Urban Technology at University of Michigan week 118
Infrastructure and sustainability with Kate Gasparro
A prospective student once asked on an admissions call, “what are you about?” when inquiring about our degree program. What. Are. You. About? My answer was not “urban technology” but collective self determination. Circular economies. Social cohesion. We are about how people live together, how they care for each other, how they survive in the most basic sense on this increasingly inhospitable planet. We’re about technology only insofar as it enables the interests imperatives above.
Earlier this week our colleagues at Cornell Tech hosted their annual Urban Tech Summit, focused this year on the question of whether urban technology has anything to contribute to the race to mitigate, adapt, and survive climate change. It was inspiring and harrowing in equal measure, and provoked me to realize that we’ve been a little sheepish, perhaps even a little cowardly, in being clear on what we hope to be the outcomes of our work on urban technology.
To date I’ve been hoping to avoid the pre-sorting of individuals by political viewpoints that happens too quickly in today’s media climate where the line between keywords and dogwhistles can be infinitesimal. If we are sometimes oblique in our language, it’s in an attempt to make space for discovery of shared interests despite divergent points of view. We want a classroom of red, blue, and purple. We want a community of academics, practitioners, investors, activists. We want to be in conversation. We will continue to trace a wide space of discovery in this newsletter, but you will also see us begin to more actively interrogate our own motivations within urban technology as we search for better and deeper answers to the question of what we are all about.
This week student editor Nicole Planken caught up with Kate Gasparro, who is currently Director of Land Development at the large real estate development firm Bedrock, to discuss the way that planet, place, people, and policy intersect via infrastructure.
💬 Hello! This is the newsletter of the Urban Technology program at University of Michigan, in which we explore the ways that technology can be harnessed to nurture and improve urban life. If you’re new here, try this short video of current students describing urban technology in their own words.
🌉 Infrastructure: Place, People, and Policy
Detroiters know Bedrock as the real estate and development arm of the so-called “Quicken Loans family of companies” which owns a huge amount of downtown real estate. As Bedrock’s work expands beyond downtown to include sites with large areas of (currently) open land to be developed, infrastructure shifts from being a given, already buried underground and largely forgotten, to being something that must be co-created. This is a source of huge potential… as well as risk! Will future infrastructure be for Detroiters? Will it be created in a way that honors the place and its communities? Will new infrastructure be cognizant of our shifting climate or willfully ignorant?
That’s where Kate’s expertise comes in. She’s not just any civil engineer, but one whose work and research has been carefully focused on understanding the source of negative outcomes such as exclusion, racism, and environmental injustices as well as mechanisms like crowdfunding that offer some promise to mitigate or prevent those ills.
NICOLE PLANKEN: What does it mean to be a “community builder”? How did you end up here?
KATE GASPARRO: I’ve always thought that there is an interesting connection between people, policy, and infrastructure. I went to undergrad for a bachelor's in civil engineering and a minor in political science. With that integrated approach, I would go to other countries to see how engineering projects in progress were affecting people and policy, and vice-versa. I worked in Nicaragua for Engineers Without Borders for four years, mostly around clean drinking water, and really enjoyed the work. From there I went to graduate school to get a masters degree in international policy and start a doctorate in civil engineering. I focused on community public-private partnerships and found that there's a great framework for engaging in equitable development internationally, but not domestically. So, I started to embrace this understanding of asset-based community development: asking what a place’s strengths are, rather than asking what problems need solving. That approach presents an inclusive framework for co-developing solutions.
“I started to embrace this understanding of asset-based community development: asking what a place’s strengths are, rather than asking what problems need solving.”
As you know, there was a lot of work to be done around community building in the United States so during graduate school, I shifted my work to Memphis and Denver to try and understand how communities in the United States are divided, either by historical racial animosity or by poor urban planning that informs other socioeconomic factors.
I call myself a community builder because I've acquired a unique skill set from being a trained engineer that has worked in policy settings, and also being pretty good at translating technical ideas to laypeople and translating policies back to engineers. By translating between all of these people and approaching the urban setting with a strengths-based perspective, I’ve been able to coalesce communities around infrastructure projects. My work here at Bedrock is not really about being an expert in anything, but rather being able to ask the right questions and translate between people with different expertise to solve really big challenges.
NICOLE: What kind of “big challenges” are facing the communities you interact with?
KATE: Equitable mobility is a big one in Detroit. When I came to the Midwest for the first time to start working for Bedrock, I saw that mobility is such a key portion of the urban experience in a way that's very different from anywhere else I’ve lived, such as Southern California, Memphis, and London. Conversations around mobility in the Midwest are focused around how the urban form looks and feels in relationship to the automobile, and how this relationship can be a barrier in creating a better place experience for people.
I spend a lot of time discussing parking requirements for developments, and how this requirement influences policy and resources. It also impacts how we think about active mobility, like walking or cycling. Right now I use an e-scooter to get to work, which helps to inform how I talk to people who work in our buildings, live in our buildings, and build our buildings. We're starting to inform policy around what Detroit and Cleveland should be looking at in terms of best practices for a healthier and more sustainable mobility network [Ed. note: these are the cities in which Bedrock is most active].
Commuting is such a personal decision, and it's such an expensive one in Detroit. Detroit has some of the highest car insurance rates in the entire country, and a lot of the city’s residents don't own a car, so the parking requirement policy actually favors people who don't live in the city of Detroit. So it's something I feel pretty passionate about in my personal life, but also in the work that I do.
NICOLE: How have sustainability and infrastructure intersected in your past work?
KATE: In Argentina… I worked with a grassroots organization on reducing public electrocution from exposed electrical wires after flooding. The country didn’t have certification for all of the electrical connections that were being made in urban space, so our role was to help the government and grassroots organization look at the policy life cycle of new electrical connections. That project also focused on social sustainability—how do we preserve public health in the way that we build and operate infrastructure assets?
NICOLE: How do local policies impact your work?
KATE: I'm so close to it right now in Detroit, local policy is tied into everything I do. Tax policy has such a big influence on what infrastructure looks like in a city, specifically how taxes are apportioned towards residents versus how commuting nonresidents.
The city of Detroit is 139 square miles, so you can fit Manhattan, San Francisco and Boston inside the boundaries of Detroit. The city was built for two million people, and we only have 600,000 that are residing here. If you equate that in terms of tax revenue for infrastructure projects, we have a lot more linear feet of roadway, utilities, lighting, public parks, etc. that have to be maintained, but way fewer people to do that in terms of tax revenue.
Then you factor in the amount of inequity in the city of Detroit. It's a really difficult problem to solve. And people think about policies in terms of either increasing tax revenue, or attracting more people to come to a city.
There's been a lot of work in Detroit to consider what it is to shut down neighborhoods—demolishing vacant and decrepit structures to the point that we don't need to service those roads anymore. [I’m fascinated by how] the density of a place and the equivalent amount of infrastructure and resources are interrelated really, really closely.
NICOLE: What are some next steps you hope to see towards a more sustainable urban environment?
KATE: On a large scale, I would love to see an economy-wide equitable carbon tax. It's really hard to do, but it would start to shift incentives around how much people build, and how people think about local resources. On a more realistic and short-term level, I would love to see people take a lifecycle approach to every project they pursue and look at a triple bottom line, which not only focuses on economic sustainability, but also environmental and social sustainability. The environment is a silent stakeholder, and often we don't actually leave space in projects to hear concerns around the environment without having a different framework in place.
The other thing that's fascinating about projects is how their timelines are in discourse with policy. Our political cycles can be two, four, or six years at a time, and on top of that, a homeowner only lives in their home for about seven years on average. These are very short timelines for people who are making decisions or voting for people to make decisions for projects that will last 50 to 100 plus years.
NICOLE: You’re an expert on crowdfunding infrastructure. What’s powerful about this idea?
KATE: What I really like about crowdfunding for infrastructure projects is seeing how local [the interaction] is. Through my research, I found that crowdfunders were voting with their dollars for projects they’re interacting with every day and understand their consequences. It becomes really difficult and challenging to trust a crowd [to create a direct impact on the built environment] when issues are stretched beyond the local scope.
“Aligning proximity with local issues is really important—the people who are closest to problems should be the ones who are most vocal…”
You see less differences within a community relative to the world, or even the state. Everybody is living in the same sort of terrain and climate, they understand the local public school system, understand the local discourse and dynamics within their own community. Aligning proximity with local issues is really important—the people who are closest to problems should be the ones who are most vocal, and what I’ve found through my research on infrastructure projects is that crowdfunding is a powerful way to achieve that effect.
NICOLE: Lastly: what is your favorite city and why?
KATE: I have so many favorite cities for so many different reasons. I was just in Mexico City this weekend. It is so beautiful how the culture plays out in this prideful way around how people get around the city, but also how they feel about their own neighborhood. I spent a lot of time in a neighborhood that was pretty gentrified with a lot of expats, but still, nobody spoke to you in any other language other than Spanish.
I think I'm gravitating towards places that stay true to what they are. And I think that's a challenging aspect of working in Detroit—Detroiters love their city for what it is and sometimes are resistant to attracting people to come live here, but they need people to come live here for the city to exist for all those reasons that we just talked about [related to cost of infrastructure and tax revenue]. So, how do you stay true to who you are [as the demographic makeup of the city changes]? I think it's really important to be part of the local fabric and to help empower the people who have lived there and support [their own vision for their community].
These weeks: Advising. Housing. Admissions. Curriculum. Welcome to Nicole, the newest member of our team, who will assist with operations and metaphorical train conducting! 🏃