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The Lender Center for Social Justice at Syracuse University awarded a $100,000 grant to three professors from SU and SUNY ESF who are using architectural and environmental research in an effort to combat long-standing economic and social inequity in Syracuse, the university announced in July.

Professors Eliana Abu-Hamdi, Iman Fayyad and Daniel Cronan will use the funding for their research project, “Closing the Racial Wealth Gap through Environmental Justice and Participatory Design,” to identify the impacts of historic housing policies that targeted underprivileged communities in the city and address them by building experimental structures.

Abu-Hamdi, associate dean for research of SU’s School of Architecture, said she and the other researchers are embracing the grant as an opportunity to identify effective ways to mitigate the long-standing wealth gap between white and Black communities in Syracuse, with hopes to apply the research to the rest of the country.

“The greatest part is the ability to see the impact we’re making,” Abu-Hamdi said. “What we’re doing is tangible, you can see the results.”

The project has three phases that will be completed over a year, with the team set to present their findings at the Lender Center Annual Social Differences, Social Justice Symposium next March.

The first phase of the project involves researching underfunded communities of color in Syracuse that are appropriate to test environmental structures by rendering 3D models, called “digital twins.” The potential structures include greenhouses, recreation facilities and marketplace canopies, said Fayyad, an assistant professor of architecture at SU.

The researchers will determine which areas in the community would see the most positive impact after the structures are built, said Cronan, an assistant professor of landscape architecture at ESF. He said phase one also includes speaking with local historians to determine the best way to implement the new structures, a process he called “co-production.”

“These local knowledge-holders give us the idea of where these (structures) can be the most impactful, and give us the qualitative data needed for the second and third phases,” Cronan said.

Cindy Zhang | Design Editor

The second phase entails working with volunteer students from ESF and SU who will complete individual research on other possibilities for structures and accompanying digital twin models. From there, the student researchers will run their own checks to make sure their chosen areas will be suitable for the structures, Cronan said.

After the research phases are completed and the researchers have agreed on their structures’ designs and locations, they will begin work on prototypes in the third phase. They will seek out businesses and land owners who can rent vacant land to build structures on and then begin testing how the structures will impact the community, Cronan said. Once the prototype is implemented, the researchers will record observations of their impacts.

While many past research projects have mainly resulted in reports, Cronan said, the team hopes to turn their collected data into tangible structures that can help to better illustrate the impact of Syracuse’s wealth gap with the help of the grant.

“We’re hoping to make this an ongoing effort, but the structure itself is a proof of concept of what co-production can do to build something tangible,” Cronan said.

While the research project is still in its development phase, Fayyad said the grant will provide a long-term opportunity for collaboration with the Syracuse community in addressing income inequality.

“This grant shouldn’t be a short commitment,” Fayyad said. “This is the very beginning of building relationships with communities in the area, to continue our co-production of knowledge and continuing to think about how we will collaborate with each other.”

Published on September 24, 2023 at 10:24 pm