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Vol. 1, No. 2 – January 2017
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MEMBER PRODUCTS
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PEOPLE CONNECTED
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2017 VIRTUAL ALL-HANDS MEETING
We held a virtual network-wide meeting on January 16, 2017 to discuss progress of the working groups and city teams, as well as to dive deeper into some of the main cross-cutting themes that have emerged across the network.
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2ND ANNUAL ALL-HANDS MEETING
Our second annual All-Hands Meeting will be held March 20-23, 2017 at The New School in New York City, New York. The week-long meeting will include plenary presentations from NYC stakeholders, practitioner panels and dialogues, poster sessions from network members, workshops from each of the eight working groups, and additional sessions focused on specific projects and themes occurring across the network. Our NYC Practitioner Lead, Adam Parris (Executive Director at the Science and Resilience Institute at Jamaica Bay), is also hosting a field trip to Jamaica Bay where he will walk us through the effects of Hurricane Sandy.
Science Communication Training at AHM 2017
UREx SRN Fellows will attend a two-day COMPASS science communication workshop in NYC the weekend prior to the All-Hands Meeting. The training will include coaching, role-play, and engagement sessions to help our young scientists build cross-cultural and transdisciplinary communication skills and learning experiences with peers, colleagues, public groups, policymakers and the media.
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SCENARIO WORKSHOPS
The Scenarios Working Group (SWG) led a workshop in November 2016 at The New School in NYC with research members and city leads from San Juan, New York and Valdivia to design the upcoming scenario workshops, which will take place in 2017 on February 3rd, March 24th and May 11th respectively. Participants had a chance to hear community and municipal partners, tour Harlem (which will be the focus of the first NYC workshop), and drink some seriously good coffee.
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The first round of scenario workshops have the purpose of creating visions of alternative futures on these three cities, each of which faces a particular climate challenge. San Juan will focus on flooding (urban, coastal and riverine), Harlem will focus on extreme heat and urban flooding, and Valdivia will look at the interaction of urban flood and drought. Scenarios are created in a variety of ways: sometimes the starting point are existing governance plans that are projected into the future; sometimes it is best to focus on a known and recurrent project and examine different solutions; sometimes the goal is to push participants to think radically different and explore transformative options. Cities decide the types of scenarios to be developed in each workshop to best suits their interests.
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UREx SRN BLOG LAUNCH
We have officially launched our new UREx Blog, which is open to discussions and themes related to the UREx Sustainability Research Network. This blog is another way that we can keep information flowing in this large distributed network and the intent is to have network members not only participate in the discussions, but also contribute to the blog by posting their own network ideas, opinions, news, events, and other UREx topics. The UREx Blog, housed on the homepage of our website (URExSRN.net), is a public forum open to all interested parties. We are excited to start this new form of communication and we encourage all of you to begin thinking about topics that you would like to see on the UREx Blog (if you have a post in mind, please contact Angela Grobstein to get it added).
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Current projects spanning our large distributed network
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CITY PRACTITIONER SPOTLIGHT
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New York City
Since Hurricane Sandy hit New York City in Oct 2012, practitioners, researchers, and community groups have increased their efforts to confront the challenges of extreme weather events. In the context of the UREx SRN, this diverse network of groups is co-led by the Science and Resilience Institute (SRI), with a special focus on flooding in Jamaica Bay, and We ACT, an environmental action group with a focus on environmental justice in Harlem and Northern Manhattan.
In November 2016, a number of actors came together to organize the basis of the upcoming scenarios workshop process, including the US Forest Urban Field Station and the Mayor’s office of Recovery and Resilience. These productive and insightful meetings have led to a very exciting agenda for All Hands and the scenarios process.
One particularly intriguing new book to emerge through these researcher-practitioner collaborations is Eric Sanderson, Bill Solecki, John Waldman and Adam Parris’s new book entitled, Prospects for Resilience: Insights from Jamaica Bay. Informed by insights of more than fifty scholars and practitioners (thanks to the many of you who contributed!), the book establishes a broad framework for understanding resilience practice in cities and sets out a process for grappling with the many meanings of resilience. Prospects for Resilience is not only for those working in Jamaica Bay or other urban watersheds, but for all researchers, urban planners, students, and others who need to create more resilient cities.
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Practitioners and Researchers at the NYC Scenarios Planning Workshop
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San Juan
Over the past three months, researchers and practitioners of the San Juan City Team have been collaborating on a Data Gap Analysis to identify the availability and quality of social, ecological, and technological data for the city of San Juan, as well as any gaps that require attention to understand vulnerability and resilience of the city from a social-ecological-technological systems (SETS) perspective. We held two workshops, one on October 19th and the second on December 5th, where we invited data managers and practitioners from key municipal, state, and federal agencies. About twenty-five people attended the workshops. We are in the process of writing a report to share with practitioners and other stakeholders. The Data Gap Analysis will also be used by the San Juan 100 Resilient City in their efforts to develop a Resilience Strategy for the city, and by the Scenarios Working Group (SWG) in the scenario workshops to be held in 2017.
The team is also working closely with the Scenarios Working Group to gear up towards the first participatory scenario workshop to be held in San Juan on February 3rd, 2017. In November we attended a SWG planning workshop in New York City where we developed initial work plans for the San Juan scenario workshops. We also had the opportunity to learn about resilience strategies taking place in NYC Jamaica Bay and Harlem areas. We are now in the process of sending invitations to workshop participants, assembling data and maps, and designing workshop activities.
Practitioners in San Jan have specific concerns around stakeholder inclusivity, financial tools for implementation of resilience projects, and scenario development that takes the fiscal constraints the country is facing. We are very excited to be confronting these concerns as the first city launching into the scenarios planning process at the end of January 2017!
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Practitioners and Researchers at a San Juan Data Gap Analysis Workshop
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Valdivia
The Valdivia, Chile city team is a diverse group of neighborhood, city, regional practitioners and professional representatives. We are lucky to work closely with an enthusiastic team (“mesa de trabajo”) who are eager to integrate their knowledge and co-develop new ideas for Valdivia with the UREx project.
Our team includes representatives from Activa Valdivia and Valdivia Sustainability Consortium; from community and civil groups, such as the Community Union of Neighborhoods and the Center of Wetlands; from the municipality and regional governments, such as the Municipal Secretary of Community Planning, Departments of the Environment and Public Works; Regional Ministry of Public Works, Ministry of Housing and Urbanism; Subsecretariat of Regional Development; National Office of Emergency; and from the private sector, such as Chamber of Construction.
Through regular meetings, this team has more clearly articulated the collective concerns and needs of Valdivia in relation to extreme climatic events - especially the juxtaposition of increasing winter “drought” and heavy winter rains. While winter rains can cause urban flooding, the increasing number of non-rainy days in the winter leads to public health concerns with dangerous levels of particulate air pollution from wood burning stoves used to heat the majority of buildings in the region. As these concerns will persist into the future, we are working together to analyze and address them at different scales. For example, we are planning our first larger participatory community workshop in May 2017. We will build upon the visions and goals of Valdivia’s existing Sustainability Plan of Action, and other local planning instruments, to co-design 5 alternative future scenarios of the city of Valdivia - integrating features of community inclusivity, technology, the environment, and resilience to both extreme flooding and drought.
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Practitioner "Mesa de Trabajo" in Valdivia
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POSTDOC BIOGRAPHY SPOTLIGHT
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Postdocs
Andrew Ballinger, North Carolina State University
Marta Berbés-Blázquez, Arizona State University*
Khila Dahal, The New School*
Yaella Depietri, The New School*
Mathieu Feagan, Arizona State University*
Margaret Hinrichs, Arizona State University*
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Sam Markolf, Arizona State University
Janet Marsden, Syracuse University
Lauren McPhillips, Arizona State University
Bernice Rosenzweig, CUNY-Hunter College*
Vivian Verduzco, Instituto Tecnológico de Sonora*
*Bio below
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Marta Berbés-Blázquez
SWG Postdoc Fellow
Dr. Marta Berbés-Blázquez is an interdisciplinary scholar whose work explores change in social-ecological systems influenced by resilience thinking and political ecology. Her doctoral work (York University, Canada) examined the interplay between ecosystem services and human well-being in resource-dependent communities in Costa Rica. As a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Waterloo (Canada) Marta explored vulnerability to climate change in coastal communities in the Caribbean and Eastern Canada.
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Khila Dahal
NYC SWG Postdoc Fellow
Dr. Khila Dahal is a post-doctoral fellow at The New School Environmental Studies Program in NYC. He joined UREx SRN in August 2016. He is primarily associated with the Scenarios Working Group of the project, with a focus on scenario modeling. As a core member of the modeling team, Khila develops and implements computational models (most often spatially explicit) to generate different scenarios of future cities. Khila is a GIScientist and received his PhD in Geography from Texas State University with specialization in computational urban geography and holds a Master's degree in Environmental Studies from Michigan Technological University. He uses advanced GIS tools and techniques, and other goecomputation methods including Cellular Automata and Agent-Based Modeling to explore various aspects of urban resilience. Before joining The New School, Khila worked for Boise State University as a postdoctoral researcher as part of the Idaho NSF-EPSCoR project. He also worked as a GIS analyst and researcher for the UN-funded International Transboundary Lakes Program. He has published a dozen plus research articles in various journals and technical reports.
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Yaella Depietri
NYC SWG & SETS WG Postdoc Associate
Dr. Yaella Depietri earned her PhD in Environmental Sciences at the Institut de Ciència i Tecnologia Ambientals (ICTA), Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona (UAB) (Spain) in 2015. Her PhD has been carried out in collaboration with the United Nations University, Institute for Environment and Human Security (UNU-EHS), Bonn (Germany) focusing on urban vulnerability and the role of ecosystem services in mitigating hydro-meteorological risk in cities. Previous to that, she worked as a junior researcher at the Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei in Italy on different EU project related to aspects water resources management. Currently she is a Post Doctorate scholar at The New School for Public Engagement, New York City working on assessing the vulnerability of the city to multiple hazards as well as the role of green infrastructure in reducing risk.
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Mathieu Feagan
TIWG Postdoc Fellow
Dr. Mathieu L.S. Feagan is an interdisciplinary scholar with expertise in qualitative research design and brings experience coordinating academic and activist communities of practice on issues of environmental justice and knowledge mobilization. His research centers on ecological consciousness as a collection of different ways of knowing and intervening in dominant institutional contexts. Matt has a PhD in Communication and Culture and a Master’s in Canadian and Native Studies. He has lectured with the Department of Sociology at Ryerson University, and held a postdoctoral fellowship with the Department of Leadership, Higher and Adult Education at the University of Toronto.
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Margaret Hinrichs
NEWG & EDWG Postdoc Associate
Dr. Margaret Hinrichs wants to change the world by improving and enhancing interdisciplinary collaboration in team science. She studies how people coordinate and collaborate in the interest of scientific breakthroughs and innovation, with an emphasis on the organizing and leadership processes of research networks. As a qualitative scholar, Margaret takes a humanistic approach to studying interdisciplinary collaboration and focuses on the shared stories, localized perspectives, and lived experiences of scientists and practitioners working together toward a brighter future. She hopes that her work supports sustainable solutions to complex problems. Margaret earned her PhD in Organizational Communication from Arizona State University in August 2016.
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Bernice Rosenzweig
CCWG & SETS WG Postdoc Fellow
Dr. Bernice Rosenzweig is a Research Associate in the Environmental Sciences Initiative of the CUNY Advanced Science Research Center (ASRC). Her background is in environmental geology and engineering, and her current research interests include urban ecosystem services, urban resilience analytics and regional-scale modeling of urban land use. Prior to joining the UREx project, Bernice worked in project management and stakeholder outreach with the ASRC Environmental Sciences Initiative.
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Vivian Verduzco
Hermosillo Postdoc Fellow
Dr. Vivian Verduzco is an Eco-Hydrologist collaborating with the Climate and Hydrological Extremes (CHEx), City Comparison (CCWG) and Scenarios (SWG) working groups. She is working on data acquisition from government agencies, decision makers and developers of a Latin American city with the goal of providing assistance in the evaluation of the impacts of extreme climate related events in the infrastructure and habitants. Vivian graduated from Sonora Technological Institute (ITSON), with Bachelor’s degree as a civil engineer. After graduation she completed a master degree on Natural Resources and then a PhD in Ecohydrology. Vivian is very interested in the evaluation and study of urban complex systems to provide rational-heuristic solutions comprising technical, environmental and ecological considerations.
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Urban Resilience Reading Group (URRG)
URRG wrapped up its first semester in December 2016. This distributed seminar, facilitated by Nancy Grimm, included 20+ graduate students from all of our SRN cities and several of the postdocs associated with the network. Most of the semester was spent exploring issues associated with urban development, sustainability, and resilience in Latin American cities. During the last two weeks, graduate students gave brief presentations on their proposed doctoral research, and it is already clear that there are a lot of exciting projects in the works and many potential synergies. For Spring 2017, UREx postdocs are coordinating a schedule that includes interdisciplinary skill-sharing related to the participating students' proposed research foci.
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Collaboration Groups and Student Engagement
A group of postdocs and grad students met in October 2016 to discuss interest in organizing informal groups around a wide range of UREx-related topics with the objective of collectively comparing work in fun and helpful ways. These and other student-led forums should be used to develop formalized, connected and collaborative workshops across the network that are sponsored by UREx.
Please remember to keep us posted on group activities at your institutions. We look forward to the growing number of self-organized student groups, mentoring opportunities, and, engaging, cross-disciplinary student activities that span the network and support UREx research in 2017!
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Interests, Excitement and Working Groups
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Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU)
UREx SRN is looking forward to another engaging summer with undergraduate students! A Call for Proposals was distributed to the network in December 2016 and final decisions on UREx-funded research opportunities will be finalized in the coming days. We will announce the opportunities and open the application process in February. Any REU students whose research is related to urban resilience, even if funded by external sources, are invited to join the UREx REU Urban Resilience Forum 2017 for bi-weekly workshops and other fun activities!
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UREx Urban Resilience Forum REUs presenting their research at the January 2017 CAP LTER All Scientists Meeting and Poster Symposium.
Well done REUs!
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Postdoc Gingerbread Masterpiece
"Resilient Landscape" crafted for the winter holidays
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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
- San Juan Scenarios Workshop. San Juan, PR. February 3, 2017.
- City Comparisons Workshop. Tempe, AZ. February 9-10, 2017.
- Science Communication Workshop. New York, NY. March 18-19, 2017.
- 2017 All Hands Meeting. New York, NY. March 20-23, 2017.
- NYC Scenarios Workshop. New York, NY. March 24, 2017.
- Valdivia Scenarios Workshop. Valdivia, Chile. May 11, 2017.
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Members Presenting UREx Related Work
January
- Nancy B. Grimm, Charles L. Redman, David Chandler, Elizabeth M. Cook, Mikhail V. Chester, David M. Iwaniec, Timon McPhearson, Thaddeus Miller, and Tischa Muñoz-Erickson. "Designing social-ecological-technological systems (SETS) to build resilience to extreme weather-related events in urban environments," AGU Chapman Conference: Extreme Climate Events, San Juan, PR. January 22-27, 2017.
February
- Melissa Guardaro, Chuck L. Redman, Ray Quay, and David Hondula, "Creating a Cooler Phoenix," City of Phoenix, Phoenix, AZ. February 7, 2017.
- Yuliya Dzyuban, "Reimagining Transportation," Friends of Transit 15th Annual Conference. Phoenix, AZ, February 17, 2017.
March
- Hallie Eakin, "Making the Invisible, Visible: Socio-Institutional Infrastructure in Urban Resilience,” New Perspectives on Sustainability and Resilience, Center for the Environment, Purdue University, March 23-24, 2017.
April
- Yaella Depietri, "Multi-hazard risk assessment in a coastal megacity: Identifying hotspots for ecosystem based adaptation in New York City," 2017 AAG Annual Meeting. Boston, MA, April 5-9, 2017 (in collaboration with MEGADAPT).
- David Manuel-Navarrete, "The Cognitive Dimension of Socio-Political Infrastructure: Mental models analysis of a social-hydrological system in Mexico City," 2017 AAG Annual Meeting. Boston, MA, April 5-9, 2017 (in collaboration with MEGADAPT).
- Chingwen Cheng and Joomee Lee, "Land Use Patterns, Water Quality, and Social Vulnerability: A Spatial Analysis of Phoenix’s Drainage Systems," US-IALE 2017 Meeting: People, Places, Patterns: Linking Landscape Heterogeneity and Socio-Environmental Systems. Baltimore, MD, April 9-14, 2017.
May
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Other Conferences of Interest to Network Members
- ICSI 2017: 19th International Conference on Sustainable Infrastructure. Paris, France, February 23-24, 2017.
- ASLO 2017 Aquatic Sciences Meeting. Honolulu, HI, February 26-March 3, 2017.
- 2017 Climate Leadership Conference. Chicago, IL, March 1-3, 2017.
- RES/CON 2017. New Orleans, LA, March 7-9, 2017.
- American Association of Geographers (AAG). Boston, MA, April 5-9, 2017.
- US-IALE 2017 Meeting: People, Places, Patterns: Linking Landscape Heterogeneity and Socio-Environmental Systems. Baltimore, MD, April 9-13, 2017.
- European Geosciences Union (EGU). Vienna, Austria, April 23-28, 2017.
- American Planning Association 2017 conference (focus on NYC coastal resilience track). New York City, NY, May 6-9, 2017.
- Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Urban Infrastructure History and the Social Sciences. NYU Paris. Paris, France, May 30-June 1, 2017.
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PARTICIPATING ORGANIZATIONS
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