrence
Building off of Segregation by Design and Roxbury Path Forward’s work in Boston, we will visualize the impact that the Central Artery and other large highway projects had on Boston’s neighborhoods. How have people been displaced due to these projects?
Utilizing natural experimental design and census data, (inspired by segregation data from Brown University), we will observe the relational effect of destructive highways and other urban projects on Black and Brown communities. We will also observe the impact displacement has had on transportation patterns of primarily Black and Brown communities using MBTA transit data.
Equitable Community Engagement in Housing Reform - Partnership with Metropolitan Area Planning Council
Board leaders: Kayla Springer
Historically, community review processes have been dominated in cities and suburbs by those with the most time, privilege, and resources to invest in keeping their communities the way that they are and resisting development.
Working with the Metropolitan Area Planning Council, we will conduct a literature review and drafted proposals for reworking MAPC’s community engagement principles.
We will look at and evaluate innovative methods of equitable community engagement, and draft a proposal about what methods could be most effectively and realistically used in the targeted town or city to most equitably engage the community in question on specific issues of housing development or land use reform.
Massachusetts Housing and Shelter Alliance Partnership
Board leaders: Daniela Shuman, Claire Wigglesworth
How is Massachusetts addressing homelessness? In particular, how is fund allocation impacting the functioning of local homeless shelters? In this project, HUUSL is partnering with MHSA to survey Massachusett’s housing shelters to understand how funds are used, as well as what their need is for funding.