Communities across the United States are struggling to respond to numerous, interrelated crises of affordability, economic dynamism, inequality, and climate change. Meanwhile, public-sector environmental-impact assessments and reviews have devolved into impediments to action rather than the integrators of environmental concerns and facilitators of community input that they were originally intended to be. Recent planning and development efforts are rife with cautionary tales of canceled projects, multi-year litigation, and ballooning costs associated with review processes run amok.
Environmental-review processes have failed to take advantage of 21st-century technologies, despite attempts by numerous public-interest-minded startups and tech-literate government agencies. The contrast with successful public-sector-facing standardization efforts, (e.g. GTFS for transit and MDS for micromobility) exposes a critical gap preventing the use of tech-based solutions: a lack of data and interoperability standards.
This presentation showcases and discusses the ongoing Urban Tech Fellowship project, which is developing standards for environmental- and impact-calculation data and exchange that accommodate differing requirements across jurisdictions. These standards include multiple types and categories of analyses and levels of complexity using a flexible architecture.
NPC Peer Reviewers assigned this presentation a learning level of Advanced. For more on learning-level descriptions, visit our General Information Page.
Learning Objectives:
Understand existing efforts to automate and streamline environmental review, and why they have largely fallen short.
Engage with a new environmental-impact analysis model being developed by the Urban Tech Fellowship at Cornell Tech.
Interrogate the role of environmental and impact assessment in the planning and development process.
