Cities are crucial settings for emissions reduction, climate adaptation, and water resource management. Yet successful implementation of urban solutions hinges on local will to engage the civic processes by which systems are created and maintained.
Local solutions also depend on understanding the urban environmental system and the forces that shape it. Through interdisciplinary research and partnerships with classroom teachers and community organizations, the New Haven Environmental History Project turns the history of the local built and natural environment into usable curricular materials.
The project invites students and the general public to consider why Greater New Haven has developed as it has and how they can steer its future. If successful, the project will integrate place-specific environmental literacy into the K-12 and post-secondary curriculum and mobilize students as public citizens, imagining and shaping the future of New Haven. The project will seek to replicate the model in other cities.
