How Might We

increase ownership, employment opportunities, and health in South Baltimore in ways that decarbonize the community

In response to a case competition we proposed a strategy to address the complex issue of decarbonizing low income communities. These communities often lack capital to make improvements and need creative financing as well as community focused design. In this project I faciliated others in the HCD process.

Our research process entailed:

User interviews with community organizers
First hand accounts of environmental injustice in the community
Census data, community surveys, news articles, city histories
Stakeholder maps of coalitions and nonprofits serving the community

This allowed us to generate a sense of community’s priorities, motivations, and needs and developed a strategy to meet city wide KPIs towards net-zero goals with the community’s pain points at the center of our design. We only had 2 weeks to put this proposal together.

We made an affinity map, synthesizing key insights and opportunities from research focusing on community pain points. We built a strategy focused on community needs and decided to design with the principles of community led projects based on what we learned. After prompts like “solve this with no money” and “solve this with infinite funds” the team generated a series of prototypes including cooperative energy production, job training, and pathways towards building equity. We also built in creative financing suggesting that we might be able to set up local carbon markets to fund decarbonization in low income communities funded by Baltimore based industry looking to buy carbon credits.

Process

Taking all the research and sorting it allowed us to distinguish between inductive and deductive categories. This process of affinity mapping helped distill insights and brought key motivations, pain points, beliefs and needs to the surface. After convergence of insights, we diverged again to do more research on decarbonization strategies and analogous research on successful models of participatory processes with low income communities. Ideation using crazy 8s helped generate some interesting ways to fund the project including partnerships with corporate sponsors to provide capital for community owned energy production and a localized carbon credit market keeping offsets from corporations within the local business ecosystem. If we had more time, next step would be to test this prototype with various stakeholders in the community and iterate.