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Climate change impacts are not evenly distributed across the globe. Inequities also emerge at a local scale where buildings have the most perceivable impact, affecting anything from access and continuity of the public realm to microclimates.Design decisions can exacerbate or mitigate microspatial inequities—i.e. significant local variation in environmentalhazard exposures, like heat, air pollution, and flooding. Green Infrastructure (GI) is a range of nature-based solutionswith the potential to mitigate environmental hazards. Decentralizing GI is critical to health and resilience, buildingredundancy and capacity through a distributed network of smaller system nodes that are less prone to cascading failures.Architecture projects can support decentralization, targeted mitigation, and incremental implementation; however theircontribution to urban resilience, health, and environmental justice needs to be better characterized to support rationalizedexpansion of such approaches. This requires ways to explore complex and dynamic interactions of buildings within and beyond site boundaries, including: (1) methods for measuring local variation in hazards at relevant spatial scales and (2) tools for modeling the impacts of interventions in inclusive conversations with local stakeholders. This research examines an equity-focused approach to co-designing GI in architecture projects, using data and tools to inform and measure the impact of individual building projects and, eventually, networks of projects. In collaboration with the city of Chelsea, MA, our transdisciplinary team is studying sensor networks and a participatory modeling process to demonstrate how architecture projects can generate and leverage local knowledge about microspatial inequities and mitigation by GI to advance broader community health goals. Co-design activities around one pilot site reveal how decentralization becomes a significant paradigm shift—even among practitioners—eliciting ideas about maximizing capacity, connectivity, co-benefits, and shared responsibility. This paper examines the term decentralization in a multidisciplinary discourse, shares lessons from a specific context, and discusses implications to architectural practice. 

Core Ideas Manual pollinations in breeding and genetics research requires pollen available when recipient silks are viable. The method collects and stores maize pollen for at least 5 days and facilitates efficient pollination. Pollen is mixed with polyetheretherketone and uses field‐collected pollen and simple storage conditions. The method can increase the number of pollinations per tassel and generates a reasonable number of viable seeds. 

Objectives Researchers have long studied the persistence of violence and aggravation from disorder to violence in communities. Recently this work has begun to consider how these phenomena might operate simultaneously at multiple geographic scales. We examine the role of neighborhoods, streets, and addresses in these phenomena, presenting and assessing a five-part typology for cross-scale interactions. Methods We calculated six measures of physical disorder, social disorder, and violent crime from administrative records for all parcels (i.e., addresses) in Boston, MA, for 2011–2016. Multilevel models used these measures to predict public violence and gun-related events in the following year at all three geographical scales and with cross-scale interactions. Results Persistence was common at all scales. Aggravation from disorder to crime was greatest for addresses. Nearly all significant cross-level interactions involved addresses. The most common interactions were reinforced persistence, when persistence of violence at an address was reinforced by violence in the street or neighborhood; and mediated persistence, when persistence at a higher geographic scale operated through addresses with disorder. Conclusions The study suggests that action is greatest at addresses, but streets and neighborhoods offer critical context. It also provides a framework for future work assessing the complementarity of communities and places. 

A method for estimating the socioeconomic impact of Earth observations is proposed and deployed. The core of the method is the analysis of outcomes of hypothetical fire suppression scenarios generated using a coupled atmosphere–fire behaviour model, based on decisions made by an experienced wildfire incident management team with and without the benefits of MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) satellite observations and the WRF-SFIRE wildfire behaviour simulation system. The scenarios were based on New Mexico’s 2011 Las Conchas fire. For each scenario, fire break line location decisions served as inputs to the model, generating fire progression outcomes. Fire model output was integrated with a property database containing thousands of coordinates and property values and other asset values to estimate the total losses associated with each scenario. An attempt to estimate the socioeconomic impact of satellite and modelling data used during the decision-making process was made. We analysed the impact of Earth observations and include considerations for estimating other socioeconomic impacts.