SCC-IRG Track 1: Common SENSES (Standards for ENacting Sensor networks for an Equitable Society) : Community-Led, Science-Driven Climate Resilience in Boston, MA

Communities across the world are experiencing a challenging paradox: accelerating development in the context of climate change. Often, the impacts are concentrated in disadvantaged communities, requiring new approaches to pursuing local and equitable solutions to climate resilience. Common SENSES will demonstrate such an approach by integrating cutting-edge science with community priorities in conjunction with a capital redevelopment of Blue Hill Ave. in Boston, MA, a long-neglected thoroughfare running through the heart of the city’s historically Black communities.

Networks of sensors installed throughout Blue Hill Ave.’s neighborhoods will measure the threat of environmental hazards, including extreme heat and rainwater flooding, from street to street. These data will be explored collaboratively with community stakeholders in workshops that will culminate in proposals for the placement of green infrastructure (e.g., rain gardens, green roofs) optimized to mitigate hazards in the neighborhood following the redevelopment.

The project is a community-city-university partnership between the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative (DSNI) and Project RIGHT, which serve communities along the Blue Hill Ave. corridor; the City of Boston’s Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics (MONUM); and an interdisciplinary team affiliated with Northeastern University’s Boston Area Research Initiative (BARI).

Common SENSES will make four major advances. (1) It will generate new techniques for modeling sensor data to quantify disparities in hazards from block to block within communities, or microspatial inequities. (2) It will develop new practices and tools for participatory modeling, or the process of generating solutions by placing complex data in the hands of community stakeholders. (3) It will evaluate the impacts that green infrastructure can have on mitigating microspatial inequities in communities. (4) It will demonstrate how sensor networks can be best integrated with community needs and perspectives to have true public impact, something that this emergent technology often lacks. The project will have extensive benefits for the Blue Hill Ave. corridor and will demonstrate a model for similar projects locally and globally.

The team will work with the City of Boston to replicate the approach in other projects throughout the greater Boston region. This project will also publish the Common SENSES playbook, a non-academic publication summarizing the insights, tools, and practices developed throughout the project to enable other communities to incorporate in their own pursuit of local solutions to climate resilience.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.