The Center for Resilient Metro-regions (CRM) provides community planning and design services and applied research.  Most of our work is in strategic planning, sustainability, resilience, land use, climate change, urban greening and low-impact development, public space, housing, and community economic development. We work at a range of scales, from rural communities to complex metropolitan regions.  As appropriate to the challenge, we organize projects through consulting contracts, as a class studio project providing skilled teams and service-learning, or providing student interns. If you are interested in CRM services, complete the form, below, or email us us here. 

CRM Services
The Center has been the vehicle for Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning (LARP) to undertake service work with communities, often on a scale of $25,000 to just a few hundred dollars.  Through CRM, faculty and students in LARP and other affiliated programs have drafted a variety of strategic, subject, and  master plans (e.g., open space and recreation plans, downtown urban design, community participation, economic/facility re-use, and sustainability plans). As part of planning or as standalone projects, we coordinate community participation, which fits our commitment to, and skill with, engaging diverse communities, and project management. 

As with all of our work, as a subdivision of state government municipal procurement from CRM is exempt from MGL Chapter 30B Procurement (Section 1 (3) and 1 (4)).

CRM currently offers particular expertise in seven areas:

• Sustainability, resilience, and climate change
• Open space and recreation plans
• Grant writing, and project scoping and management
• Strategic and organizational planning
• Regulatory analysis
• Multi-disciplinary design studios

Research Base
The Center offers communities the opportunity to tap into world-class research and innovation. For instance, methods of applying low-impact development have been tested through CRM-related research and applied in studios.  The New England Greenway plan was developed through CRM to test theories of how to bring together land with various forms of ownership and protection into a contiguously linked recreational network with integrated ecological and cultural benefits, and to develop a method for valuing the outcomes in communities with this sort of investment in public recreation.  And in CRM-related work, we are developing a new approach to engaging the public and experts in more sustainable, resilient infrastructure planning.
SAGE Sustainable Adaptive Gradients in the coastal Environment
Boston Metro Ecological Research
Our Research Partners
Our colleagues