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May 15, 2017

Town and Gown


Town+Gown is a systemic action research program that aims at increasing evidence based analysis, information transfer, and understanding of the City's built environment. The City's built environment serves as an ideal laboratory for those working in the City's physical spaces and in the built environment disciplines. Town+Gown provides a link where practitioners work on projects as equal partners with academic partners.

Over the years, calls have been made to increase research activities in the built environment. Town+Gown's response to these calls scales long-standing structural hurdles that have made increasing built environment research difficult. Town+Gown facilitates partnerships between academics and practitioners on built environment research projects, generating discussion and follow-up research aimed at making changes in practices and policies.

“DDC’s ‘Town+Gown’ participation is a symbiotic relationship, with the students learning to apply their studies to real-world situations and data sets, and the students in turn providing DDC with insights it might not have reached on its own,” said DDC Commissioner Feniosky Peña-Mora. “Those analyses can then be translated into construction management best practices that improve the City public projects and make the project delivery system more efficient. We value our relationships with all our educational partners, and seek to expand on them for the benefit of the entire City.”


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