Cityblock was launched in Brooklyn's Crown Heights/ Brownsville/ Bed-Stuy area last month, June 2018, with the help of neighborhood team members, some of the very same folks who helped create "Streetcoin."
 

But long before Cityblock and its $21 million in venture capital(7), the neighborhood team began innovating their "Streetcoin" strategy.  Young men from the streets of Brownsville, Tameel Marshall, Alonzo Jones, Sean Turner, and others teamed up with Harvard graduates Alan Waxman (the author), Quardean Lewis Allen (of Made in Brownsville), and Brownsville Community Justice Center leaders Deron Johnston and Erica Mateo to begin addressing the prevention of violence and chronic disease through design and technological innovation.   The first few collaborations were mainly focused on user interface design, social media design, and changing the atmosphere around violence in the population.  These "studios," as they were called, were funded by groups like the Center For Court Innovation and the Police Foundation and found partners in design firms like BBDO and Wolff Olins.  They mostly focused on the North side of the famous gang beef between the Brownsville Houses (to the North) and the Marcus Garvey Village (to the South).

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When Alan Waxman and Ionna Jimenez were given the opportunity to start a studio in the Marcus Garvey Village side (the South side of the beef), they jumped into action, involving a team of youth to create the first "Urban Rhythms" studio(8,9,10).  The group came up with a methodology(11) to "turn up" or "turn down" collective risk through architectural intervention, inspired by Kenneth Frampton, who had designed their housing project over 40 years before(12).  In a dramatic design review at Columbia University they presented their work to Frampton in Columbia with the help of professors Kaja Kuhl and Tricia Martin. Waxman and Jimenez continued to be funded by the Brownsville Community Justice Center to innovate.  A follow up study was recently published by the Urban Institute on their work.

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In 2016 Alan Waxman and Tameel Marshall won a grant from Storefront For Art and Architecture to follow up with the Brownsville Houses (North side of the gang beef) and develop an innovative healthcare strategy.  What resulted was a methodology for adapting risk from the inside(13).  Marshall analyzed the history of the neighborhood, particularly the murderous 80s and 90s in Brownsville, as drug kingpins dominated and terrorized the streets.  Over time, the "traphouse" typology began to form as a way for youths to find family-like bonds and safety in the wilderness of the streets and also to work together to manage collective risk through the social network.  Participation and also reluctance and withdrawal to participate in what was sometimes called the block's "chain gang," would result in violence prevention in particularly high risk zones of gang territory. As Marshall and others described, the more time an individual spends on the street, the more time he or she comes to embody the collective risk there, and the more power they have to address that risk through behavior. 

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The research team, which in 2017 included Tameel Marshall, Dee Banga, John Wick, Adam Bush, and Alan Waxman, developed a spatial data integration technique to evaluate changes in the block's potential to affect collective health(14). They call their technique of data mining a "cipher.”  The group gathers in a confidential HIPAA protected space to cipher, or mine, their “Streetcoin:” high risk areas in the gang territory are assessed in terms of the intensity of risk felt by the participants that day, even in that particular moment.  This is discussed in terms of emotion, usually through the metaphor of music, and recorded in terms of perspective paired with biorhythms, heart and breath rate matched with geographic location.   The result is a block by block framework of collective sensitivity.  Then the real data integration begins as the team weaves in layers of socio-economics, real estate value, crime data, etc, to create a background beat for the particular block framework in question.  For the most sensitive spot, the group adds lyrics, wrapping personal social network information into the data set.  HIPAA protection offered by the legitimizing hospital or clinic means that these personal records mint the “coin” with the biorhythms of the participants as well as the records that “chain” the community as a whole.  

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Each session or "cipher," as it is called, renders a data set (“streetcoin”) valued in terms of its ability to translate into insurance savings.  The group has continued the process for over a year, under the auspices of Brookdale Hospital, producing “streetcoin” for this high risk series of blocks in Brooklyn.