Dwight Healthy and Just Neighborhood

Since 1996, the Yale Urban Design Workshop has collaborated with New Haven’s Dwight neighborhood community on a range of planning, design, and equity issues, developing community-based plans in 1996 and 2008, and designs for specific new community facilities, including schools, retail, and affordable housing. 

In light of increasing development pressures and growing community concern about resident health due to degraded air quality, increasing heat vulnerability due to climate change, and longstanding structural and environmental inequity, the Dwight, Healthy and Just Neighborhood project will present a new grass-roots planning framework that centers the relationship of the urban environment at the neighborhood scale to community health.  Funded by an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Environmental Justice Small Project Grant and a Yale Environmental Humanities grant, the project couples new sensing and mapping technologies and techniques (including a real-time neighborhood-scale air quality monitoring network with a GIS dashboard to provide highly granular, up to the minute data)  with extensive community engagement and public education, and a historical look at environmental equity in the neighborhood.  A new, data-driven, action-oriented web-based plan will propose concrete programs and changes that can improve equity and the quality of living in the Dwight neighborhood.