Ming Xu and Josh Newell was awarded a grant of $319,000 to develop an integrated tool to evaluate water scarcity risks for industries with global supply chains.
Category Archives: News
Wolch, Byrne, and Newell Featured on Next City
The article “Urban green space, public health and environmental justice: The challenge of making cities ‘just green enough’” by Jennifer Wolch, Jason Byrne, and Joshua Newell was highlighted inn Next City’s Science of Cities column. Click here to read the column.
From green roofs in Chicago to the High Line in Manhattan, U.S. cities have been making high-profile investments in green space — to widespread celebration. But could there be a downside to urban greening? A growing body of academic literature examines a paradox: Low-income communities tend to suffer from various kinds of environmental injustice, including shortage of green space. But when these concerns are addressed — the power plant closes, a park opens — the neighborhood becomes more desirable, often kickstarting a process of so-called “environmental gentrification.”View More
Newell Featured in The University Record
The University Record ran a weeklong “Victors for Michigan” feature highlighting Joshua Newell’s work on underutilized urban spaces in a week long “Victors for Michigan.”
Back alleys, vacant lots and underutilized urban spaces hold great potential for fostering more sustainable cities, if they can be reimagined and transformed into multidimensional green infrastructure that simultaneously delivers environmental, social and economic benefits, says Joshua Newell, assistant professor at the School of Natural Resources and Environment.
“Traditionally, city planning around green urban redevelopment has been driven by one agency with a single agenda, so there’s been little focus on trying to achieve multiple objectives,” he says. “We can be more strategic in these redevelopment efforts. There’s much greater potential to achieve simultaneous benefits by repurposing neglected urban spaces with more than just one pillar of sustainability in mind.”
Much of Newell’s urban sustainability research focuses on developing new models for what he describes as coupling multiple ecosystem services within a single redeveloped urban space. For example, an empty lot in a park-poor neighborhood can be repurposed as green parkland that serves as open space for residents, a playground for children and a means for abating stormwater runoff.View More
Newell, Love, and Norton Receive MCubed Award
Joshua Newell, Nancy Love, and Richard Norton were granted an MCubed award for their proposal Innovatively Planning for Technological Innovation: Water, Infrastructure, and Sustainability.MCubed is a two-year seed-funding program that provides startup funds for groundbreaking, high-risk research projects. The awards are intended to empower interdisciplinary U of M faculty teams to take on innovative work that will have a major impact on society. The funds are intended to generate data for high-impact publications, or to achieve preliminary results for novel research proposals. Click here to read a summary of the successful MCubed proposal
Newell and Vos Featured in USC News
Joshua Newell and Robert Vos’ (USC) research on the carbon footprint of paper in U.S. and Chinese supply chains is featured on the USC News website. Two studies by Newell and Vos demonstrate how current methods of measuring the carbon footprint of consumer products are insufficient in measuring the products’ true impacts, particularly as they pertain to the location of production and the impacts on surrounding land use.