University Place

Designing for Inclusion and Equity in the City

– Welcome everyone to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab. I’m Tom Zinnen. I work at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Biotechnology Center. I also work for the Division of Extension, Wisconsin 4-H. And on behalf of those folks and our other co-organizers, PBS Wisconsin, the Wisconsin Alumni Association, and the UW-Madison Science Alliance, thanks again for coming to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab. We do this every Wednesday night, 50 times a year. Tonight, it’s my pleasure to introduce to you Edna Ledesma. She’s a professor here in the Department of Planning and Landscape Architecture. She got her undergraduate degree in environmental design at Texas A&M University in College Station. Then she got a master’s degree in architecture and a master’s degree in urban design at the University of Texas in Austin. She returned to Texas A&M to get her PhD in urban and regional science. Tonight, she’s gonna speak with us about designing for inclusion and equity in the city. Would you please join me in welcoming Edna Ledesma to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab?

– Thank you, Tom for that introduction. And thank you to PBS Wisconsin for the invitation to be here and share a little bit about my work. Before I begin, I would like to start with a brief context on my positionality. I am the daughter of a contractor and a community organizer, and I like to say that my parents have had a significant influence on my career. Growing up around construction sites, I grew up wanting to be an architect, but as I matriculated through architecture school, I quickly realized that I cared a lot more about people than buildings. And so I’ve titled my talk today “Designing for Inclusion & Equity in the City.” Over the next hour, I’ll address how I define the inclusive and equitable city. I’ll present work from collaborations, both in Texas and in Wisconsin.

And then I’ll end with an overview of my research at the Kaufman Lab, which I direct here at the University of Wisconsin. The inclusive and equitable city gives people choice. I think we would all agree that the 21st-century city is one that is facing significant challenges. Today, many Americans are living in cities that perpetuate isolation, limit accessibility, exacerbate environmental risks, are providing inadequate housing, and induce separation. Over time, planners and designers have come to understand that we can address these disparities by following four fundamental principles. The first principle as you see on our slide is that cities need to be safe and secure, and safety and security is fundamentally important at the street level. The second principle is that we need to build homes that are robust and affordable, with access to daylight and amenities. And the third, those particular amenities, so we’re talking about parks, access to a grocery store, access to work, access to transportation, those amenities need to be accessible. And lastly, in designing a smart city fabric, we need to be careful in how we locate particular housing or public amenities so that we are not exacerbating the challenges of the urban poor in thinking about exposure to environmental risks. And this is fundamentally important.

Sustainability is flawed if we do not protect those that are most marginalized in our cities. So once we’ve addressed these fundamental principles, we can begin for our city fabric that is supportive of social infrastructure and thinking about places for children and the elderly in our cities, which are two of the most marginalized populations. Using in this case, as we see on our slide, Hammarby Sjstad, is a case study. We can see how this additional layer of urban fabric begins to unfold. So this particular site is a brownfield site. It’s a redevelopment of a new community that is net positive, meaning that it collects water, heating, cooling, and waste systems all on site while also producing energy on site. And it does all this while introducing mixed income housing. It has a direct connection to the city center via public transit, and it connects social amenities of this particular development. So we’re talking about the introduction of public schools, daycares, all within a relative walkable and accessible distance to this district. And so we cannot plan our cities without taking into consideration how these elements are all interconnected to increase access to choice.

So we fundamentally are thinking about choice within our cities. And so the reality is while many of these principles are in place and cities are densifying, are growing, the reality is a little more complicated. What we see today is that these principles are being used to redevelop our cities, but the outcome in many cases is generally problematic. And this is problematic because what we’re seeing is that that increase in growth in most of our cities, at least particularly in the North American context is happening in neighborhoods that have a higher concentration of low income populations and particular populations of people of color. And we know that this particular growth, which has actually occurred primarily in this 21st century, after the year 2020, has really pushed people out into a suburban context, as the literature on suburbanization of poverty has demonstrated. At the same time, we see that our country’s population demographics are changing. And particularly, we look at, within the context of my work, I do a lot of research with communities within the Latino population. This particular population group in the year, between the year 2000 and the year 2010, saw a significant growth in population of 43%, which was the largest of any population group in that decade. At the moment, there are approximately 56 million Latinos, which is approximately 17% of the population. That 17% is projected to grow to 29% by the year 2060.

Within the planning field, there is a growing body of literature which is relatively new, titled Latino Urbanism. And we really focus on connecting or understanding how particular political, socioeconomic changes in our cities are impacted by the growth of this population group. How does one particular group affect our built environment? And a lot of my work really revolves around that and really connecting the necessary amenities that these groups might need in a city. So what we know is our cities are continually growing and changing, and we need to be able to understand how people live, work, and play. That’s generally the focus of urban planning as a field. And my work really emphasizes understanding how particular amenities within the city, so I talked about the role of housing, well, I focus specifically on amenities. So I’m talking about parks, public space, streets, infrastructure, how all of those components allow for people to have access to the city. How are they included? And so over the course of my research and my academic studies, I have really focused on trying to understand how we can address the evolving 21st-century city to be more inclusive and equitable to our communities. And how do we then engage disenfranchised populations in that process? I am primarily a community engaged scholar. I do qualitative research and I work directly with communities in trying to understand how we can design our cities to be able to have choice and amenities for everyone.

And so today, I’ll talk about two different projects that address how that process actually unfolds in everyday life within the planning process, as it integrates into the academy. So back in 2017, I was approached by the City of Brownsville because they were facing a particular planning and design problem. The City of Brownsville is located in South Texas, which is on the U. S.-Mexico border. And they had on the table an eight-mile-long, hundred-foot-wide easement that ran through the full extent of the city and even beyond the city limits. And this particular easement was a debunked freight line. And this freight corridor, which stopped operating in the year 2012 had, once it was decommissioned, the city and communities around this corridor saw an opportunity to develop something that was more human-oriented and possibly even thinking about the improvement of their hike and bike infrastructure. The challenge that was on the table is that this easement, although it ran through the city, it was actually owned by the county, which is a different municipality. And so the county saw an opportunity to actually build a toll road.

You can see on the map right here, the yellow line indicates that eight-mile-long corridor. And just north of the yellow line, you’ll see sort of density around another major road. And that particular road is a highway that actually connects straight into Mexico. You can see south of the yellow line is the U. S. -Mexico border, the Rio Grande river, and the yellow line of that hundred-foot easement had the capacity to connect what you see on the left-hand side, which is the western edge of the city. It’s one of the largest flea market in the region. It is one that houses over 1,500 vendors every weekend. They operate Saturdays and Sundays with approximately 50,000 visitors every weekend to this market. It’s a very thriving, robust center of micro economy.

And then to the right-hand side, you see in the downtown, you have access to the community college, the local community college servicing the region, the historic downtown. The City of Brownsville is home to the second largest body of historic structures in the state of Texas. Brownsville, a city of population of close to 200,000 it’s only second to the city of San Antonio, which is quite impressive. More than Austin, more than Houston, more than Dallas. This is a historic downtown that is currently undergoing significant revitalization. And so there’s a lot of energy around that core of the city. And so the community rallied, and over the course of five years, they collected thousands of signatures. And in that timeframe, they were able to convince the city and the county to come to an agreement and to not build the toll road, but they were stuck. And so what they lacked was the ability to consider and vision, provide visions for the future of this corridor. And that’s where we were brought in.

We were brought in as a research team. At the time at the University of Texas at Austin, we were working on this project to think about the opportunities that this corridor would have for the city, not only as a hike and bike infrastructure, but also thinking about the ability of defining infill along that corridor. And so as a community-engaged scholar, this was really a unique opportunity to integrate the work that I do with my pedagogy, what I do with my students. And so connecting those two opportunities to really dive into how do we address the inclusive and equitable city, always going back to those sort of four fundamental principles. And so I undertook this partnership, guiding graduate students and undergraduate students from interdisciplinary backgrounds, working with landscape architecture students, students within the urban design program, planning students, and undergraduates in architecture to really tackle these issues. This course was underwritten by a local grant from the City of Brownsville of $20,000 to fund the travel of the students and that engagement process. This was a really, really critical partnership in introducing what would be an opportunity to move, move the needle forward and have a conversation about what it means to define place in the 21st century that is not autocentric, that is really thinking about community development and what could be equitable opportunities for access, to opportunities beyond just mobility and thinking about housing, community development, et cetera. And so the project really was championed by existing grassroots. As I mentioned before, we built on the work five years of community efforts of collecting signatures to present to our local governments. There was a grassroots group of Friends of the West Rail, that really rallied around building support for this type of thinking.

And so our students came in and we really built on the existing engagement, outreach, and collaboration that that group and a number of other local entities had already began to really build the conversation around the future of this particular site. In addition to that, we also had partnerships at the national level, from the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy, who really saw an opportunity to support a project that was human-oriented in thinking about the design of a region that could introduce the first binational hike and bike system into Brownsville and into the Lower Rio Grande Valley. One of the challenges that we saw in this particular project, we came into the trajectory of the timeline in 2017 and was really sort of the robustness around the federal dialogue and the local dialogue around national security. The border wall, which you see in this picture, is something that began construction back in 2012. So this wasn’t new, but the expansion of that infrastructure really set a tone for what top-down planning strategies could induce on an area that has such a rich cultural and environmental fabric. This particular area, which is on the mouth of the Rio Grande Valley is actually migratory birding rest stop for many birds that are traveling from Canada and North America down to South America. And so bird watching is actually a pretty significant part of the local economy through local ecotourism. And what you have is in addition to that, you have this robust grassroots effort happening on the ground with local nonprofits that are really defining a very different approach to the city. We have, you see on this picture, a series of community gardens. This is one that was actually located just off of where this hike and bike corridor was meant to be introduced in the city.

And in addition to that, I mentioned earlier, the flea market. So the flea market is this robust center of micro economies in the city. And so we really pushed our students to think about how hike and bike infrastructure could make sort of that armature much more meaningful for people who live in the core of the city might not have access to a personal vehicle or own a vehicle, but access to that artery could redefine access to a job at the end of that corridor. And so the course really was a true partnership of various players on the ground. We were coming in as an R1 university, that’s the University of Texas. And we worked directly with the local community college, Texas Southmost College on this project to address the development of a truly economically deprived region. The students that traveled with our group from Austin, from Central Texas worked in partnership, hand in hand with students from the Rio Grande Valley. And in addition to that, some of the students at the community college actually live in Matamoros in Mexico, and they cross that border every day to come and advance their studies. And so this was truly a partnership of trying to connect that local knowledge to the expertise that our students from UT were bringing to their own expertise of lived experience and their practice as they were also, they were in a two-year architecture certificate at the community college. This was truly a bottom-up approach to design intervention, thinking about integrating the concerns of the local stakeholders into the assessment.

And so, as you can see, I’ll walk through some of the examples of the outcomes of this project. So through this project, we were really able to address how the corridor could reinforce those four principles. And we’re thinking about how do we address safety and security? And so that artery, that hundred-foot easement really was an opportunity to conceive of multimodal approach. As I mentioned before, one of the challenges was that there was this whole fight of like no road versus a road. Bringing in a road would mean bringing in traffic, but bringing in a road doesn’t necessarily have to mean that you are not gonna integrate mobility. And thinking about smart mobility, how a bus could really, introducing a bus lane into this artery, could really increase accessibility to some members of the community as they navigate the city through this artery. The same could be said for introducing at a more micro scale, the introduction of, at a finer grain, amenity loops around hike and bike infrastructure along the corridor and into the neighborhoods. And all while considering the safety of cyclists and pedestrians, which was fundamentally what the city wanted, is thinking about introducing this sort of hike and bike pedestrian infrastructure. In addition to that, we also focused on exploring the possibility of addressing affordable housing infill, thinking about parcels that were potentially vacant or areas of growth and opportunity for the city to consider developing or for potential developers to come in and invest in the city, to introduce a variety of household types, always thinking about the opportunity of addressing housing for families, for young families, and even for the elderly. As I mentioned, two of the more marginalized populations in our cities.

In thinking about amenities, this particular armature of the city was able to introduce additional park space. And one of the most beautiful contribution of this was also thinking about that connection back to ecotourism. This is something that the city of Brownsville is incredibly proud of, and how we could invest in what is already a robust economy and introduce that. And thinking about bird watching along the corridor was something that really excited the community members. Again, one of our principles is thinking about the environmental risks, being along the river, thinking about how climate change is really impacting the severity and frequency of climate-induced disasters and challenges, and thinking about the potential flooding of neighborhoods. So our students really addressed how those environmental risks could be addressed at the block level and thinking about developing future housing typologies for the evolution of the downtown core as housing stock begins to reach its lifespan. And so ultimately, what I do in my work is I encourage my students to think holistically about how they approach city design, and thus they are able to conceive environments of choice. That is really the core message here is that students can walk away from this experience by collaborating across disciplines with people that are approaching a challenge from a very different perspective, a very different walk of life, but able to come up with solutions that really address how the community, thinking forward to opportunities for the future, can live a life that has choice. And so in turn, once you’ve addressed access to those choices, then you can begin to see how the social fabric of the city can unfold. And that rich cultural identity, that rich amenity that is the life of the city can actually begin to flourish within the city fabric.

So I’m happy to say that this project, which we presented to the public back in 2017 was received with a lot of excitement. After we presented, the national Rails-to-Trails Conservancy hired a project manager to actually push this project to the next level. It took a little bit of time, but eventually they were able to secure funding. And I’m really happy to say that this past fall, fall of 2021, a few years, I guess that would be four years after we were first connected as partners in crime in this particular venture to think about the visioning of the west rail corridor, the project broke ground, and the groundbreaking took place along the downtown with all the community partners present. And I’ll say, this is a picture of the group, with the shovels demonstrating sort of the groundbreaking, and that really their hard work really paid off. And I’ll point out, at the center of the picture is my mother, who was part of that work, that initial really championship of pushing to secure signatures to really fight that toll road because the community was so invested in a future that was human-oriented and a future that provided their community more opportunities. So I’m excited to see how this project will unfold as construction continues. So I’ll move forward and talk now about a second project. We’ll move from Texas and now into Wisconsin. And this is a project that began in the spring of 2020.

I had an opportunity to partner with the Fondy Farmers Market in the city of Milwaukee’s Department of City Development to study the Fond du Lac and North Planning Area. This is a planning area that for the. . . It will be the first planning area of the city that will receive an update to their comprehensive plan. And I had the opportunity to work with this, a variety of different stakeholders to bring in students from UW-Madison to partner in thinking about the visioning of this district in a way that would help address the update of that particular plan. And one of the great things about this particular project is that I had been at the university for a year, and this really was the first time in the history of a relatively newly merged Department of Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning, two areas of compatible research, compatible connections, but had existed at sort of separate departments. So they were merged. And when I was brought in, I had the opportunity to actually teach a course for the first time where these students had the ability to actually work together on this project. For this particular project, some of the challenges were that at the core of this planning district, this is the planning district, I’ll give an introduction of sort of the social context of the site, but at the core of this district was the farmers market, the Fondy Farmers Market.

And so we really saw the market as an opportunity to help address economic mobility, access to healthy food, increased mobility in the city, and how that node of intervention can have wider implications for the development of the city and the downtown, which is located approximately two miles from the core. In addition to that, one of the things that we did for this project, we began the partnership with the planning department and with our local partner of the Fondy Food Center, who runs and operates the farmers market back in February of 2020. And we all know what occurred and what unfolded that particular year. And many of us did not understand how quickly our lives were going to change and how that, what would be the implications of that in our everyday life. And in addition to that, in how we teach these kinds of very collaborative courses, that are hands-on, applied, and connected directly to the community. And so we were concerned that that might have some challenges. Fortunately, I had attended a seminar produced by Esri, which is a corporation that manages and oversees a geographic information system, which is a software that allows planners to map changes within the city. And they were actually piloting two new software called Urban and Hub. And they are these online platforms for collaboration, and they were seeking courses to test and pilot the software. And I decided that I felt those were appropriate opportunities to address inner collaboration.

And it turned out that applying those in the context of a global pandemic ended up being a very important tool for success, for the work that our students were able to do, much of it remotely. And so the way that we structure our workshops, which some of you might know these courses as studios, as I mentioned before, in other universities are called practicums. But really, the purpose of this type of course is to introduce students to a real-life challenge. You typically are working directly with a community partner, and that community partner has the ability to then tap into the knowledge that students are bringing directly fresh from the academy, and that local partner sometimes don’t, they don’t have the support for an expensive consultant to do the kind of visioning that is necessary for moving a plan forward. And so this was an important partnership for us because we were able to work with a non-profit, but also work directly off of the work that they had already began. So none of these projects began from scratch. What we do is we come in and we build those relationships to move them forward, but we are not coming up with the work. They are the ones that are telling us and guiding the direction of what the community actually needs. And so just to give you a little bit of context of where we were operating. So the Fond du Lac and North Planning Area is located about two miles north of the downtown in the city of Milwaukee.

And this particular area is historically underserved and underrepresented, primarily African-American neighborhood that has faced significant challenges, such as increased vacancy, low socioeconomic status, and the challenges of being located along a pretty highly trafficked road, Fond du Lac Avenue, which at the intersection of Fond du Lac and North Avenue is where we have the Fondy Farmers Market, which is a pretty robust, thriving farmers market that has actually one of the highest access to EBT in the state, and actually has a strong population of Hmong vendors and immigrant vendors. So it’s a pretty good champion of market that is not what most people assume, or the stereotype of a farmers market. It’s actually a market that shows that there is wide and increasing range of diversity within its reach of its community. And so, like I mentioned, we were working directly off of the work that the city had already began. They began their community engagement efforts back in 2018. And so we, fortunately, while the studio and the workshops required that we do engagement directly with the community, because of the pandemic we were not able to do so, but we were able to take that knowledge, their various focus groups and meetings and outreach that began back in 2018, and then build off of work that they continued, and allowing for socially distanced and safe meetings to happen at the market, because it could happen outdoors. It could happen in the summer. And so we came in building off of that work, and we based our propositions based on three fundamental policy recommendations that the community made, and that the city recommended we use as our guiding posts for our work. And so the primary area was thinking about resilience within the neighborhood. Thinking about thriving corridors that focused on a robust, local economy.

So supporting small businesses. And lastly, thinking about how to develop and strengthen the neighborhood. So I mentioned this was an area that suffered from significant vacancy. Being so close to the city center, it was threatened by potential redevelopment strategies that would exclude certain population groups from access to that housing. So the current framework produced by the city had identified that particular nexus of Fond du Lac Avenue and North Avenue as an important anchor for us to concentrate the development strategy. And you can see here on this aerial, it’s a bird’s-eye view of the region. What you see is that direct connection into the downtown. That’s Fond du Lac Avenue on the left-hand side. You see the market itself, and running perpendicular to that is North Avenue, and all that beautiful green space that you see is actually scar tissue or remnants of the Urban Renewal Era of the 1960s. At that time, they came through, the federal government came through and actually plowed through a lot of this land because there was supposed to be a highway that was gonna be built in this area, but the neighborhood had fought back, many communities actually to the west of this area fought back, they didn’t want the highway.

And what happened is that you have all this now publicly owned land that sits vacant, appears to be beautiful parks but, and really is areas that have an opportunity for growth and have sat empty for many years. Over the course of 15 weeks, we worked in interdisciplinary teams amongst our students of planners and landscape architects to think about social and economic change within the district, thinking about the role of place making, the significant role that healthy food has in changing the dynamics of the neighborhood and what community assets we could really reemphasize as we developed our strategies for the future. Some of the challenges that we saw in that particular timeframe of doing this kind of community-engaged work is that we really had to adapt how we gather data. We did visit Milwaukee. I’ll talk about that in a second, but how we were able to collaborate over the course of 15 weeks, we met three or four times in person. A lot of this was happening virtually, but really building off of the tools. For example, as I mentioned earlier, that partnership with Esri, using Urban and Hub as tools that could allow us to generate ideas quickly, collaboratively, and all at the same time, all online, and then how we could then bring those ideas back to our community partners through virtual engagement using Hub and as we all know, using Zoom for those platforms of communication. We were able to visit Milwaukee, as you see here, and connect directly with our farmers market manager, with our partner. You see her at the center of the picture here, telling our students a little bit about how the market operates. We were able to conduct windshield surveys, walk around the neighborhood, see the kinds of events and activities that are happening, and think about opportunities for intervention.

And protecting the local character of that region. Here is just a few more pictures of us. In addition to being able to survey the site, it was important for us to be able to understand what is the identity of the city, of this sort of Rust Belt Midwestern city, and how that has implications at the local level in a community development project. And having access to external partnerships in addition to the partnerships on the ground is always helpful. In this particular instance, working with Esri, having them come in and facilitate some of the collaboration among our students. They provided learning modules and a classroom experience for them to actually be able to adapt what they have already experienced in other courses, understanding how to map a place, but then integrating that into a very different, but advanced setting that is the online platform of Urban. This was something that we took away as an opportunity to introduce in future projects. And at the end, it helped facilitate that sort of real live interaction between our students from very different backgrounds in planning and in landscape architecture. And I’ll just walk you quickly through some of the examples of the work that our students did. What you’re seeing here is actually what the Esri interface looks like.

This is one of the five proposals. The students generally were focused on thinking about housing infill opportunities. In addition to that, I’ll point out that this group was really interested in connecting industry back and thinking about clean and modern industry. The big purple block that you see is a new industry hub that is flanked by local retail along North Avenue, and then has a connection into the market. This other group that you see on this slide was really interested in developing a new eco, off-the-grid neighborhood that densified and tried to address the increased vacancies that we had seen and the neighborhood experienced over time. And lastly, this project, what they were really interested in is introducing a mixed-used approach. The big pink/purple block at the edge of the market is actually a hotel that the city already has in the pipeline that is gonna be introduced. So what you don’t see here is sort of that robust eco intervention, the landscape proposal that connected between their housing through the hotel and over into the market. So our proposals really centered around equity in the city and developing planning strategies that offer those local residents choice. So we thought about affordable housing options, thinking about amenities for social interaction, proximity to local shops.

And then thinking about developing smart infrastructures. So here on this slide, you see a proposition of a very complex and unique bike hub and bike station, where this had connections to local partnerships that are community-run nonprofits for the biking community, thinking about how this particular bike hub might be accessible using your same bus card that you use for the City of Milwaukee. And thinking about how we make these connections more accessible to make these choices, opportunities that can be accessible to everyone within the community. And one of the things that was really important, I think moving forward in our classes, what we see is that we have to be thinking about how a pandemic, another pandemic might be right around the corner. And so what lessons we can take from the lived experience of COVID-19, the need to really address how access to public space is important to our health, to our mental health, and for addressing sort of public health crisis. And so how we could adapt our planning codes, our zoning and building ordinances to allow neighborhoods to adapt over time. And so the work of the workshop ultimately pushed students to question how we could redefine infrastructure, such as this particular state highway, to really increase porosity and increase access to the market for the growth of this particular neighborhood. So I joined the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the fall of 2019. And one of the reasons why I decided to come here, because I would have the opportunity to work directly with Dr. Alfonso Morales, who is the founder of the Kaufman Lab and is really a champion in the field of planning, in the research of marketplaces.

Being able to come here, work with him, and be able to become the director of the Kaufman Lab and push this research forward was something that I couldn’t resist. This lab was founded in honor of Professor Emeritus Jerry Kaufman, who was really a champion in food system research in our field of urban planning. We work with students from across the university and focus on how do we make sure that the role of marketplaces is being supported by local, state, and federal policies. And we do this primarily through one of our key components, which is Farm 2 Facts. And so I like to describe Farm 2 Facts as a market census. Farm 2 Facts, really its primary mission is to lend a voice to farmers markets across– We work in the U. S. and in Canada, by working with markets to provide a data collection toolkit that allows them to analyze and visualize their impact. So one of the challenges that we see with farmers markets is that markets are generally operated in the non-profit world. They’re incredibly undersourced, understaffed, but they provide such an important asset to our community.

Not only as centers of microeconomic opportunity for starting a new business, also they’re incredible support systems for social infrastructure. Everybody can think of a story of going to a market and experience they had, and it comes back to why that made them feel really good. They were able to connect with someone from the community. You make relationships, you make connections. That’s what the heart of a market is. But sometimes, the impact that markets have is really hard to quantify. And so our mission within the Kaufman Lab and with Farm 2 Facts is to be able to empower market managers to be able to make decisions off of numbers that demonstrate that they are truly impactful, that they play a significant role as a small entity, many times, but a significant impact back to the local economy and back to the role of the city. And I won’t get into the history, but the program itself really is a product of a USDA grant. It’s a research grant that came out of a collaboration with the Farmers Market Coalition, which is a national nonprofit that manages and oversees the support of markets across the U. S.

And this was a partnership between the Kaufman Lab, with Dr. Morales and at the time the director of the Farmers Market Coalition. What they saw in collaborating directly with market managers is that there was a need to find a way to assess how markets are operating. And how could we do that in a way that was not overbearing to market managers that have already a lot on their plate. And so we used, the program itself uses a citizen scientist approach, which means that the research is being led by the community on the ground. What we provide is the tools, we provide the interface, the platform for entering, analyzing, and evaluating that data. And so what managers are then able to do by collecting strategically at key points throughout their season, their market season, they’re able to demonstrate back to whatever their local accountability or form of accountability might be. For some, many markets might have a local board, or they have to report back to the local municipality because they operate on public land in a public parking lot, and demonstrate that say, over the last year, this is what we were able to achieve. And so we work with over 50 farmers market across the U. S.

We work in two different ways. We are contracted under various USDA grants. So for example, we recently contracted with the State of Wisconsin Farmers Market Association to work with 35 markets in the state to collect data over the next three years to measure their performance. We also work directly one-on-one with markets on an individual contract basis. And so, doesn’t matter the skill of the contract. We provide the same service and we make sure that our markets are able to demonstrate that their capacity and their ability to continue to thrive. And why does this matter? This matters because in the end, by shopping at your local farmers market, what you are doing is actually making sure that the dollars that you bring to your community stay local. You’re able to make sure that you have an impact on how the money continues to be distributed. And that is local economic development. If you take your dollar to go buy your organic lettuce at the big box store, it’s great because you’re accessing organic food.

But at the end of the day, that organic farmer may not be in our backyard. They may not be from the state of Wisconsin. And so we care to support farmers markets because we ensure that that money stays in our community. And so I’ll talk a little bit about the kind of metrics that we collect within our platform. We collect, we develop profiles for each of the markets. So the market manager is able to assess the number of vendors, how far a vendor is traveling. Particularly, we’re interested in the farmers, how far the produce travels from the farm to the market. We’re thinking about the economic impact by vendors reporting their sales, their annual sales. And we think about where, what is sort of that social connection back to the market? So we collect data for customers to try to assess where they’re coming from, how long they’ve been coming, what capacity they bring to the market in terms of spending power. And they’re actually shopping at surrounding businesses as well.

And that has implications because then markets are able to report back to their municipality to say, “Hey, you know, we know that,” for example, and this is the case of the Brownsville farmers market, “Approximately 10% of our customers are actually visiting the market for the first time. So what we see is the majority of our customers are actually returning over time.” This is also important in thinking about equity and access to food. Many markets that have EBT programs on the ground will need to be able to demonstrate their impact. And one of the ways that that matters is that markets sometimes partner with local municipal nonprofits or the local government to fund what are called Double Dollar programs. And so if they’re able to demonstrate, “Look, we have X number of return customers that are using EBT,” or we were able to double from, in this case, over $11,000 in one market season that was doubled thanks to the market Double Dollars program. And so that has direct implications on the sustainability of the market over time. We saw this example also with a partnership with the Brown Deer Market here in Wisconsin. In the year 2018, we partnered with them to measure that same type of information around access to EBT and increasing access to food, to marginalized populations, and by introducing a community access coordinator and a marketing strategy that influenced that growth of access to EBT at the market. So year one, there were approximately $500 spent in EBT.

By the second year, that number had grown by over 750% to over $4,300 of EBT all within one year, all because of the introduction of that marketing strategy approach. And we were able to quantify that. And so lastly, I wanna talk about one of the new, up-and-coming programs that we’re able to offer within Farm 2 Facts. We’re really excited about the ecosystem services metric. And this is an important component because what we see in many of our partnerships with farmers markets is that the farmers that are coming to our markets are not the big mega farmers. They are the farmers that are running and operating diverse, unique, and many times small-scale operations. And so beyond just having a market operation or a farm operation that says, “Hey, I sell organically certified products.” We also want them to be able to say, “We’re doing this, plus we’re doing all these other wonderful things that are important to the environment.” And so working directly with farmers, with farmers across the U. S., we have released this tool, which is a set of tools within Farm 2 Facts that begins to understand the diversity of how we grow our products at our local farmers markets. That if you look at the slide, what we’re used to seeing in the sort of mega farms is the image in the center. One crop over a pretty large area of a farming operation versus what you see on the left and on the right are more diverse operations that are looking at a variety of products and a variety of farming practices. With the ecosystem services tool, what we’re able to do is measure and rate the operation of a farmer, providing opportunities for growth and improvement. By documenting, their practices could be modified over time. And so we look at the soil health, the type of livestock, how products travel to the market. If you’re using alternative energy sources, how all of the combination of these six different variables have implications on your impact on the environment. And being able to quantify that impact can then be brought back to the market. So here in this slide, we’re just seeing an example of what the toolkit looks like. So we ask a little bit about your soil health practices, what percentage of a particular operation you might do, and our algorithm then outputs metrics that say, “Hey, you’re doing great in this particular region.” Or “You could improve over time by doing this.”

And why this matters going back to the farmers market is that a farmer can then link their data back to the market. And the market manager can then aggregate that data and say, “Look at how robust my farmers, the work of my farmers is actually having this particular impact on the environment.” This is important because like I said, the role of the farmers market manager is really to think about the sustainability of a practice that is very challenging for communities, because it takes a lot of heart, it takes a lot of energy to do that. Farmers markets generally operate on the weekend and they really are the heart of the community. And what we have seen over the last couple of years throughout the COVID-19 pandemic is that markets play a significant role as social anchors for our community. And we wanna demonstrate that not only are they providing that kind of opportunity and catalyst for community and placemaking, but they also have a direct impact on our environment, and they have a direct impact on our economy. And I wanna wrap up by mentioning that none of these projects that I’ve mentioned would be off the ground, had it not been for the significant partnerships that people have offered and trusted in our work at the university. And we do this because we cannot do anything on our own. Partnerships are critical and they are at the core of what we do within planning practice.

I’m really grateful that at the university, I’ve had the opportunity to collaborate with nonprofits, with municipalities, with other institutions that are working collaborative to bring these kinds of opportunities forwards for our communities. These visioning strategies that planning is really at the core of that allow for us to think about how to expand choice for our community members. And so I hope that you’re able to stay in touch. You can see on this slide, I’ve got my email address, my Twitter address, our website for Farm 2 Facts. I’d love to hear from you. And as you move forward and reflect on what you learned today, I hope that you’re able to think of how planning really impacts our everyday life. That you live in a town or you live in a major metropolitan area, planning plays a significant role in thinking about the future of our cities, the challenges that are environmental problems, environmental challenges are inducing in our communities, and how every day we have the opportunity to conceive of environments of choice that allow us to envision a better future for all of us. So thank you for tuning in and take care.