News from the Yale Urban Design Workshop (August 2023)

It’s been a busy period for the Yale Urban Design Workshop (YUDW). Building upon 30 years of planning, advocacy, and action in the Dwight neighborhood of New Haven, YUDW has embarked on a new project, “Dwight Healthy and Just,” which seeks to address long-standing environmental and health concerns in the area. An air-quality monitoring network, funded by the EPA’s Environmental Justice Small Grants Program, will be deployed to provide a dataset that can be used by the community as a basis for ongoing and future planning efforts, and which will be made available through a new online gateway dedicated to neighborhood health and planning. The information gathered through this process, as well as through a series of public charrette-style activities, open houses, and walking tours, will inform a revision to the original Dwight plan that YUDW helped the neighborhood publish in 1996. In addition, YUDW will be collaborating with the Yale Center on Climate Change and Health to examine cooling strategies in Dwight, with the goal of mitigating summer heat for low-income residents who are disproportionately affected. This part of the project has been funded separately by a grant from the Climate Impact Innovation Fund of the Yale Planetary Solutions Project and will deploy bicycle-mounted heat sensors as well as place sensors in households to create a detailed heat map of the neighborhood. The resulting primary data will provide another input to the new Dwight plan, contributing to the development and siting of specific strategies and project proposals for improving the health of area residents in relation to both urban heat and air quality.

The YUDW is also working with Niantic Main Street, a downtown revitalization organization, on a Main Street Plan for the waterfront of East Lyme, Connecticut. The YUDW will revise a plan originally published in 1997. A renewed set of principles will outline several ways to transform the town through strengthening its connection to the waterfront, creating walking and cycling routes, and building on the distinctive identity of its retail environment, all with the ambition to preserve and enhance Niantic’s unique character. The plan will include more detailed schemes for the development of an old police station by the water’s edge and for the conversion of a recently closed local cinema complex into a flexible workspace and theater venue.

In Norwich, Connecticut, the YUDW is working with Castle Church to design a public space on Broadway. Nestled between Castle Church and the old Del Hoff Hotel, the site, Jubilee Park, is newly framed by a colorful 50-by-50-foot mural painted by artist Ben Keller that features two important Black historical figures — James Lindsay Smith and Sarah Harris Fayerweather. The completion of the mural signaled the conversion of the site from a disused patch of land to a welcoming, celebratory space where the community can gather. The hope is that this public space will serve as an anchor for the downtown district and inspire further improvements to this part of Norwich.

Back in New Haven, the YUDW is continuing work on the adaptive reuse of a Queen Anne Revival house, on Ella T. Grasso Boulevard, into a daycare center and affordable homes for local teachers, as well as on a master plan for the Elm City Montessori School. Exterior stabilization work began this summer.

The second iteration of the clinic “Housing Connecticut: Developing Healthy and Just Neighborhoods,” organized by the YUDW, will take place in the Fall 2023 semester at Yale University. The workshop pairs graduate students from the School of Architecture, Law School, and School of Management with nonprofit developers to produce proposals for affordable housing. Last year the clinic resulted in three projects: a reimagining of local vernacular housing in Newhallville, an inventive ADU model on Division Street, and an ambitious mixed-use project in Fairhaven. Offered in collaboration with the Department of Housing and Commissioner Seila Mosquera-Bruno, and supported by a grant from the SNF Fund for the Integration of Theory and Practice, the projects emerging from the clinic have the potential to progress into the pilot phase, where they would be implemented with support from the YUDW. One of the initial three projects, including eight units of affordable housing, is now moving toward final design and construction.

Last semester the YUDW was pleased to welcome Matthew Rosen as Assistant Director. He holds a master’s in Architecture from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design and a BS in Architecture with Honors from the University at Buffalo. He will coordinate several of the YUDW’s projects, in addition to teaching at the School of Architecture.