City, EPA and team from Brown prepare briefing booklet summarizing problems, resources and viewpoints regarding such concerns as graffiti, litter, recycling and rats
Pollution, vacant lots and lead poisoning are among the problems of some neighborhoods, and Brown's Center for Environmental Studies is cooperating with the City of Providence do something about it.
Three students and Harold Ward, professor of chemistry and environmental studies and the center's director, recently prepared an urban environmental briefing booklet called Livable Providence 2000. The 75-page booklet summarizes problems, resources and viewpoints regarding such city environmental problems as graffiti, litter, recycling and rats - "things that don't seem very glamorous but those are things that people worry about," said graduate student Ana Baptista, who worked on the project.
The document, produced in cooperation with the city and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), provides the city with a step toward its goal of creating an environmental plan, which is to become part of the city's comprehensive plan adopted in 1991.
The city invited the Brown students to prepare the booklet because of their previous project with the city - a study of urban lead poisoning, said Luke Driver, Providence's associate director of administration in Mayor Vincent A. Cianci's office.
The Brown students "provided a service that we were not able to undertake" because of lack of staff and funding, said Driver, who graduated from Brown in 1991. "They brought a very fresh perspective. They asked a lot of very difficult questions, challenged our assumptions, and delivered a product that was very informative."
The briefing book was used to guide discussion among residents and agency representatives at an Oct. 23 Livable Providence 2000 Conference at the Providence campus of the Community College of Rhode Island. The booklet outlines issues such as "how can vacant lots be used to strengthen neighborhoods?," then summarized what has been done about vacant lots, how effective recent laws have been, and the current status of the problem.
The issues highlighted in the briefing book came from public input at three meetings held last spring with the EPA, the Department of Environmental Management, the city, and organizations such as the Sierra Club, DARE and the South Side Land Trust.
From those meetings, Baptista and fellow students Justin Huxol '01 and Matthew Amengual '01 were assigned topics to research for the booklet. Their summer of research was financed with a $20,000 grant from the EPA's Urban Environmental Initiative.
Judging from the discussion at the October summit, the project was a success, Ward says. All the workshops were filled, with 75 to 100 people attending at any one time.
Particularly noteworthy are the booklet's maps, which plotted where in the city it faces such problems as asthma, noise, litter, graffiti, lead poisoning and vacant lots. "Nobody mapped this before," Ward said. "The maps are a wonderful way to get people talking. People start to see patterns."
A theme that emerged was the concentration of environmental problems in low-income areas, Ward said. "It's a real environmental justice issue."
The maps, Amengual's project, were among the most difficult components to achieve because the agencies that held the data - for example, the police department - didn't have it in a form that was easy to hand over, Ward said. In the end, the maps got rave reviews.
"The police got some of the maps. Then they were all excited to give us more data. I think it was an eye-opener for them to see what you could do with all the information they have sitting there," Baptista said.
The project demonstrates the benefits of a method of teaching called service-learning. "Students learn more when they do something they perceive as useful," Ward said. "And I think Brown owes something to the community."
City administrators also support the partnership.
"It's great to be able to tap into the University," Driver said. "The students get a challenging issue that's real - one student working on lead poisoning was invited to sit on a national board because of her work. We get the benefit of the creative solution. Rhode Island got a $4 million HUD grant specifically because of the students' ability to pinpoint the lead poisoning project."