The Urban Innovation Fellowship

NYCHA houses over 500,000 residents across 335 developments, but decades of federal disinvestment have left it with a $78 billion capital need and aging infrastructure that generates significant greenhouse gas emissions. Local Law 97 requires large New York City buildings to cut emissions 80% by 2050, making decarbonization an urgent priority for the Authority.

To address this, NYCHA Fellow Noelle Francois is spearheading two high-impact initiatives. The first is a wastewater heat recovery demonstration project at a 70-unit Manhattan building, which will capture thermal energy from wastewater and repurpose it to generate domestic hot water for the building. Funded by a $1.9M NYSERDA grant she helped secure, the project is designed as a scalable proof of concept for buildings undergoing electrification across NYCHA’s portfolio. The second initiative aims to activate NYCHA’s underutilized parking facilities for public electric vehicle charging, targeting NYCHA residents and for-hire vehicle drivers in boroughs currently underserved by charging infrastructure.

These projects demonstrate how a large public housing authority can strategically pursue climate innovation by pairing electrification, external funding, and private-sector engagement to modernize infrastructure, reduce emissions, and preserve deeply affordable housing.

DCAS Fellow Tom Conboy is working on accelerating two key municipal decarbonization initiatives: solar canopy EV charging infrastructure and renewable diesel building heat.

To support DCAS’ solar charging efforts, Tom manages implementation of Local Law 63, which mandates at least five solar canopy installations across the five boroughs by the end of 2026. Working with vendor INF Associates and partner agencies including Parks, DOE, DOT, and NYPD, Tom coordinates site selection across agency properties — balancing energy capacity, parking availability, and capital improvement schedules to deploy at least 25 new Level 2 chargers supporting NYC’s EV fleet.

On renewable diesel, Tom is translating DCAS’s proven vehicle and vessel decarbonization success into building heating applications. DCAS is piloting renewable diesel at a Bronx public school, with plans to expand to additional schools and city-owned buildings. The fuel reduces lifecycle emissions by 60% and drops into existing fuel oil systems without equipment modification. Tom is building a broad stakeholder network — spanning regulatory bodies (DOB, FDNY), industry partners, and research institutions including the California Air Resources Board — to validate performance and scale the pilot across City-owned buildings.

Both initiatives are designed to be replicable beyond New York City, establishing frameworks that other municipalities can adopt. Tom’s Fellowship concludes in November 2026, with all five canopies targeted to be online by Fall 2026 and renewable diesel validation advancing through the current Winter heating season.

DOT faces mounting pressure to inspect and maintain aging infrastructure as climate change accelerates deterioration across the City’s vast network of streets, bridges, and transportation assets. Traditional inspection methods rely heavily on manual processes, subjective assessments, and fragmented data systems that limit the agency’s capacity to respond proactively.

DOT Fellow Catrina Cuadra leads the development of “AI for City Streets,” DOT’s flagship AI initiative designed to integrate computer vision technology into infrastructure management. The program’s first phase focuses on automating pavement and roadway marking assessments, applying machine learning to evaluate street and bike lane conditions with greater frequency and consistency than human inspectors alone can achieve.

Future phases will expand to automated asset detection and inventory, using computer vision to identify and catalog physical infrastructure including street lights, traffic signs, and bike racks. The initiative aims to enable proactive maintenance scheduling while freeing human inspectors to focus on complex assessments that require specialized expertise.

The program represents DOT’s broader strategy to establish more predictive data-driven decision-making processes across the City’s transportation network, with potential implications for infrastructure management in other major urban centers.

Through AI pilots, human-centered design, and cross-sector collaboration, DEP is modernizing how it manages water infrastructure and enforces air quality policy. Serving millions of City residents with 1.1 billion gallons of drinking water daily and treating 1.3 billion gallons of wastewater, DEP has to do this in the face of aging assets, climate change, and persistent air pollution.

DEP Fellow Anh Nguyen focuses on three priorities. First, accelerating GIS digitization of water and sewer assets by applying computer vision to interpret complex engineering drawings, reducing maintenance backlogs while preserving manual oversight. Second, modernizing field inspections using LiDAR, 360° imagery, and AI to detect defects, map above-ground assets, and improve stormwater management. Third, designing an in-house digital compliance platform for a proposed Warehouse Indirect Source Rule, translating complex policy into an intuitive reporting, enforcement, and public transparency system.

Together, these efforts strengthen operational efficiency, regulatory accountability, and climate resilience. By pairing responsible AI with frontline expertise, DEP is building not only smarter infrastructure systems, but also its first AI toolkit — creating reusable frameworks for procurement, governance, and ethical deployment that position the agency for long-term innovation.

In June 2025, DSNY launched a stationary on-street waste containerization pilot in Manhattan Community District 9 (M9). Schools and large residential buildings across the district use “Empire Bins” — 800-gallon on-street waste containers serviced by custom-built automated side loader trucks. M9 represents the first fully containerized community district in New York City and serves as a critical testing ground for modernizing residential and school waste collection.

As New York City evaluates how to expand the program beyond a single district, DSNY Fellow Stephen Albonesi is conducting a comprehensive analysis of the M9 Pilot to identify opportunities to reduce labor-intensive fieldwork and scale planning processes for future implementation. His project focuses on transforming a complex, manual siting and coordination process into a more efficient, data-driven system.

Stephen’s objectives include documenting and evaluating existing pilot workflows; identifying new data sources and analytical methodologies to strengthen citywide property and streetscape analysis; and developing a more automated, predictive model for siting Empire Bins using GIS, computer vision, and other technologies. His work also explores alternative data sources and verification methods so that property contact information can be automatically populated, validated, and maintained.

By improving planning efficiency and data accuracy, the Fellowship aims to help streamline a program capable of enhancing the storage and collection of up to 14 million pounds of daily residential waste — potentially impacting more than 1.8 million households (59% of housing units) and over 1,200 schools citywide.

New York City’s $42 billion procurement system shapes nearly every aspect of City life. MOCS Fellow Calgary Haines-Trautman leads procurement reform projects that support innovation, equipping agencies to pursue innovative solutions to urban challenges.

At the center of this work is Challenge-Based Procurement, a new purchasing approach that allows agencies to define a problem, rather than prescriptive requirements, test multiple solutions, and scale successful pilots. Through partnerships with early-adopter agencies, Calgary is producing tools and training to help agencies independently launch their own challenges.

Calgary also supports reforms that streamline City procurement. Calgary led Public Hearing Reform implementation, which replaced cumbersome live hearing requirements with online public notice and comment, reducing procurement timelines by 20 days on average while maintaining transparency. In the Discretionary Grant Pilot, an initiative to help nonprofits receive payments faster, Calgary supported implementation, helping nonprofits receive payments four to ten times faster than in the traditional model.

Across these projects, Calgary applies human-centered design to ensure reforms work for the agency staff, vendors, and public who use them. By emphasizing user research, co-creation, and prototyping, Calgary helps embed a culture of user-centered reform across MOCS.

Together, these initiatives position City procurement as a driver of innovation that delivers better and more efficient services for New Yorkers.

NYCEDC is leveraging Challenge-Based Procurement to streamline the pathway from successful pilot programs to scaled procurement opportunities. NYCEDC Fellow Meera Kumar identified waterfront inspection and mapping as the inaugural challenge, asking: “What is the most efficient and effective way to capture, process, and prioritize waterfront imagery to enable streamlined inspections?”

NYCEDC manages all waterfront inspections for more than 350 miles of City-owned waterfront property, representing two-thirds of New York City’s total waterfront. Current inspection methodologies, largely unchanged over decades, rely on consulting firms and lack a visual baseline for tracking change over time. While panoramic imagery was captured in 2014, it has never been updated, making it impossible to meaningfully compare conditions asset-by-asset.

The challenge seeks solutions that provide high-definition panoramic imagery of above-water waterfront, underwater shoreline imagery for condition assessment, and predictive analysis to enable preventative maintenance. Winning solutions will be evaluated through a pilot where vendors map and deliver graded imagery of up to 15 linear miles of East River waterfront and three underwater sites with diverse infrastructure types.

This Challenge-Based Procurement serves multiple objectives: it improves NYCEDC’s inspection efficiency while establishing New York City as a hub for drone and robotics innovation. Successful pilots will be procured at scale through follow-on contracts, creating a replicable model that other NYCEDC teams can adopt for their own procurement needs. The project demonstrates how procurement can serve as a strategic tool to support innovation and business growth rather than simply a bureaucratic hurdle.