CitySCOPE Podcast

This week, on episode 2 of the CitySCOPE podcast, Joy Chen, Charles Gress and Kate Cooney speak with Anika Singh Lemar and David Schleicher, both from Yale Law School about the ways in which land use community engagement practices might actually hinder rather than help the development of new housing supply. Access to safe, suitable, and affordable housing is a cornerstone of inclusive community and economic development, but cities around the United States are experiencing significant shortages in affordable housing and housing supply in general does not always keep up with demand. We discuss models to overcome barriers to equitable participation processes in affordable housing development. We also discuss how process reforms, such as procedural rules, "zoning budgets" and comprehensive plans with binding targets, might allow for more housing supply. Tune in for an interesting conversation!

In episode 1, Allen Xu and Kate Cooney talk to Elihu Rubin, from the Yale School of Architecture about his work on the built environments of the 19th and 20th centuries. In thinking about the American landscape of wealth, poverty, race and space, a first step in mobilizing for new arrangements is to consider how a city's current landscape encapsulates notions of place-making from earlier eras. These earlier era settlements live on in both the built environment and in the mental and emotional models of space in cities that structure the American mind. Elihu Rubin's work on critical heritage sheds light on how the past is both elided and selectively commemorated in building reuse. We also speak with Robert Shiller, Nobel Prize-winning economist from the Yale School of Management, about his new book Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events. Both of these conversations help us set up our themes for Season 2 of the CitySCOPE podcast. We conclude with a snapshot of the conversations to come over the future 7 episodes of the 2020 season

Opportunity Zones in New Haven and Final Reflections, podcast hosts Song Kim, MBA candidate and Professor Kate Cooney begin by reviewing the work done in the Spring 2019 Inclusive Economic Development Lab class, where teams of students learned about 4 neighborhoods in New Haven that contain OZ tracts and made suggestions about how the models we studied (Food Halls, Fab Labs, CLTs) might be deployed in each neighborhood. The neighborhoods are: Hill South, Dixwell, Newhallville and Fair Haven. Next, Song and Kate review some of the key insights from the interviews with the guests we met over Season 1 of CitySCOPE podcast and highlight some general takeaways about the challenges and opportunities in inclusive economic development work. We finish with some general reflections of our own.

Thanks for taking this journey with us, we hope it is useful in sparking your imagination about how to make Opportunity Zone investment create real opportunities for the communities currently living in the zones.

Creative Financing for Community Inclusion, podcast hosts Nina Crook, graduate of Yale SOM with a Masters in Global Business and Society and Camilo Monge, MBA guide listeners through a series of conversations exploring different models of creative financing to build inclusive models for economic development and make possible investments in innovation that maximize community benefit. Guest interviews with: Joe Evans from The Kresge Foundation, Aliana Pineiro from Boston Impact Initiative, Greg Reaves from Mosaic Development Partners and Eric Letsinger from Quantified Ventures. Topics covered include: use of impact covenants for Opportunity Funds to differentiate funds with community benefit commitments, crowdfunding and other strategies to share the wealth potential of OZ projects with community members, and environmental impact bonds as another arrow in the quiver for municipalities layering OZ projects alongside other investments as part of a broader OZ development planning process.

Fab Labs and Maker Spaces in the New Economy, Liam Grace Flood, MBA candidate at the Yale School of Management speaks with two guests on the origins and potential of the Fab Lab and Maker Space movement: Joel Cutcher-Gershenfeld, Professor from the Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University and Jerry Davis, Associate Dean for Business and Impact at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan. Topics covered include: the third digital revolution, the potential for Fab Labs and Maker Spaces to create opportunities for self-sufficient production, the future of fabrication technologies and local versus corporate control of them, fabrication and implications for the future of work, and emerging practices for local governance and stakeholder control of Fab Lab networks. Before coming to Yale, Liam Grace-Flood, the podcast host for episode 6, spent a year exploring makerspaces and their broader context across Europe, South Asia, and South and East Africa as a Watson Fellow. Many of his learnings were published in an often-weekly column for Make: Magazine called Open World.