Manny Patole’s community engagement receives national recognition, and shapes his work in the classroom

Manny Patole, Industry Assistant Professor at the Center for Urban Science + Progress (CUSP) at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering, was recently named one of 22 Community Innovators for 2025 by the Economic Architecture Project and The Brookings Institution. This recognition stems from his participation in the Valuing Homes in Black Communities Challenge with a submission focusing on the Baton Rouge-based Plank Road Community Land Bank and Trust (CLBT). Since 2019, Patole has supported the Plank Road CBLT in his roles as a Co-City Fellow and Project Manager at the NYU Marron Institute of Urban Management. Drawing from this experience and further applied research at the intersection of community resilience, economic development, and urban sustainability, Patole continues to make an impact through his courses in the M.S. in Applied Urban Science and Informatics program at CUSP, which bridge academic research and community stakeholders to address real-world challenges.

“Working with communities and working with students in the classroom are mutually reinforcing,” said Patole. “If I were working solely with communities, I wouldn't necessarily know the latest techniques, skills, or ideas that can help facilitate conversations with them, and help communities understand design thinking, ideate, and prototype.”

Innovating a new model of urban redevelopment centered on community

Patole has a long history with New York University — his fall 2024 faculty profile offers a detailed look at his roles across the University. He earned his undergraduate degree in political science and later studied urban planning at the Wagner Graduate School of Public Service before pursuing degrees in water governance and conflict resolution. His work with the Plank Road CBLT began in 2019 when Sheila Foster, a professor jointly appointed at Columbia University’s Climate School and Law School, and Clayton Gillette, a professor at the NYU School of Law and former director of the Marron Institute, enlisted him to manage Co-City Baton Rouge. This initiative emerged from a partnership between Marron Institute, LabGov — a “laboratory for the governance of the commons” co-directed by Foster, and the local redevelopment authority Build Baton Rouge. "Co-City" references LabGov’s pioneering urban redevelopment approach which envisions the city as an infrastructure that fosters sharing and collaboration, participatory decision-making, and peer-to-peer production, underpinned by open data and the principles of distributive justice. Within this framework, Co-City Baton Rouge is the first of its kind, notable in terms of its city-wide scale, location in the United States, and inclusion of not just planning but also physical implementation. Co-City Baton Rouge’s primary goal is to revitalize the Plank Road corridor, a historic African-American commercial and residential corridor in North Baton Rouge that has faced long-term structural disinvestment. Local stakeholders are engaged throughout the process with the belief that those most directly impacted by revitalization play a key role in the long-term stewardship of community resources and institutions.

“Leveraging the Co-City protocol, we met with community members as part of the Imagine Plank Road master planning process and, through that engagement, we came up with ideas that would guide the master plan. Two of those ideas were assigned to us at Co-City Baton Rouge to implement: the Plank Road Community Land Bank and Trust and Erie St EcoPark.”

Combining features of a land bank and community land trust, Plank Road CBLT invests in affordable housing, commercial and recreational developments, resilient infrastructure, cultural programming, and public utilities. Patole joined local partners and residents to celebrate the groundbreaking of the first development, Erie St EcoPark, on October 1, 2024.

“At the Plank Road Corridor, we heard from community members that a large barrier for entrepreneurs who need a brick and mortar space is the actual brick and mortar,” said Patole. “So how can you leverage a space for commercial uses at the local level, where someone doesn't have the ability to have a lease or maintain it for three years?”

In addition to creating a decision support tool to evaluate and suggest use cases for land bank properties, a sub-project was launched to quantify the cost of doing nothing. The sub-project was initially undertaken as an independent study by CUSP graduate students from the Class of 2022 — Tarea Karunaratne, Alec Bardey, Vaidehi Raipat, and Dan Levine — and later evolved into the CUSP capstone project “Understanding the True Cost of Vacant Properties in Baton Rouge” with Patole serving as the project sponsor alongside Dr. Rebeca de Jesus Crespo from Louisiana State University. Prior to this role, Patole had advised capstone students at CUSP as a faculty mentor since 2021.

“If we could prove that the cost of doing nothing was more expensive than actually doing something with these properties, it would help provide the impetus for the local government to invest in these vacant, abandoned, and deteriorated properties. It would also provide the Plank Road CLBT with quantitative data to demonstrate to potential funders and collaborators how much their work can make a difference in these areas,” said Patole.

Yang Liu, Will Maney, and Analaura Tostado, all graduate students from CUSP’s Class of 2023, estimated that vacant properties cost the city of Baton Rouge approximately $1 – 1.7 million annually, based on police, fire, and 311 calls related to the incidents at these sites. Additionally, they developed maps to illustrate the spatial distribution of these incidents for the broader public.

Connecting academia with real-world challenges

In the fall of 2024, Manny Patole’s involvement with CUSP grew as he was appointed Industry Assistant Professor, teaching courses focused on the intersection of policy and data governance. Two half-semester courses led by Patole — Data Governance, Ethics, and Privacy and Foundations in Policy, Research, and Writing — are integral to the first-year core curriculum for students in the M.S. in Applied Urban Science and Informatics program.

“Teaching Data Governance, Ethics, and Privacy was a breath of fresh air for me, especially in a program at the cutting edge of this work with cities,” said Patole. “How do we produce the next generation of urban data scientists, with a sort of angel on their shoulder asking: ‘Are we considering the cognitive and algorithmic biases that might be perpetuated, especially when we haven’t looked at these biases in the analog realm for so long?’”

A common thread across his classes is inviting practitioners into the classroom so that students can gain new perspectives on the current discourse surrounding cities. In Spring 2025, his course The Citizen and The City takes it a step further by pairing student teams with three non-profit organizations and one local government agency — ImpactTULSA, National Community Stabilization Trust, Rebuild by Design, and Office of the Comptroller for the City of New York — to tackle a challenge over the semester. The course culminates in a public showcase on May 5, 2025, where students will present their findings.

“When you want to engage with community members, policy and public officials, and industries that aren't tech-savvy, you have to understand how to do the code-switching. You have to understand how to make information accessible, digestible, and equitable,” said Patole.