Research | Practice

Practice

This page outlines some of my practice work.

Health and Planning (Mid-2000s on)

My work in health and planning includes a number of projects listed at http://www.designforhealth.net/resources/other.html. These have produced new tools, trainings, and other academic publications. Some involves traditional research and other work takes the form of evidence-based practice.

Design for Health that I founded and co-direct also won several awards including national awards (EDRA/Places Great Places Research Award (2009),American Planning Association (APA) National Planning Excellence Award, Best Practices (2009), APA Minnesota Chapter, Merit Award (2008)).

Metropolitan Design Center (2002-2007)

Key outcomes during my directorship of the center included initiatives on healthy and sustainable communities, faculty and student fellow programs, visiting lecture and critic programs, and publications and exhibitions series. I was also involved in conducting or managing 15-25 urban design projects per year, representing some hundreds of thousands in grant funding each year. These included landscape and park design, neighborhood and district planning, mapping and spatial analysis, urban design visual assessment, healthy environments work, and affordable housing.

The center won several awards. The Corridor Housing Initiative (CHI), now the Corridor Development Initiative, with the design center involved in the core technical team received substantial recognition (APA National Planning Excellence Award for a Grassroots Initiative (2007), Local Government Innovation Award, Minnesota, (with the City of Minneapolis Corridor Housing Strategy (CHS)) (2006), Finalist, Innovations in American Government Award (with the CHS) (2005), and APA, Minnesota Chapter, Special Community Initiative Award (2005)). It continues to do great work.

Note, this process is documented in 2010 A. Forsyth, G. Nicholls, and B. Raye. Higher Density and Affordable Housing: Lessons from the Corridor Housing Initiative. Journal of Urban Design 15, 2: 269-284. Some of the materials we produced are still available online.

Other projects won state level awards for specific projects and public education.

Urban Places Project (1995-2000)

The Urban Places Project (UPP) started a couple of years after I’d gone to U.Mass and continued a little after I left for another institution in the state. A collaboration with Henry Lu and Patricia McGirr, UPP conducted urban design and neighborhood planning projects in low-income neighborhoods, emphasizing participatory processes. We completed more than 20 projects with cities, nonprofits, and community groups in Springfield, Holyoke, Pittsfield, and Fitchburg, MA, including neighborhood and open space plans, park and garden designs, downtown revitalization, workshop facilitation, how-to manuals, safety audits, architectural and economic feasibility studies.

An early version of the web site, that I remember working on in the late 1990s, is still online through some workings of the cyberuniverse.

One project, the YouthPower Guide, won national awards from the APA and ASLA. UPP also won the U.Mass system’s President’s Public Service Award, and a number of state-level awards. This was a terrific guide based on a youth-led participatory process. It is no longer available so I’ve scanned it--note this is not a great scan and the (limited number) of internal pages that were color are now black and white, but it does make it available. I will update it later in 2010.

The co-directors also published on service learning and on Puerto Rican use of space in cold climates. Those articles are listed in the publications section of this site.

Other Practice

Over the years I have done other work for universities (e.g. supervising mover 20 student projects for the U.Mass Center for Economic Development in the mid-1990s) and in the private sector.