Smart Cities Research Lab
The dominant response to the great challenges facing our cities has been to make urban areas “smarter,” with a focus on technological innovations and sustainable design. But what about the people, the diverse and marginalized communities that struggle to maintain sustainable lives in changing urban locales? At the Smart Cities Research Lab (SCL) we study and consult on best practices for building equitable urban communities at the human scale from the classroom to the street corner. The SCL specifically focuses on the challenges and opportunities of university-driven development projects both on and beyond the campus.
Because colleges and universities have become central political and economic anchors for cities, drawing attention to campuses highlights a range of urban issues from inclusive planning, worker’s rights, and equitable innovation strategies to just policing, sustainable food systems, and public art. SCL mines buried histories of the past, everyday struggles of the present, and speculative possibilities for the future to ensure that cities remain spaces of living, learning, and loving for everyone. At the SCL, our work is guided by the mantra heard in the communities we serve: The smartest cities develop without displacement.
Key highlights of the lab include the broader Renewal Project, which chronicles higher education’s historic use of federal policy to demolish and displace communities of color. This work uses histories of harm to build out new visions of both reconciliation and repair. Within this work the lab is leading a nationwide series of campaigns called Payment in Lieu of Taxes (PILOT) to get nonprofits to “pay their fair share” into struggling municipal budgets, with consideration of their property tax-exempt status. The lab has also worked on related campaigns for community control of land use policies and noncarceral campus and community safety projects, alongside affordable housing mandates. Innovative community history work serves as a central foundation for much of the reparative work of the lab, including The World of the Harlem Renaissance: A Jigsaw Puzzle and preliminary efforts to build a Black Intellectual Oral History (BIOH) database.
Davarian L. Baldwin
Davarian L. Baldwin is an internationally recognized scholar, author, and public advocate. He currently serves as the Paul E. Raether Distinguished Professor of American Studies and founding director of Smart Cities Research Lab at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. His academic and political commitments have focused on global cities and particularly the diverse and marginalized communities that struggle to maintain sustainable lives in urban locales.
Baldwin is the award-winning author of several books, most recently, In The Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities Are Plundering Our Cities (2021) and served as the consultant and text author for The World of the Harlem Renaissance: A Jigsaw Puzzle (2022). His commentaries and opinions have been featured in numerous outlets from NBC News, BBC, and PBS to USA Today, the Washington Post, and TIME magazine. Baldwin was a featured guest on the HULU series, The Conversations Project and in 2022 he was named a Freedom Scholar by the Marguerite Casey Foundation for his work.
Baldwin’s research and impact has driven the public-facing role of the Smart Cities Research Lab. As the strategic thought leader of the lab, he works with public officials, university leaders, and community groups across the country to build models of educational justice and equitable urban development.
This work has included sustainable food redistribution at universities, inclusionary zoning projects with city governments, curriculum development for school boards, and the urgent work of non-profit taxation policy at the local and state level.
The convergence here between scholarship and advocacy allows Baldwin to steer international conversations around key social justice issues of educational equity, gentrification, worker’s rights, policing etc. These vital interventions have led to invitations globally as a speaker and consultant, including London, Berlin, Rotterdam, Bangkok, and Shanghai.
Kiana Matthews-Quiñonez
Kiana Matthews-Quiñonez serves as the project manager at the SCRL. She provides strategic oversight for the daily activates and long-range planning for the lab. With bachelor’s degrees in TV production (B.S.) and Journalism (B.A.) from the University of New Haven, Kiana has an illustrious professional background in multi-media video editing, production, and administration. She has formal training in newsroom settings having interned at the nationally recognized news outlet WTNH- News 8 (New Haven) and worked as the Managing Editor for The Charger Bulletin, the University of New Haven’s on campus newspaper and news broadcasts. Her professional experience grew in the digital space at theGrio where she led a team of video editors to edit and produce content highlighting Black culture. She is the recipient of three Anthem Awards in the “Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Film, Video, Television or Show Awareness & Media Categories,” for her excellence in video editing on projects that discuss successes and tragedies in the Black community. As the SCRL project manager, Kiana is the coordinator and public facing point of contact for all projects and inquiries.
St. Clair Drake Fellowship
St. Clair Drake Fellows serve to expand the mission of the SCRL by researching and consulting on best practices towards building equitable urban communities. We think about visions and strategies for equitable urban communities quite broadly, from deep archival study to broad planning and policy analysis. The St. Clair Drake fellowship program is envisioned as a logical extension of our work by supporting young scholars working in alignment with the mission of the lab.
Rachel Kirk
Rachel Kirk is a PhD candidate in French Studies at Louisiana State University and an adjunct instructor at Bard Early College New Orleans. She holds a MA in International Education Development from Columbia University and a BA in Political Science and French from Virginia Tech. Through the St. Clair Drake Fellowship with the Smart Cities Lab, she will conduct qualitative interviews with high school administrators and educators to understand how they think about school mergers, school name changes, and Black educational culture in New Orleans through the lens of one school amidst the post-Katrina education system privatization/charterization. Beyond her fellowship research, she is also conducting dissertation research that examines how (un-)natural disasters shape cultural preservation and loss in Franco-Creole Louisiana, Martinique, and Guadeloupe. Previously, she was a program manager at the Columbia University Climate School, a Fulbright English Teacher in Rabat, Morocco, and a high school French teacher in New Orleans.
Julian B. Hartman
Julian B. Hartman is an ALI Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of City and Regional Planning at Cornell University. He is interested in how universities, hospitals, financial institutions, communities and government organizations interact to shape the built environment of the innovation economy. The main empirical focus of his research is on the Boston region from the 1950s onward. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Arizona’s School of Geography, Development, and Environment in 2023.