Neighborhood Planning

Ensuring neighborhood stability demands a long-term vision that confronts the systemic challenges of health, climate change, economic development, and environmental justice while building on local cultures, networks, qualities, and assets.

Many of Connecticut’s inner-city neighborhoods, originally built to house a burgeoning industrial workforce, immigrants, and eventually the emerging middle class as these cities expanded during the industrial era, today face entrenched challenges stemming from population loss, post-war auto oriented redevelopment, decades of disinvestment, structural inequality, and exposure to environmental hazards. To achieve genuine, long-term stability, neighborhood residents must be empowered to chart their own resilient futures.

As a planning unit, the scale of the neighborhoods offer unique possibilities for community design and development. Our neighborhood planning practices combine community organizing and engagement with empirical research to deliver implementable, bottom-up plans that address critical community needs, desires, and inequities. We approach neighborhood planning as a core function of civil society, utilizing collaborative design and visualization as primary tools for community organizing, empowerment, and capacity-building. Our methodology often grounds technical work in environmental justice and public health data, focusing on the systemic, historical roots of structural disadvantage. In the process of neighborhood planning, we strive to identify concrete, impactful projects and create a roadmap for implementation. For instance, our continuous work in New Haven's Dwight community has spanned three decades, progressing from an early grass-roots neighborhood plan (1995) to constructing an addition to the neighborhood school, a new grocery store, a preschool, and housing rehabilitations. Today we continue this work with design of affordable housing, implementation of an air quality monitoring system, and in 2025, we began a 30 year revision to Greater Dwight’s neighborhood plan, looking forward to the next ten years.

For more of our work related to Neighborhood Planning, check out our project archive.