Pocket Résumé
Terri Matthews: Originator and director of Town+Gown: NYC, a research program on the built environment in the Department of Design and Construction. Visionary: Named one of New York City and State’s Above & Beyond Innovators, 2022. Musical Memory: She was hanging out in Boston Ritz lounge after 2015 BC Law Reunion when Elvis Costello walked in and started singing with some bluegrass musicians: “It was like my own private show, and I’ll never forget it.”
“I live in New York—I don’t need to travel,” said Terri Matthews A&S ’80, JD ’85, speaking recently from her office in Tribeca. After more than three decades in New York City government, the Needham, Massachusetts, native remains intrigued by every aspect of her adopted city, from its multi-layered bureaucracies to the spaghetti of buried cables that carry critical utilities beneath its streets and sidewalks.
“Know the law and know where the money comes from to pay for what you want to do,” is Matthews’ maxim for effective public policy. To boost her understanding of the money side, she earned an MPA in finance from the Wagner School of Public Service of New York University. Over a career spanning both the legislative and the executive branches in NYC government, she has, in fact, “mostly worked not as a lawyer,” she said, “but understanding how the laws work—or don’t—is key for all kinds of policy and budget analysis.”
Matthews “fell into construction,” as she puts it, while working at City Hall during the first term of Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s administration. “When you’re at the mayor’s office, people tell you everything,” she said. While responsible for citywide procurement policy, she heard about the snarled processes hampering the efficient design and construction of public assets: “the roads and sidewalks, public buildings, like libraries and police precincts, and wastewater treatment plants.”
To understand better, she convened a working group of construction agency practitioners, mainly engineers. Two issues stood out: the need for new research to investigate underlying causes and systemic interactions, and the need for a clearinghouse to archive and share existing studies and reports.
In a city crammed with institutions of higher education, Matthews figured there must be ways to connect practitioners in built environment agencies with academics and other researchers in this field, to foster joint projects and support evidence-based best practices and policies. That was the genesis of Town+Gown: NYC as an open-platform, city-wide action research program on the built environment.
Working initially with a few public policy schools, Matthews formally launched Town+Gown in 2009. Marrying her legal skills with her knowledge of the procurement process, she developed an innovative city-wide master academic consortium contract, which now includes fourteen universities and colleges, to support agency funded, faculty directed applied research.
Every year, Town+Gown now runs an average of ten to twelve applied experiential learning research projects and three to six events, some for working groups, including Urban Resource Recovery, Resilient People, Places and Projects, Construction Data and Culture, Innovative Water Research, and Toward a “Smarter” City: Utilidors. “Utilidors,” Matthews explained, are multi-purpose tunnels that can accommodate all utility infrastructure, with access allowing maintenance and repair without routinely digging up the streets. “Intellectually, it’s a fascinating concept,” she said, “with huge legal issues, all the way from franchises to state and federal regulation.”
For law school graduates ambitious to tackle large-scale, complex challenges, Matthews sees New York City government—corporation counsel and agency legal departments—as offering unmatched opportunities. “It’s local government, only on steroids,” she said, “and being a small fish in the big NYC endeavor is better in many respects than being a big fish almost anywhere else.”
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