Architecture & Urban Planning

On December 11, 2013, we released the report Changes to the Land: Four Scenarios for the Future of the Massachusetts Landscape (link will download report) to an overwhelmingly positive response.

Energy efficiency is particularly critical in affordable housing developments, says Jeremy Hays, Chief Strategist for State and Local Initiatives at Green For All, a sustainability advocacy group with offices in Oakland and Washington, D.C. According to Hays, apartment buildings built before 1970 use 55 percent more energy than those built after 1990, while low-income residents spend 400 percent more of their monthly income on utility bills than the average American.

The Technion has inaugurated a brand new visualization laboratory, the first of its kind in Israel, in the Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning. The new visualization lab is a research and learning facility, which allows one to “enter” a three-dimensional digital simulation (model) of buildings, cities and landscapes, whether they physically exist yet or are in only in the planning stages.

HOK Healthcare Sustainable Design Leader Mara Baum, AIA, LEED AP BD+C, has been selected to the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED Fellows Class of 2013. Baum oversees sustainability implementation, research, consulting and education across HOK’s global healthcare practice.

Before joining DTZ as the Energy and Sustainability Program Manager, Julia was the Sustainability Engineer for Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In her role at MIT, she helped facilitate and implement the energy efficiency programs and she was the Department of Facilities sustainability liaison to graduate and undergraduate courses for energy and planning. At MIT she developed a cross-campus energy reduction program for the existing building infrastructure in partnership with the local utility company.

How can human communities sustain a long-term existence on a small planet? This challenge grows ever more urgent as the threat of global warming increases.

Most likely the items in your home or office came from overseas. Today's report focuses on the question how those products got to you, and what is the impact on the environment and workers?

If one were playing a word association game and were asked what comes to mind when the terms “food” and “land use” are given, chances are high that the response would be “agriculture.” Yet every stage in the food system, from being grown or raised through being consumed, is place-based. Put differently, everything that happens with our food system involves land use in some way.

Abstract: Current literature is insufficient to make causal inferences or establish dose-response relationships for traffic-related ultrafine particles (UFPs) and cardiovascular (CV) health. The Community Assessment of Freeway Exposure and Health (CAFEH) is a cross-sectional study of the relationship between UFP and biomarkers of CV risk. CAFEH uses a community-based participatory research framework that partners university researchers with community groups and residents. Our central hypothesis is that chronic exposure to UFP is associated with changes in biomarkers.