#BUandBoston: Planning Healthy Cities

This post is part of our #BUandBoston series, highlighting the work and research of BU students, faculty, and staff throughout the City of Boston and the Greater Boston region. Interested in having your Boston-related work featured? Tag us on Instagram or Twitter (@BUonCities) using the #BUandBoston or send us an email at ioc@bu.edu.

By: Sean Waddington

March 10, 2025 – The article has been corrected to include B-Cool project, led by Patricia Fabian, and its partners and funder, that Jonathan Lee is a part of.

Reshaping municipal bureaucracies is not always top of mind for researchers and practitioners at the School of Public Health, but Jonathan Lee feels it should be. Just last year, Mayor Michelle Wu – with the help of former IOC Co-Director Katharine Lusk – launched the City of Boston’s new Planning Department. Created to foster more comprehensive community planning within City Hall, the department’s creation is a first step in rethinking how Boston gets built.

A second-year PhD student in Environmental Health and an URBAN trainee, Jonathan’s primary interest lies in the ways urban planning and design impact health. He has most recently been helping with an ongoing pilot project called B-COOL, led by Patricia Fabian in partnership with A Better City, the City of Boston’s Office of Climate Resilience, and funded by The Boston Foundation, focused on the potentially disparate ways Boston’s neighborhoods experience heat. The research team has collaborated with various community partners to install neighborhood sensors to measure air temperature. Jonathan explained that while surface temperature (measured from satellites) is often used in research, air temperature is more relevant to human health. This pilot project has placed two sensors in five of Boston’s neighborhoods most vulnerable to extreme heat, as outlined by Boston’s Heat Plan.

Working with the City of Boston has been particularly important for this project as city and public health officials’ work can improve dramatically with the sensors’ data. Boston is currently the only municipality in Massachusetts to issue heat emergencies, with other cities, like Chelsea, following suit. Boston’s current guidance method uses data from the National Weather Service’s temperature monitor stationed at Logan Airport. However, this single measurement is a flawed predictor of heat across the city. The airport’s open location in the water is likely to read cooler than denser inland neighborhoods. By the time an emergency is officially declared based on this data, neighborhoods like Roxbury may be well into a more extreme situation. This is particularly poignant when considering the resources a heat emergency declaration provides through free and open spaces to shelter from libraries, community centers, and cooling centers.

Jonathan’s interest in urban planning processes partly stems from this increased threat of extreme heat. While he and his peer researchers work to mitigate and adapt to urban heat, they are also looking to build cooler neighborhoods. This is why the new Planning Department has attracted the interest of public health scholars like Jonathan. He is currently a Coalition Partner on the planning initiative for Beacon Park Yard, the new neighborhood planned at the Allston Interchange. With his background in urban heat, Jonathan is bringing a new perspective to this project that is often not considered. While consultants on new projects will examine wind and solar projections to understand the impact of wind and shade, heat is an overlooked factor. Building up new areas will increase heat impacts, but the heights of buildings and widths of streets can alter how people experience temperature. Jonathan hopes he can work with planners to integrate heat mitigation strategies into the original neighborhood design, planning ahead for extreme weather events and a changing climate.

When discussing the new Planning Department, Jonathan expressed optimism. He feels the restructuring of planning from a piecemeal approach to one more comprehensive shows promise, as does the inclusion and integration of city partners like public works, climate, and urban forestry in the planning process. However, Jonathan still has ideas for city officials. Boston’s Public Health Commission (BPHC) is still rather siloed from these and other functions of city government. They aren’t housed at City Hall with other departments and aren’t as folded into planning processes. He views their work as complementary, citing the Commission’s work on chronic disease as an example. BPHC is discussing ways to motivate walking or biking as preventative healthcare, but these activities are mediated by infrastructure and the built environment. For Jonathan, bridging these gaps is key to building smart, healthy cities.

Disconnects exist between planners and health officials as work becomes increasingly virtual. Jonathan lamented that “breaking out of silos isn’t compensated.” The time required to make and maintain multiregional, interdisciplinary coalitions is often not on the clock and comes at the expense of day-to-day responsibilities. Jonathan says it’s our civic duty to speak against harmful projects and uplift the ones that will improve our neighborhoods.  He’s hopeful that renewed commitments to crossing departmental boundaries will encourage creative ways for experts of all fields to contribute to better urban planning.

Further Reading