Built with Humanity Innovation Platform

The Built with Humanity Innovation Platform is an innovation platform for cities focused on equitable and sustainable development.

Rapid urbanization is expected to continue well into the future with 68% percent of the global population are expected to live in cities according to United Nations population reports. “Managing urban areas has become one of the most important development challenges of the 21st century. Our success or failure in building sustainable cities will be a major factor in the success of the post-2015 UN development agenda,” said John Wilmoth, Director of UN DESA’s Population Division. 

Many of the greatest challenges are:

• Lack of Affordable Housing

• Overcrowding

• Unemployment

• Development of Slums and Poor Communities

• Poor Health and Spread of Disease

• Pollution and Environmental Degradation

• Urban Crime

One of the most harmful aspects of these challenges are that they disproportionately impact low income and minority communities. The legacy of racial segregation and “redlining” of neighborhoods affect minorities in major cities across the United States.These inequities and systems of exclusion are even more significant in technology centers such as Boston, San Francisco, New York, and Austin.

Built With Humanity (BWH) is a one-year design fellowship program that invites Black and Latinx innovators to develop breakthrough, market-viable solutions to challenges in urban sustainability. The program is based on the equity-centered community design (ECCD) framework, a flexible system at the intersection of community development, design-based problem solving, and equitable outcomes. 

The fellowship is supported by an online innovation platform (the solution presented herein), the BWH Engine, on which fellows are trained on the ECCD process via learning modules and connected to other innovators and resources in their area. This platform will:

1. Provide resources and learning modules on best practices in equity-centered community design. 

2. Create a scalable innovation process for civic innovators and entrepreneurs that helps them design effective interventions for vulnerable communities. 

3. Enable sharing of best practices, city data, resources, and effective solutions to urban sustainability among cities worldwide.

Our innovation platform will change our world by providing a powerful tool for urban designers, civic innovators, and entrepreneurs to co-create communities and local initiatives with communities that have been traditionally underserved.

Our approach is unique because we combine equity-centered innovation methods, community co-creation, and urban design and development into one platform. We focus on radical inclusion of underserved communities through education and collaboration and believe the definition of a "smart cities" must include cities being educated on the needs, lives, and suggestions of underserved community members.

Our innovation platform leverages technology to:

1. Aggregates best practices and methods in equity-centered community design, education modules for community members, civic innovators, and urban designers.

 
2. Provides a means to organize collaborative design research, co-creation, prototyping, testing, and impact evaluation of urban design and community development initiatives.

3. Allows us to measure, monitor, share, and evaluate innovation practices and track solutions that actually facilitate equitable outcomes among traditionally underserved communities. This data can be used as a means of knowledge sharing between cities looking to tackle issues on equity and sustainability. 

December 2018: Finalize the curriculum for the fellowship and complete wireframes for the innovation platform. 

February 2019: Formalize partnerships, including the commitments and responsibilities for each partner. Get feedback the platform with our partners, urban designers, planners, and community members.

March-April 2019: Advertise the fellowship among local colleges and universities, as well as community organizations. Initiate version 1.0 of the innovation platform. 

May-July 2019: Finalize budget allocation and fellowship work breakdown structure. Release innovation platform beta for fellows to use during the design fellowship to get feedback. 

July 2019 - Dec 2020: Testing with stakeholders and city-wide launch. 

Yr 1 -3: In partnership with the Austin Center 4 Design and the Creative Reaction Lab, host fellowship cohorts that tackle local challenges in urban sustainability. The local fellowship will be used to aggregate best practices, methods, measures of impact. Once the platform has proven successful (year 2 target), we aim to open it up to other cities to use.

4: Facilitate partnerships with other major cities, and provide services to implement the fellowship and innovation platform within their city.

5:  Grow an accelerate impact by continuing to scale to mid-sized cities.

Beyond: Form partnerships with international cities

Our solution will be deployed in partnership with the city local office of innovation and in partnership with community organizations and partners. The innovation platform will be available online, and community members will be made aware of the platform through our network of collaborators and community organizations and organizers. By tapping into existing community networks we aim to increase engagement and retention. 

We are currently in the prototyping phase and have hosted workshops to to get feedback on the concept and innovation process. 

We will be beginning the fellowship in approximately a years time.

Fellows will be empowered to: 1) lead in their communities, 2) increase economic opportunity while preserving minority culture, 3) raise awareness of the effects of systemic oppression and segregation, and 4) develop best practices with organizations in other cities.

In 3 yrs we aim to have graduated 3 cohorts of high capacity social entrepreneurs and believe we can support 60-70 local jobs from the social ventures created. We also aim to scale this process through our innovation platform with a target of at least 3 additional major cities.

Brannon Veal, PE

I am an engineer and graduate student at Harvard University's Extension school studying sustainable development with a focus on urban development. I bring 10 year of experience in technology innovation, consulting, operations, and entrepreneurship. In partnership with the other organizations mentioned we bring a tremendous amount of experience in design for community development, entrepreneurship, and innovation.

We plan to use the platform as a means to consult for cities on innovation, and design and provide consulting services for for the public sector. This includes facilitation of evidence based participatory design with their communities. We aim to help be a guide for policy related to Urban design and development. 

We want to be able to solicit feedback from a world leading institution and network to understand how we can better facilitate innovation that can help make cities more equitable and inclusive. We believe that the technical prowess of the MIT SOLVE community and members could help us accelerate tech innovation that can improve the lives of marginalized communities. We hope to work with MIT faculty, to define metrics and models of systems change and innovation for our growing urban centers. 

We need technical expertise in data science, urban design, innovation, and public administration to help us understand how to design solutions to urban inequality. Funding would be great, but connections to professors, leading researchers, and innovators would be the most valuable thing we could  receive from this challenge.