WIN City Labs Initiative Launches Port Chester Project with Iona Students

The Westchester Innovation Network’s (WIN) City Labs initiative and students from Iona University kicked off a new project on Wednesday with the goal of helping the Village of Port Chester brainstorm new ideas for transforming its downtown waterfront into a destination.

A group of students from Iona’s Hynes Institute for Entrepreneurship & Innovation will spend the coming weeks speaking with community residents and business owners to determine what the public would like to see along the roughly 1,600 feet of waterfront the village controls along the Byram River. Village manager Stuart Rabin gave the students a tour of the waterfront so they could see first-hand the challenges as well as the existing possibilities the waterfront holds.

“We’re working very diligently to make the downtown area more welcoming, feel more safe, more walkable,” said Rabin. “A lot of things we’re looking to approve are larger sidewalks, better crossings, and plazas or other areas available for people to be able to live, work and play.”

During his meeting with the students, Rabin explained how Port Chester is undergoing explosive growth in its residential sector, which could receive up to 10,000 new residents in the next decade. The challenge, Rabin said, is convincing the many new younger residents moving into apartments to stay in Port Chester as they grow older and start families.

Iona professor Akash Sapru will lead the students, who will use principals of design thinking to guide their research. Design thinking is a human-centered and user-specific approach to problem solving and it requires engaging end-users to develop more impactful solutions.

“The project will be using the design thinking methodology not only to solve some of the pieces of the problem, but probably even to conceptualize the problem in a different light,” said Sapru, whose students will attempt to empathize with Port Chester stakeholders. “We will put ourselves in their position to learn their priorities and how the world looks from their perspective.”

The Iona students expect to deliver their findings and recommendations to Rabin and other Port Chester officials in December.

BCW executive vice-president and COO John Ravitz attended the kickoff and he encouraged the students to use their creativity and think outside of the box as they work on the project. He also thanked the village for being part of the City Labs program and allowing the students to play a significant role in helping redesign the village’s important waterfront.

The Iona-Port Chester City Labs collaboration is part of the Business Council of Westchester’s WIN-related efforts to propel innovation as the underpinning for the future economic growth of Westchester. The BCW WIN’s City Labs spotlights a host community and teams that municipality with individuals focused on identifying projects to assist in delivering immediate economic benefit to that community and its residents through innovation.

The Port Chester collaboration is the sixth City Labs project. Previous iterations were in Mount Vernon, New Rochelle, Peekskill, White Plains and Yonkers.