We pull the veil back...
— Joe Minicozzi, Founder, Urban3
Balance and Intersection Define OneCape Summit
Cape Cod's sustainability weaves together threads of housing, environment, and infrastructure. Could visualizing community economics offer another lens to explore integrated solutions?
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What is the OneCape Summit?
20 September 2025 – HARWICH, MA – More than 400 people gathered over the two days of the 11th OneCape Summit in Harwichport to dig into the issues facing the future of Cape Cod.
Kristy Senatori, Executive Director of the Cape Cod Commission, said balance and intersection form the watchwords for this year’s event and hoped that attendees would focus on the way the different challenges impact each other.
Who attended the summit?
The event’s attendees represented elected and appointed officials as well as different stakeholders. Speakers included Lt. Gov Kim Dirscoll, Massachusetts Housing and Livable Communities Secretary Edward Augustus, and dozens of other experts housing, waste water, climate, transportation, and infrastructure issues.
What role can analyzing economic data play?
Kickoff speaker Joe Minicozzi, founder of Asheville NC-based community economic analysis firm Urban3 triggered a different way of looking at these intersecting challenges: visualizing community economics.
Data visualization and communication transforms policy discussion, he said, noting that finding plain-spoken ways to share with the pubic change the conversation.
How does visualizing community economics help?
Urban3’s lens looks at municipalities as corporations, highlights infrastructure as investments and assets, and land use as a tool to maximize returns for the corporation. From this economic data analysis, municipalities have a new way to look at policy decisions around infrastructure, zoning, and even property tax options – and this quantifiable data-approach sometimes turns conventional wisdom on its head.
For example, one analysis compared an $11M downtown investment to a $20M Walmart investment – the raw numbers seemed obvious – 20 dwarfs 11 – but after crunching all the numbers, the productivity punch per acre came in far higher at smaller. With this type of deepened understanding, towns can begin to explore different policy and economic options.
“We pull the veil back on how that operates,” he said.
