UREx Newsletter: Vol. 1, No. 3

Vol. 1, No. 3 – Fall 2017

Our second annual All-Hands Meeting was held last March at The New School in New York City, New York. The week-long meeting brought together over 100 network members (researchers, practitioners, external advisory members). The first day's plenary session, to which the public was invited, featured speakers and panelists from local government, a local landscape architecture firm, and practitioners from each of the ten UREx cities. Working groups and task forces held panels, workshops, and moderated discussions over the course of the next several days, and there was abundant opportunity for social interaction and networking throughout the week. For many UREx participants, it was their first opportunity to meet face to face.

SCIENCE COMMUNICATION TRAINING

Prior to the All-Hands Meeting, UREx SRN graduate students and postdoctoral fellows attended a two-day COMPASS Science Communication workshop to build their skills in cross-cultural and trans-disciplinary communication with peers, colleagues, public groups, policymakers and the media. Participants used COMPASS’s Message Box’ to learn to distill the following from their research: the problem, the solution, the benefits, and why it is important. Everyone focused on avoiding jargon, turning their research into a story, and finding compelling anecdotes and examples to connect with their audience. Throughout the weekend, the facilitators and visiting expert communicators helped all the participants hone their messages through a series of lively communication scenarios, from talking to a journalist to explaining their research at a community meeting.

At the All-Hands Meeting poster session, working groups, graduate students, and postdocs had an opportunity to highlight their research to the network. The event featured thirty-one posters were presented with topics ranging from heat exposure and transportation to green infrastructure and finance. This valuable session helped UREx members better understand the various projects that are underway across our large distributed network. Our graduate students and postdocs did a fantastic job illustrating their hard work!

On March 25, UREx held its first NYC scenario workshop in partnership with a Harlem-based environmental justice organization, WE ACT for Environmental Justice, on “Visioning Climate Justice in Northern Manhattan” at the Manhattan Borough President’s Office. The over fifty attendees included researchers, local community members, and representatives from city agencies. The goal of the workshop was for the community to brainstorm future scenarios to deal with the impacts of climate change in an equitable and just way, building on WE ACT’s already substantial work on the Northern Manhattan Climate Action Plan. Attendees broke out into smaller groups to develop future visions under themes of extreme heat, flooding, housing affordability and energy democracy, and emergency preparedness and connectivity. The four groups spent the day developing broad visions for the future of Harlem and Northern Manhattan, imagining as far ahead as 2080, followed by setting medium and shorter term targets and mapping ideas for specific goals, such as new youth recreation centers and parks. Finally, each group shared their work by narrating a day in the life of a character in the future scenario they had created. A follow-up workshop is being planned for late Fall of 2017 to present UREx’s analysis and models developed based on the first workshop.

On February 3rd, San Juan held their first UREx SRN Scenarios Workshop in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Joining the San Juan City Team and the Scenarios Working Group were about 51 practitioners, including municipal planners, infrastructure and emergency managers, community and NGO leaders, academics, and designers. In a series of structured activities, participants were asked the following questions: What does it mean to have a sustainable and resilient San Juan in 2080? What social-ecological-technological (SETS) strategies are necessary to achieve future objectives? What specific goals are necessary to achieve SETS strategies? When and where should these strategies occur? And, who should these strategies benefit? A total of eight scenarios were co-developed, six were adaptive to extreme flooding events (coastal, urban, and river) and three transformative (food and energy security, just and livable city, and connected city). Two of the adaptive flood scenarios were developed by architects and designers that were participating in the workshop to receive continuing education credits by the Association of Architects and Landscape Architects of Puerto Rico. To view the details of each scenario you can access the Report on San Juan's Scenario Workshop I here. The Scenarios Working Group is currently analyzing the scenarios and developing land use models to explore the outcomes of the different futures. These models will be used in San Juan's Workshop II later in 2018 in order to fine tune strategies and evaluate trade-offs of the different scenarios.

On May 11, Valdivia held their first participatory future scenarios workshop in Valdivia, Chile. The workshop was a success, engaging 46 representatives from multiple Municipal, Regional, and National agencies and ministries, leaders of non-governmental and community organizations, academics, and a talented group of design students who helped visualize the scenarios. Attendees worked in small groups to co-develop 5 visions for the future of Valdivia in 2080: an inclusive city, a friendly city, an innovative city, an eco-wetland city, and a city resilient to both flooding and drought. The scenario themes were developed based on local stakeholder responses to the UREx SRN governance survey conducted prior to the workshop, as well as imaginaries from the Valdivia Sustainability Plan of Action, with the intent to build upon and add more details to the existing ideas. As in other cities’ workshops, attendees worked through a series of activities to determine the overarching goals and challenges for each scenario and add diverse SETS strategies, details, and targets to achieve those goals. While the scenarios focused on distinct themes, the co-developed scenarios shared several common goals for the future, including a strong cultural identity, empowered and active citizens in governance, highly connected and integrated green corridors, parks, and wetlands with diverse uses for economic, recreation, transportation, tourism, and education purposes, and multi-modal sustainable transportation system integrating river and bike transport. A few example transformational and adaptive strategies to achieve the 2080 goals include: car free zones including downtown, 95% elimination of personal cars throughout the region, 100% renewable energy, 100% permeable pavement to address runoff and flooding, a decentralized economy with hybrid businesses, micro-cooperatives, and community gardens, and the development of Centers of Reflection, Meditation, and Knowledge Exchange, plus many more. The Valdivia team looks forward to meeting again with their dynamic group in 2018 to assess and refine these scenarios during Workshop II!

Dr. Marissa Matsler is an interdisciplinarian whose research is focused on exploring the interdependencies between society, technology, and ecosystems within green infrastructure policy and implementation at the municipal level. This work includes research on both ecological restoration and stormwater/wastewater management. In particular, she looks at the influence of social perceptions of nature on infrastructure maintenance and investment; she is now exploring the SETS framework through this work as a part of the SETS WG and the City Comparisons WG. Marissa has a BS in Marine Biology from Oregon State University, a Masters of Environmental Management from Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, and just completed her PhD at Portland State University in Urban Studies where she was an Fellow in the Ecosystem Services supporting Urbanizing Regions IGERT Program. Throughout her career she has worked on multiple interdisciplinary teams focused on international comparisons of green infrastructure perceptions, sanitary sewer innovations in the US, and local urban planning initiatives.

Dr. Allain Barnett will join the UREx team in September as a post-doctoral researcher to work with the City of Miami beach to study green infrastructure initiatives and the social, environmental, and technological factors that contribute to resilience and vulnerability to extremes in the city. Allain has a diverse research experience, including research in aquatic community ecology as a Master’s Student, ethnographic research of lobster fishing communities in Nova Scotia during his PhD at Arizona State University, collaborative research on common-pool resources and institutional analysis, and marine debris mapping and recovery projects as a post-doc at University of New Brunswick. He plans to continue to examine the various ways that humans engage in collective action to adapt their social and physical infrastructures to environmental and economic change.

Graduate students Stephen Elser and Jason Sauer are conducting research on the urban wetlands of Valdivia, Chile. These students seek a more holistic understanding of the ecosystem services the city's wetlands provide to Valdivians, such as flood control, water treatment, and cultural enrichment. Jason is currently taking measurements of water retention of the wetlands by collecting soil samples and measuring surface water levels during the city's wet and dry seasons. He will later use these measurements to improve the city's stormwater management model and to provide decision support information for the second UREx scenario workshop. Stephen is collecting water samples from the wetlands to measure nutrient levels across development gradients and degrees of wetland connectivity. He will later distribute household surveys and conduct on the street interviews to investigate the provisioning and cultural services provided by the wetlands. Eventually, Stephen also plans to perform an economic valuation of the wetlands by using InVEST models and/or hedonic pricing. Project highlights have included seeing firsthand how the Valdivia's wetlands are integrated into its various neighborhoods and communities, and being escorted to these wetlands by the city's various friendly quiltros (the endearing term Valdivians have given to its dogs). It is anticipated that the results from both studies will assist city practitioners in future city development planning.

Postdoc Vivian Verduzco is part of the Hermosillo team with Professor Agustin Robles and his student Javier Navarro who are collaborating with Portland State University Professor Vivek Shandas and his students Jackson Voelkel and Darin Wahl on a heat wave mapping study. They are studying how the physical factors of cities, such as location, green areas, infrastructure types, bodies of water, and building density and height, are impacting the heat wave distribution in the city. Furthermore, in the second part of this study they would like to develop landscape-based indicators of heat and demonstrate how the heat indicator is created and evaluated in relation to social indicators, like poverty. Very often, social vulnerability factors correlate with higher heat exposure areas; however, this can vary among cities. They conducted a field study to identify the heat distribution in Hermosillo, a UREx city with the second highest mortality risk associated with high temperatures in Mexico, after Mexicali. With this study they hope to find and propose novel strategies to overcome and adapt to climate related extreme events like heatwaves, not only in Hermosillo but in cities around the world that are facing these types of problems (e.g. Phoenix). Hermosillo municipals and researchers have shown great interest in these type of studies.

POSTDOC & STUDENT BUZZ

Urban Resilience Reading Group (URRG)

The 2016-2017 Urban Resilience Reading Group (URRG) comprised of graduate students and postdoctoral researchers who met once a week to deepen our understanding of the knowledge and skills we each bring to the challenges of urban resilience. Students were able to explore cross-cutting skills and engage in discussions about research with other like-minded peers in the SRN. Overarching, bi-weekly topics were introduced in a large group setting and individual readings, activities, and dialog, were then pursued by smaller, more focused groups. Topics included: Mapping and Visualization, Large-scale Land & Climate Modeling, Decision Analysis, Vulnerability Assessment, and Transitions. Participant reflections indicate a huge success for the URRG, and this group will recommence at the start of the Fall semester. Students will again have the opportunity for collaborating on seminal readings as well as research projects; the semester will conclude with student generated research outcomes.

Postdocs Contribute to the Network Evaluation Working Group (NEWG)

In January 2017, postdocs responded to a request from the NEWG to share insights from their various perspectives into the UREx logic model. In brief, while network activities did seem to align well with core outcomes, postdocs showed interest in deepening the meaning, and extending the current scope, of what co-production, network sustainability, and communication means for the SRN. Pointing to the tendency for network activities to play into existing strengths -- e.g. data visualization happens best where the best data are available, but some network cities may not have access to the required data or resources to visualize it effectively -- postdocs suggested that changes would be needed to support a more even approach to UREx goals across the SRN as a whole. Many of the same issues were raised by practitioners, faculty, and graduate students at the 2017 All Hands Meeting, and since then postdocs have initiated a monthly informal check in to continue the conversation about our roles and contributions in terms of peer mentoring, integration of activities around the scenario process, and supporting graduate student development through URRG.

Year 2 Office of University Evaluation & Ethical Effectiveness Surveys

In the past year the ASU Office of Evaluation and Educational Effectiveness (UOEEE) conducted a variety of evaluation activities to support the work of the Education & Diversity Working Group (EDWG). Key activities included administering surveys and holding focus groups of graduate students and postdoctoral fellows to understand their experience in UREx SRN. Evaluation findings indicate the UREx SRN's educational and diversity program is making progress towards its goals.

Notably, many students and postdocs cited the All Hands Meetings’ Science Communications training as a highlight of their UREx SRN experience in the past year. Analysis results show significant gains for participants in communication effectiveness, comfort with scientific communication, and likelihood to seek communication about research as a result of participating in the training (Figure 1). Additionally, based on needs identified in the survey feedback, the UOEEE will continue working with UREx SRN to provide ongoing evaluation of operational improvements and future diversity and cultural responsiveness training.

Figure 1. Average Self-Reported Rating of Science Communication Skills from Pre and Post Training

Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) Summer Program

UREx SRN collaborated with CAP LTER and UWIN SRN for this year's REU summer program. Emily Key (UREx SRN's Sr. Education Program Coordinator) and Mark Watkins (CAP LTER's Program Manager) hosted bi-weekly meetings that provided a setting where REU students who are focused on urban issues could share their experiences and their research. Sessions include ongoing interdisciplinary research, science communication, graduate school opportunities, and more.

Left to right: Emily Key: UREx SRN REU facilitator, Shannon Newell, Madison Arnold, Claire Moen, Brian Foster, Tiffany Justice, David Nardelli, McKenna Welsch, Mark Watkins: CAP LTER REU facilitator (Not pictured: Sam Genchimakher, Daniel Read, and Bobby Moakley)

David Nardelli, Paul Smith's College: Storm-water Hydrology and Algae Canal Sampling
Brian Foster, NAU: Cost-effectiveness of Municipal Climate Change Adaptation Strategies
Madison Arnold, ASU: Financing Options For Green Infrastructure in San Juan
Shannon Newell, NAU: Does Vacant Land in Phoenix Contribute to Resilience or Vulnerability?
Sam Genchimakher, PSU: Validating Urban Heat Island Modeling in Portland
Daniel Read, FIU: Understanding Water Source Contribution to Urban Stormwater
Bobby Moakley, Rochester Institute of Technology: Does Cleaning a Bird Feeder Improve the Health of Back Yard Birds
Tiffany Justice, UNM: Maricopa County Household Water Use in a Heat Wave-Power Failure Emergency
Claire Moan, ASU: Black Widows on An Urban Heat Island: Using Genes, Physiology, and Behavior to
Understand Global Change
McKenna Welsch, ASU: The Relationship of Urban Design and Micro Climate in Influencing Behavior to Mitigate Heat Exposure on Public Transit Stops in Phoenix Metro Area

Sea Level Solutions Center: Interdisciplinary Research and Design Studio

Tiffany Troxler, UREx SRN City Co-lead and Director of the Sea Level Solutions Center (SLSC) at Florida International University, with offices based at Miami Beach Urban Studios, is deeply engaged in fostering multiple cross-College research projects. A new curricular offering, the SLSC Interdisciplinary Research and Design Studio, focuses on the integration of research, design and analytics to build urban resilience. The goal of the course is to infuse principles of resiliency to sea level rise into project designs and to develop and apply new tools to evaluate the “resilience performance” and cost-benefits of those designs in the short- and long-term. The SLSC, in partnership with faculty in Colleges of Communications, Architecture, and the Arts; Arts, Sciences, and Education; Engineering; Stempel School of Public Health; and the Metropolitan Center joined with faculty at the Concordia University School of Law to undertake its second set of SLSC studio projects - focused on sites in Miami Beach and Key Largo, Florida.

Weekly lectures from faculty experts in planning, law, ecology, economics, water resource engineering, and architecture complemented interdisciplinary student work. Projects focused on developing integrated research and public facilities that were resilient to climate stressors of storm-surge and sea level rise, emphasizing both sustainable and renewable delivery of water and energy while improving environmental and social quality at the sites. In the Key Largo project, students and faculty collaborated with the National Park Service (NPS) and other stakeholder groups, with NPS supporting a 2-day charrette. The second project was developed in partnership with City of Miami Beach staff to design the Indian Creek Living Laboratory and Greenway on Miami Beach. Stormwater improvements are rapidly being implemented and city stakeholders sought the incorporation of living shoreline and green infrastructure elements to bring added value to tourism and environmental health as part of sea level rise adaptation projects.

The design studio (2016) was a huge success and resulted in three groups of students submitting their studio projects to the Architect Magazine Studio prize! Projects submitted were: "Rubik Buoy," "JEWEL," and "Living Lab Flex Space."

UREx PhD candidate Matt Smith developed planted bioswale and water quality modules as part of a set of resilience performance tools developed as part of interdisciplinary work that will be used in future studio projects. He has incorporated the City of Miami Beach green infrastructure “mangrove planter” in Lake Pancoast as part of his UREx research.

See short documentary: https://youtu.be/6xfAe2BNUpE

Do you have new projects, upcoming presentations or city updates that you would like to share with the network? Perhaps you heard of an upcoming event of interest. Send us your insights and ideas!

UREx Hosted Meetings and Workshops

1. Climate & Hydrologic Extremes (CHExWG) Workshop, Asheville, North Carolina, August 10-11, 2017.
2. Scenarios Agenda-Planning Workshop for Year 3 Cities, Tempe, Arizona, September 14-15, 2017.
3. Hermosillo Scenarios Workshop: Hermosillo, Mexico, November 6, 2017.
4. Phoenix Scenarios Workshop: Phoenix, Arizona (Exact date TBA)
5. Baltimore Scenarios Workshop: Baltimore, Maryland (Exact date TBA)
6. A series of Innovation Plazas is being put forward this Fall, including:

A practitioner focused reflection on how the scenario process for San Juan, New York, and Valdivia contributes to a wider conversation about sustainability transitions across network cities; early September (TBA)
An expert panel on the challenges and opportunities of financing urban resilience projects in a climate of fiscal restraint; moderated by Joyce Coffee; Wednesday, October 18th from 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm MST
A number of other Innovation Plazas are still in planning on issues of green infrastructure, social equity, changing codes and standards, among other topics!

These various Innovation activities will be taking place in Baltimore, Miami, and San Juan as part of the new S&CC but these are to be determined. S&CC stands for Smart and Connected Communities, and members of the Transition and Implementation Working Group have obtained a National Science Foundation S&CC Planning Grant to put together a transdisciplinary team of data management experts, engineers, and social scientists to develop a new concept for how Socio-Ecological-Technological Systems can better inform approaches to how cities (Baltimore, Miami, and San Juan) respond to increasing flood risk.

Members Presenting UREx Related Work

August

Rae Zimmerman. Implications of Combined Infrastructure Concentration and Interdependency for Extreme Event Recovery. Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Structural Safety and Reliability (ICOSSAR 2017), Vienna, Austria, August 6-10, 2017.

Ecological Society of America Meeting

Benjamin J. Shetterly and Jennifer L. Morse. Characterization of soil phosphorous and its potential for mobilization following drying and flooding in urban stormwater bioretention facilities. 102nd Annual Meeting of the Ecological Society of America, Portland, Oregon, August 6-11, 2017.
Charles T. Driscoll, David G. Chandler, and Caitlin G. Eger. Variability in the function of green infrastructure technologies: Lessons from science and practice. 102nd Annual Meeting of the Ecological Society of America, Portland, Oregon, August 6-11, 2017.
Daniel Childers and Emma Rosi. Long term urban ecological change: Slow-rates, lags, and legacies. Symposium 19: 20 Years of Insights into Social-Ecological Research from the Two Urban LTER Sites. 102nd Annual Meeting of the Ecological Society of America, Portland, Oregon, August 6-11, 2017.
Elizabeth M. Cook, David M. Iwaniec, Jason R. Sauer, Nancy B. Grimm and Olga Barbosa. Future urban sustainability and resilience in Valdivia, Chile: Assessing social-ecological-technological scenarios with ecosystem services. 102nd Annual Meeting of the Ecological Society of America, Portland, Oregon, August 6-11, 2017.
Erin N. Looper and Jennifer L. Morse. Denitrification potential in urban green stormwater infrastructure. 102nd Annual Meeting of the Ecological Society of America, Portland, Oregon, August 6-11, 2017.
John S. Kominoski, Evelyn Gaiser, and Sara G. Baer. Revisiting Odum (1969): A heuristic model of how long-term ecological research advances theory of dynamic and developing systems. 102nd Annual Meeting of the Ecological Society of America, Portland, Oregon, August 6-11, 2017.
John Kominoski, Evelyn Gaiser, Kevin Grove, Marc Healy, Rinku R. Chowdhury, Matthew Smith, and Tiffany G. Troxler. Raising with the rise: Socioecological responses to sea-level rise in South Florida. 102nd Annual Meeting of the Ecological Society of America, Portland, Oregon, August 6-11, 2017.
Lauren McPhillips, Timon McPhearson, and Nancy B. Grimm. Cross-City Comparison of Vacant Lot Form and Function: Do they Contribute to Resilience or Vulnerability? 102nd Annual Meeting of the Ecological Society of America, Portland, Oregon, August 6-11, 2017.
Marissa Matsler. Addressing the institutional challenges of green infrastructure development: The Eco-Techno Spectrum as organizing heuristic for interdisciplinary research. 102nd Annual Meeting of the Ecological Society of America, Portland, Oregon, August 6-11, 2017.
Nancy B. Grimm, Marta Berbés Blásquez, Chingwen Cheng, Elizabeth Cook, Timon McPhearson, Lauren McPhillips, and Monica Palta. Assessing urban aquatic services in the face of climate-driven extreme events. Symposium: Aquatic Ecosystem Services in a Changing World, 102nd Annual Meeting of the Ecological Society of America, Portland, Oregon, August 6-11, 2017.
Nancy B. Grimm. Climate change and urbanization: colliding threats to desert streams. Ignite Session: What Is the Single Greatest Threat to Dryland Ecosystems in a Changing World? 102nd Annual Meeting of the Ecological Society of America, Portland, Oregon, August 6-11, 2017.
Peter M. Groffman, Emma Rosi, Nancy B. Grimm, and Sujay S. Kaushal. Streams are not pipes: The expected and unexpected relationships between streams, watersheds, and urban dynamics. Symposium: 20 years of insights into social-ecological research from the two urban LTER sites. 102nd Annual Meeting of the Ecological Society of America, Portland, Oregon, August 6-11, 2017.
Vivek Shandas. 2017. The role of urban forests in mediating the impacts of climate change: Heat waves and vulnerable populations. 102nd Annual Meeting of the Ecological Society of America, Portland, Oregon, August 6-11, 2017.

Resilience 2017 Conference

Chingwen Cheng, Nancy B. Grimm, Lauren McPhillips, Joomee Lee, Monica Palta. Green infrastructure, urban resilience and sustainability. Resilience 2017 Conference, Stockholm, Sweden, August 20-23, 2017.
David Iwaniec, Elizabeth Cook, Timon McPhearson, Tischa Muñoz-Erickson, Melissa Davidson, Marta Berbés Blásquez, Nancy B. Grimm. Co-production of sustainability future scenarios. Resilience 2017 Conference, Stockholm, Sweden, August 20-23, 2017.
Elizabeth Cook, David Iwaniec, Olga Barbosa, Nancy Grimm. Framing sustainability transformational change as more than just big changes. Resilience 2017 Conference, Stockholm, Sweden, August 20-23, 2017.
Nancy B. Grimm, Mikhail V. Chester, Yeowon Kim, Lauren McPhillips, and Charles L. Redman. When is safe-to-fail safe? Resilience 2017 Conference, Stockholm, Sweden, August 20-23, 2017.
Timon McPhearson, Elizabeth Cook, Chingwen Cheng, and Nancy B. Grimm. Climate Resilience in Urban Social-Ecological-Technical Systems: A SETS Approach to Urban Ecosystem Services. Resilience 2017 Conference, Stockholm, Sweden, August 20-23, 2017.

September

Ariel Lugo, Pablo Méndez Lázaro, and Jenniffer Santos Hernández. Panel on Puerto Rico's Resilience to Global Change during the Puerto Rico Architects and Landscape Architects Association annual symposium: Week of Architecture, San Juan, Puerto Rico, September 7, 2017.

November

Tischa Muñoz-Erickson. Speaker at the annual Ecourbanism Congress Enrique Martí Coll on Resilience in the face of the Urban Emergency: Quique, the Pope, and You, San Juan, Puerto Rico, November 3, 2017.

PECS-II Conference

Marta Berbés Blásquez, David Iwaniec, Elizabeth Cook, Melissa Davidson, Tischa Muñoz-Erickson, Timon McPhearson, and Nancy B. Grimm. Visions and Strategies for Guiding Urban Transformations. PECS-II Conference, Oaxaca, México, November 7-10, 2017.
Chingwen Cheng, Javier Navarro Estupiñán, Agustin Robles-Morua, Rinku Roy-Chowdhury, David Eisenman, Vivek Shandas, Jenniffer Santos-Hernández, Timon McPhearson, and Nancy B. Grimm. SETs vulnerability assessment to climate extremes: a cross-comparison between the city of Phoenix, Arizona and the Sonoran Desert region in Hermosillo, México. PECS-II Conference, Oaxaca, México, November 7-10, 2017.
Elizabeth Cook, Olga Barbosa, Marta Berbés Blásquez, Chingwen Cheng, Nancy B. Grimm, David Iwaniec, and Timon McPhearson. A Social-Ecological-Technological Systems (SETS) Approach to Urban Ecosystem Services. PECS-II Conference, Oaxaca, México, November 7-10, 2017.
Nancy B. Grimm, Charles L. Redman, Elizabeth M. Cook, Mikhail V. Chester, David M. Iwaniec, Timon McPhearson, Thaddeus Miller, and Tischa Muñoz-Erickson. A social-ecological-technical systems approach to understanding urban complexity and building climate resilience. PECS-II Conference, Oaxaca, México, November 7-10, 2017.
Lauren McPhillips, Chingwen Cheng, Timon McPhearson, and Nancy B. Grimm. Cross-City Spatial Comparison of Green Infrastructure Distribution in the US and Latin America. PECS-II Conference, Oaxaca, México, November 7-10, 2017.

Other Conferences of Interest to Network Members

PARTICIPATING ORGANIZATIONS

Our Mission is to link scholars with city and community practitioners to produce resilient infrastructure data, models, images, maps, stories, and on-the-ground projects in 10 cities, to accelerate innovative urban sustainability knowledge and application.

Our Vision is to promote the transition to cities of the future that are resilient by virtue of their flexible, adaptable, socially equitable, and ecologically based infrastructure in the face of a higher incidence of extreme events, more culturally diverse communities, and continued urbanization pressure. This will be a comprehensive network that will build the scientific basis to support existing and emerging city initiatives and incorporate fundamental and practical strategies to promote urban resilience from a social-ecological-technical/infrastructural system dimensions and sustainability approach.

Our Culture of Collaboration and Inclusion makes our work more meaningful, helps us better learn how cities can adapt, and results in more useful and relevant outcomes. UREx SRN aims to bolster trust-based collaboration and inclusivity in every endeavor.

Urban Resilience to Extremes
Sustainability Research Network
PO Box 875402 – Arizona State University
Tempe, AZ 85287-5402