The Urban District Initiatives team, led by Marika Reuling, is primarily focused on longer-term, transformative-scale, mixed-use urban districts that are non-institutional in nature; major, performative infrastructure, and significant new public realm projects. The team ideates, experiments, evaluates, recommends, and implements new approaches to city-building. The Urban District Initiatives team works to strengthen the connections between places, experiences, and people, and to bring innovative change to the urban areas that are the setting for the University.
The work is intentionally experimental, consultative, and participatory. This ensures that these new urban districts align with university and community goals for diversity, equity and inclusion, economic development, resiliency, and sustainability, and design excellence. The Urban District Initiatives team strives to establish land uses in Allston that activate and animate the streetscape and the neighborhood. The Zone 3 program is a focus of these efforts.