Sustainable Urban Environments: Creating Resilient Communities in the Age of The Anthropocene

Keith A Miller University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Ali Momen Heravi M.Arch, MSc, EDAC, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Eleanor Luken The Graduate Center, CUNY
Heather Carter Ph.D., LEED AP, ASID, IIDA, IDEC, University of Missouri-Columbia
Denise McAllister Wilder NCIDQ, Purdue University
Diana Nicholas AIA NCIDQ LEED GA, Drexel University
Ozlem Demir Ph.D., Amasya University
Kimia Erfani EDAC, LEED Green Associate, University of Michigan
Marie-Alice L'Heureux PhD AIA, University of Kansas

Learning Objectives:

• Through participation in this intensive, individuals will learn about a range of global housing concerns and research that can be applied to the design of contemporary residential environments.
  
• Participants in this intensive will gain an understanding of the health and wellbeing benefits to older individuals provided through aging-in-place/aging-in-community and intergenerational residential environments.
  
• This intensive will enable participants to become familiar with a variety of different creative architectural solutions that provide environments supportive of occupant and community well-being.
  
• Participants will learn about planning and policy changes and design modification necessary to facilitate occupant well-being in the context of societal and cultural change.
  

Session Abstract:

Increasing climatic concerns in our cities offers myriad opportunities to examine well-being outcomes in diverse cultural contexts for groups with distinctive needs. Well-being is intimately entangled with quality of life giving the world's residential settings a central role in the achievement of well-being. Acknowledged as the primary setting for human habitation, residential environments should enable us to relax, be ourselves, and have the highest degree of control on our interactions with the outside world. Residential environments should also offer optimal support for well-being's many facets. In the context of creating resilient communities, specific physical requirements for residential environments change as social, political and economic forces instigate cultural transformations.

Employing ten presentations about a range of different housing types, user groups, and geographic locations, this session examines core research concerns and agendas at the intersection of sustainable resiliency and well-being in urban residential environments. Spanning the spectrum of room design to community planning, this intensive explores questions of lifespan housing alternatives, indoor air quality, strategies to improve social capital in residential environments of under-served populations, and policy considerations to encourage residential environments that are more supportive of human well-being broadly.

Following individual presentations, we will move into breakout working sessions organized around the two topics of community-level resiliency and individual well-being. Each breakout group will outline a white paper on its topic. The intensive will conclude with a wrap up presentation of white paper outlines and creation of a strategy for development and dissemination of these white papers.

Social Immediacy in Planned Community Design: The Problem of Macro-Scale Programming and Lost Opportunities for Social Capital

Keith A Miller

As The New Urbanism gains momentum in the field of real estate development, a greater number of urban designers seek facility with this stylistic vocabulary. A common tendency for practitioners is to comprehend the traits of the language without first understanding the purpose behind those traits. Specifically, the New Urbanism program requires a porch or balcony for every dwelling, situated within close proximity to a common walkway along streets.

Adhering to well-established dimensions of the "social-space" zone (8-12 feet), these elements are expressly intended to foster casual interactions within this compressed behavior setting. The assumption is that within social-space proximity, pedestrians would readily make verbal contact with those inhabiting porches. While this assumption is valid in most cases, there are a number of common features that in reality can easily thwart this goal (such as vegetative growth and vertical distance not comprehended in a common site plan).

This study critically examines the assumptions that underpin many New Urbanist design guidelines, taking examples from an ongoing case study to illustrate potential problem areas that result from over-generalizing programmatic goals across a multi-acre development site. The situated nature of "social space" will also be examined, with an eye toward future empirical research into differences between indoor and outdoor socio-spatial zones. By refining these programmatic needs, it is hoped that neighborhood Social Capital can be enhanced, thus increasing community resiliency and endurance.

Healthy Affordable Housing in the Age of Green

Ali Momen Heravi

During the past twenty years, several green building certifications have been emerged. Over roughly the past decade, design and production of affordable housing increasingly has been influenced by green design certification systems as noted in studies by Global Green. Some of these certification systems now explicitly incorporate health-related criteria. These trends in certification parallel trends in research about affordable housing. Despite the relatively far-ranging research on energy efficiency and green strategies in the buildings, studies that examine the health impact of green strategies on affordable housing occupants are infrequent. This study compares and contrasts these two literatures: one focused on greening affordable housing and one on healthy affordable housing. This presentation aims to explain a) Where do these two bodies of literature overlap b) How do these two bodies of literature interact c) Where might the literature on healthy housing benefit from the trends and strategies found in literature on greening affordable housing and vice versa.

Comparative analysis of literature revealed that there is a growing interest in implementing health-promoting criteria in housing design and planning; however, the green building certification programs do not fully address all dimensions of occupant health, especially in the development of affordable residential environments. This study will inform architects, planners, and decision makers about the existing gaps in the research agenda concerning urban sustainability and occupant health. Moreover, this study offers a framework for advancing future research on the topic and discusses the innovative ways that an evidence-based healthy housing research agenda can gain greater salience among the community of housing architects as well as affordable housing stakeholders.

Taking the Home out of Home-Based Care

Eleanor Luken

Home-based family child care is a very common, yet often undervalued, form of child care for many families and employment for many child care workers. This session reports on one result from a multi-year dissertation research project with family child care providers in New York City: the increasing trend of removing home-like characteristics of family child care in favor of more structured settings resembling preschool environments. The policy context of child care is changing rapidly in NYC with Mayor de Blasio's Universal PreK agenda. Additionally, parents face a pressure to 'push' academic achievement to younger ages to ensure their children's competitive advantage in the merit-based public school system. However, these trends have created a disadvantage for family child care providers who work within the context of extremely limited residential units and remain at the lower end of the income spectrum. This talk will explore the practical and ideological context of the changing face of family child care in an effort to theorize on: the role of contemporary early childhood care and education, and the pursuit of livable working conditions for this sector of child care workers.

Storied Possessions: Post-Household Disbandment Older Adult Placemaking through Meaningful Belongings

Heather Carter

If older people do not age-in-place, one of their last residential moves involves household disbandment--divestment of possessions, change in lifestyle, and relocation into smaller space. There is increased social and anthropological research on household disbandment. Less is known from an environment and behavior theoretical perspective about the subsequent process of reestablishing meaningful place. A goal of this study was to understand how place was made through personal possessions to answer the research questions: "What identity meanings, related through life span stories, were embedded in the possessions older people moved to their new residences?" and "How did post-disbandment older people embed the meaning of family when making place?" Participants were twenty-three retirees (70 +) in a variety of residential housing types and five of their adult-children. Multiple-case holistic case study research methods were used to analyze sixteen household cases. Within-case findings suggested post-disbandment older people, in their new residential environments, incorporate possessions embedded with personal, social, and collective identity meanings related to life story events. Cross-case findings suggested participants integrated family into their new residences by engaging with possessions connected to storied points in their lives. Participants actively engaged with authentic perspectives of current reality to make place. Implications suggest disbandment and placemaking are a holistic event not distinct episodes, and the agency of older people should be privileged. Contributions include an analytic tool to evaluate possessions' granular meanings and the Model of Storied Possessions depicting symbolic interaction that sustains the idiosyncratic nature of one's metaphysical place of home.

Increasing Confidence in Home Modifications for Safe Aging in Place in Rural Environments

Denise McAllister Wilder

Aging in place, the practice of remaining in one's home while aging, is the choice for many. To insure residential safety and well-being, occupational therapists are asked to perform home assessments and make recommendations regarding home modifications. Unfortunately, those recommendations are not always implemented by the client even though research shows pre-discharge home assessments reduce the risk of falls and subsequent readmission to the hospital. Additionally, when recommended modifications are implemented, less than 50% of those implementations are still being utilized a year later. Missing from this scenario is the participation of interior designers and architects. Recommendations generated by occupational therapists are typically communicated to the client using textual descriptions of the modifications, sometimes accompanied by simple sketches or product specification sheets.

This study assesses confidence levels of home modifications when clients are shown those modifications utilizing architectural visualization technology. Architectural walk throughs of a home created using building information modeling software combined with gaming software allow clients to view recommended modifications as they would exist in their own homes.

The difference in confidence levels between those living in urban environments compared to those living in rural or suburban areas will be discussed. Does willingness to invest in home modifications to support safety and independence while aging differ between those living in an urban setting and those living in a rural or suburban setting? Do urban dwellers have concerns not found with rural or suburban elderly? These and other findings will be discussed during this intensive presentation.

Integral Living Research: Tools and Solutions for Sustainable and Healthy Living in Underserved Communities

Diana Nicholas

Health advocacy and design for equitable urban living are studied by the Integral Living Research Group. Integral Living Research is a novel and collaborative design research group that has developed seven principles for healthy living environments in underserved communities. This group melds the disciplines of architecture, interior design, public health and STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) fields. Developed through deep experience in human-centered design research that focuses almost exclusively on advocacy and urban living space, the overall goal of the seven principles of Integral Living Research is to help remove living stress and create tools that can function as a bridge to improved health in dire conditions. Substandard housing and housing insecurity cause great stress in the urban environment. This session will delve into the seven principles, the research and novel projects behind each, and examine how an inter professional group can approach science health and design research to create new solutions for neuro-diverse populations.

Understanding Affordable Housing Strategies and Solutions

Ozlem Demir

The primary purpose of this study is to revise and improve guidelines to make residential environments more livable for low-income people by increasing close attention to psychological, economic, and environmental dimensions of affordable housing movement in Turkey and many other countries. Increasing economic issues cause more need for affordable housing. Therefore, several concerns should be considered such as creating a whole community to sustain the residential environment and social and economic wellbeing. Correspondingly, these concerns are related to selecting a correct place to construct affordable houses where necessary needs such as job, grocery and so on are fulfilled. Although the primary purpose of affordable housing is to meet the housing needs of people who have low income, local and national governments should consider the benefits of place attachment and place identity. Lack of community awareness, aesthetically pleasing residential environment may adversely influence the belongingness and attachment to the place where individual lives. Thus, this could bring adverse effect on ownership and connection to a new settlement. Within the scope of urban transformation as well as affordable housing projects, the Turkish government has demolished thousands of buildings that carry the risks or have already damaged. Those are replaced with new multi-story buildings, which are undesirable regarding sustainable urbanization because of the deterioration of the urban skyline. Although these structures were located in different geographic regions, it was observed that they were constructed similarly in terms of their structures and layouts as well as aesthetic and typological constituents. In this study, affordable housing strategies and solutions were compared among Turkey, the United States, Canada, and Australia. In conclusion, similarities and differences of affordable housing strategies and solutions were observed and listed policy recommendations to improve residential sustainability.

Aging in Place and Resilience in the Age of Climate Change

Kimia Erfani

As the rate of Climate Change is accelerating, more frequent intense disasters as a result of extreme weather conditions are globally on the rise. Older Americans--defined as age 65 or older--are eminently vulnerable to suffer from the dire consequences of Climate Change stressors mainly due to social isolation and coping with a multitude of physical and cognitive disabilities. Climate-related disruptions in the flow of essential services to the older adults can also adversely impact the health and well-being of this population group. As many of the older Americans are expected to be located near coastal areas, sprawling suburbs, and metropolitan regions prone to the urban heat island effects and various impacts of Climate Change, it is essential for the urban planners, built environment designers and architects to account for human vulnerabilities, adaptive responses and resiliency when designing for inclusive urban areas. In this paper, the vulnerability of older Americans to Climate Change stressors and the impact of aging-in-place strategies in building resilient communities will be reviewed. High degrees of social connectedness and social capital is identified as a key factor in creating disaster resilient communities for older adults and should be at the core of designing aging-in-place strategies and sustainable cities.

Ivanhoe Redux: The Importance of Place in Growing Community

Marie-Alice L'Heureux

How does a neighborhood condemned for decades as a haven for drugs and violence successfully reinvent itself? In 2018, after years of fighting crime, drugs, poverty, gun violence, illegal dumping, condemned housing, and vacant lots, the Ivanhoe Neighborhood Council (INC) of Kansas City, Missouri will complete the 39th Street Gateway project-the first neighborhood-driven development in this largely African-American community fourteen duplex and eight senior houses, all sold and owner-occupied. The long-time first director retired in December 2017, and the new leaders plan to expand housing and revitalize 39th Street's commercial and retail functions. This research aims to help them strategize to develop their next ten-year plan.

The 'What Works Collaborative,' a foundation-supported research partnership publishes research on a wide range of urban issues. The guide to Building Successful Neighborhoods published in 2011 helps residents and professionals strategize effectively to turn neighborhoods around. My research compares the strategies illustrated in the case studies in Building Successful Neighborhoods with the paths taken by the leadership of the Ivanhoe Neighborhood Council in the past, their aspirations for the future, and the results. Using data from three sources: 1) six years of participant observation data of the neighborhood's activities and serving on the INC's Housing and Economic Development Committee, 2) an in-depth study of the physical and economic changes in Ivanhoe since 1990, and 3) the 2018 Local Initiatives Support Corporation (USC) health assessment study of the neighborhood, I present the development history of Ivanhoe, the economic and health outcomes, what has worked in the neighborhood compared to the strategies of the 'What Works Collaborative,' and possibilities for the future. I also report on the collaboration between the new INC leadership and local architectural design studios that are helping the neighborhood visualize its aspirations to promote investment in the community.