June 21, 2024
APDesign faculty members receive Brownfield Fellowship
Three professors in the College of Architecture, Planning & Design's landscape architecture and regional & community planning, or LARCP, department have been awarded a K-State Technical Assistance to Brownfields, or TAB, Fellowship with funding from the Environmental Protection Agency. Associate Professors Blake Belanger and Susmita Rishi and Assistant Professor Shakil Kashem are the recipients of the first TAB Fellowship starting in academic year 2024-25.
The fellowship will allow the faculty to provide technical assistance to communities and support graduate student studies focused on the intersection of brownfields and community engagement. The EPA defines brownfields as any property or area where redevelopment or reuse is complicated by the presence or potential presence of a hazardous substance, pollutant or contaminant. Projects through this fellowship will involve working with brownfield communities to identify best practices, brownfield redevelopment visioning, brownfield assessment and feasibility, policy and planning recommendations, and resilience planning. The fellows will receive up to $50,000 per year for their teaching and outreach activities in the brownfield communities for up to four years.
Belanger's fellowship, titled "Imagining Together," focuses on innovative methods of community engagement and best practices of conceptual visioning for brownfield redevelopment.
"Most communities we work with need specialists who understand the challenges and redevelopment potential associated with brownfields," said Belanger. "The fellowship provides much-needed funding to help communities improve ecological, social and economic conditions that have been stalled by the presence of one or more brownfields."
Along with experts from K-State Technical Assistance to Brownfields and their professional partners, LARCP Faculty Fellows and Graduate Student Fellows bridge the knowledge and talent gap.
"My team will be directly engaging with residents, stakeholders and leaders to help them visualize the future of their communities," said Belanger. "In addition, the fellowship will yield transferable tools and methods that other communities can use."
As part of the fellowship, Rishi will focus on the intersection of brownfield redevelopment and affordable housing production.
"We are in a housing crisis, where there is a dearth of affordable and suitable housing throughout the nation and housing research tends to focus on larger metropolitan areas," said Rishi. "Through this fellowship, I will focus on understanding how communities, particularly in micropolitan and rural areas, have redeveloped brownfields into housing. My work will focus on the role that community engagement played in making these projects successful as well as what federal and state support was leveraged through the process."
Amongst other things, Rishi's work aims to then create a toolkit that other communities may use to successfully redevelop brownfield sites into housing to help fill the affordable and suitable housing gap.
"This fellowship provides a unique opportunity for not just academics but future planning practitioners — as my project will support two incoming Master of Regional and Community Planning students — to learn from communities that have existing and long-term relationships with K-State TAB, and then create proposals for how other communities may implement these as well as how policy may be used to further support such efforts," said Rishi.
Kashem's fellowship will explore the potential of brownfield redevelopment for strengthening community resilience and hazard mitigation initiatives.
"Brownfields are important assets for our communities that can be utilized to change the course of economic development and thereby contribute to strengthening community resilience," said Kashem. "However, brownfield sites located in natural hazard areas — e.g., sites located in flood plains — can be more challenging to redevelop."
Through this fellowship, he will work on developing a broad typology of hazard mitigation solutions adopted by different brownfield communities and explore their planning process and outcomes. He will focus on identifying the best practices of these solutions that can help guide brownfield redevelopment and planning initiatives in other communities.
"I am thankful to TAB for this fellowship that will allow expanding my current scholarship on community resilience while working with different brownfield communities," said Kashem.
"This work will allow our program to put greater focus on some of the most important topics we assist communities with," said Wendy Griswold, who directs the K-State TAB Fellowships program. "It's immensely gratifying to initiate our new fellowship program through collaboration with our long-term partnership with LARCP faculty. We're looking forward to developing additional fellowship opportunities that will allow a wider range of fields to gain experience in and contribute to the practice of community engagement in brownfields redevelopment."