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Vol. 1, No. 6 – Spring & Summer 2019
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MEMBER PRODUCTS
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PEOPLE CONNECTED
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Scenario Workshops
- Portland Workshop 1 – September 26, 2019
- Valdivia Workshop 2 – October 21, 2019
- Hermosillo Workshop 2 – Fall 2019 (exact date TBC)
2019 Virtual All-Hands Meeting (VAHM)
November 13, 2019
This virtual meeting is an opportunity for our members to get together and share ideas, highlight some of the work happening around the network, and discuss network goals for the 5th year of the UREx SRN. For more details about this event, please reach out to Emily Key.
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COMMUNICATING OUR RESEARCH
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Celebrating 2 YEARS of the FUTURE CITIES Podcast!
Initiated and produced by the 2019-2020 UREx Senior Grad Fellow, Stephen Elser, the Future Cities podcast finished its second year in production and continues into year 3. Future Cities is dedicated to understanding urban resilience and how we can achieve it. The podcast has grown a remarkable listenership in 59 countries and 427 cities around the world. Be sure to keep listening to the Future Cities and keep your podcast topic ideas coming in; the next episode of Future Cities could feature your research and highlight your community connections!
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Conferences of Interest to Network Members
- 2nd Annual Climate Correction Conference, University of Central Florida. October 3, 2019.
- Transformations 2019, Santiago, Chile. October 16-18, 2019.
- RISE Conference 2019 (in partnership w/ NCSE), University of Albany, New York. November 18-20, 2019.
- 2019 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP25), Santiago, Chile. December 2-13, 2019
- AGU Fall 2019 Meeting, San Francisco, CA. December 9-13, 2019.
- NCSE 2020 Annual Conference, Washington, DC. January 6-9, 2020.
- Transforming Transportation: Connecting People for Sustainable Growth, Washington, DC. January 16-17, 2020.
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Stephen Balogh
Postdoc, Environmental Protection Agency
Dr. Stephen Balogh is an environmental scientist who currently works for the US EPA Office of Research and Development. He studies communities and their connections to the environment across global, regional and local scales – including ecosystem services, energy and material flows, nutrient issues, and restoration. He has collaborated with scientists, academics and stakeholders on a broad range of interdisciplinary research. These projects range in scale from regional optimizations of nitrogen removal to neighborhood-level analyses of ecosystem services and urban metabolism in Puerto Rico. He is currently working with UREx researchers to quantify the energy cost of cities’ efforts to increase resilience to extreme events and climate change. Prior to his current position, he worked as a visiting assistant professor at SUNY-ESF and adjunct at the Whitman School of Management at Syracuse University, where he taught courses about urban ecology, renewable energy, and sustainable business strategies. His PhD dissertation is entitled "Feeding and Fueling the Cities of the 21st Century." He has published eleven papers and several book chapters on the nexus of the environment, energy, and the economy. He co-edited the textbook Understanding Urban Ecology, published in 2019.
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Arun P. Kumar
Graduate Fellow, Portland State University
Arun P. Kumar is a PhD student in the Earth, Environment and Society (EES) program under the supervision of Dr. Heejun Chang and Dr. Jola Ajibade at the Department of Geography at Portland State University. His research interests are mainly in the areas of climate change adaptation, sustainability, resource management, and associated socioeconomic and cultural impacts. Other research work in Fall 2019 focuses on urban vulnerabilities of various US cities as part of the UREX-SRN project with Dr. Heejun Chang. In addition to his education and training overseas, Arun earned his BS in Geography from Arizona State University.
Arun has an extensive professional background in physical and human branches of Geography, and has also worked in other related but diverse fields such as environmental consultancy, content-writing, local and state government, non-profit management, renewable energy development, and space research, mostly with organizations in Asia and Europe. He is also a published author of several novels in English and Kannada languages.
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Anais Roque-Antonetty
Graduate Associate, University of Puerto Rico
Anais Roque-Antonetty is a first-year PhD student in Environmental Social Sciences at the School of Human Evolution and Social Change. Her broad interests include resilience, disaster recovery, environmental justice, governance, social networks and community development. Before pursuing higher education, Anais worked with HUD in Puerto Rico providing tools to residents that wanted to obtain a job. In addition, she worked as a research assistant in the NSF project: Critical Resilient Interdependent Infrastructure Systems and Processes (CRISP-Puerto Rico) collecting data (i.e. stakeholder identification and interviews) and analyzing energy governance for sustainable transitions to renewable energy in the island. She obtained her BA in Political Sciences from the University of Puerto Rico, Mayaguez Campus.
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Efrain Vizuete
Graduate Associate, Instituto Tecnologico de Sonora
Efrain Vizuete studied Environmental Engineering and Natural Risk Management in Ecuador. He received his Master of Science in Natural Resources in the Technological Institute of Sonora (Mexico) under The National Science and Technology Council (CONACyT) Scholarship. He worked monitoring nutrients using ion exchange resins in a natural areas. He also worked as an academic laboratory technician performing research and sample analysis activities in a Segmented Flow AutoAnalyzer. He worked as a teacher in the environmental engineering career (ITSON) teaching the subject of Fundamentals of Environmental Engineering. Currently he is a PhD student in Engineering Sciences and he is interested in heavy metal accumulation in urban soils and the concentrations of heavy metals in rainfall under a seasonal period in semiarid ecosystems (Hermosillo and Maricopa County, AZ). He also is interested in dust particles linked to heavy metal pollution.
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Postdoc Spotlight: Mathieu Feagan and the Innovation Plazas
Mathieu (Matt) Feagan asks: How can we showcase what practitioners are doing and thinking on the theme of urban resilience and green infrastructure implementation? The Innovation Plazas were one response to this question, organized as a series of UREx SRN online and face-to-face cross-city dialogues for practitioners and researchers to:
- voice what needs to change in our approach to building greater urban resilience
- showcase and discuss the relevance of specific examples of successful green infrastructure implementation
- increase our network connectivity and strengthen our researcher-practitioner relations, while also tapping into outside expertise
From finance to flooding, from Latin American perspective to resilience hubs, and from measuring health benefits to community based heat action planning, the UREx SRN has hosted a total of 10 Innovation Plazas between our 2017 and 2019 All-Hands Meetings – and we expect to host at least one more before AHM 2020. Matt says, 'This has been an opportunity to develop new skills in the pedagogy of (online) group facilitation in a way that puts a face to the idea of knowledge co-production and contributes to realizing our unique capacity as a network of over 150 actors in various positions and roles across 9 cities and 17 academic institutions in the USA and Latin America." A plaza is “a public square, marketplace or similar open space in a built-up area” (OED online), and as the list Innovation Plaza ideas below suggests, the concept has provided a creative and open ended space for imagining a resilient future together.
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Urban Resilience Reading Group (URRG) & 2019-2020 Graduate Research Grants
The URRG grad students and postdoctoral researchers had an eventful spring semester! An existing network city, including Atlanta, was selected by each student and small city groups formed (2-3 students). City presentations were then given to rest of the URRG class introducing the general city profile, geographical and meteorological characteristics, important issue and ongoing efforts for urban resilience in the city, and scenarios workshops outputs for applicable cities. Large group discussions of each presentation led to 3 Research Questions and the class again divided into small groups to further investigate the city data as it applies to an alternative future for that city.
Students were also invited to present their alternative futures for their city(ies) at our 4th Annual All-Hands Meeting in the session titled, UREx Has Talent for a chance to secure 1 of the 4 UREx graduate research grant opportunities this year. See below for the grad grant recipients - including the AHM winners - and the research they're conducting with their grad grant award!
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International Research Experience for Students:
Hermosillo, Mexico
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The second iteration of the Resilient Urban Latin America (RULA) International Research Experience for Students (IRES) was conducted over the summer in Hermosillo, Mexico. Under the mentorship of Dr. Agustin Morua Robles and Dr. Nancy Grimm (not pictured), IRES students were able to conduct valuable research pertaining to the city infrastructure, transit system, and dengue data projections in Hermosillo. Student researchers also had the valuable benefit of working closely with the Director of IMPLAN (economic impact analysis for planning), Lupita Peñuñuri and other city officials. Dr. Javier Navarro, the SRN's newest postdoc, and other students from the Instituto Tecnológico de Sonora and the Universidad de Sonora, were also able to work collaboratively with the IRES students (below) on inclusive research resulting in actionable feedback for the city of Hermosillo.
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Jason Sauer, ASU Graduate Fellow
Research: Participatory Flood Mapping and Testing the Limits of Rational Method and Blue Spot Method Predictions of Flood Risk
This research was a continuation of the flood modeling originally done in the Hermosillo Scenarios Workshop. Future action will be taken for research exploring floods and the current infrastructure of the city. For a full account of his research and Jason’s reflections, click here.
Yuliya Dzyuban, ASU Graduate Fellow
Research: Heat perception and thermal comfort of public transit riders in Hermosillo
This research was an extension of the study Yuliya conducted on the public transit system in Phoenix, Arizona. This type of research had never been conducted before in Hermosillo, and Yuliya was able to partner with the IRES team to conduct summer research for the UREx SRN. To learn more about the research that was conducted and next steps for the city, click here.
Elana Berlin, Stockton University Undergraduate
Research: Climate Data and Dengue Incident Analysis & ArcGIS Course Instructor
Elana researched a decade worth of climate data and reported dengue incidents and explored through various applications for a sense of where the most vulnerable areas in Hermosillo. For more on her research and her reflections while in Mexico, click here.
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Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) Summer 2019 Program
UREx SRN partnered with several research networks this summer to offer a collaborative research experience for undergraduate students interested in urban related topics. Network participants included: CAP LTER, UWIN, Sabo lab, National Weather Service, and NASA. Emily Key (UREx SRN's Sr. Education Program Coordinator) and Mark Watkins (CAP LTER's Program Manager) facilitated the summer long program, and guest contributors included Chris Sanchez, Dr. Marta Berbés-Blázquez, and Jennifer Jenkin, who were all invited to talk about their experience of a "life after your undergrad" perspective for a grad student, postdoc, and non-profit practitioner (respectively). UREx's own Grad Fellow, Alysha Helmrich, also taught a science communications workshop (picture 1), and the summer program concluded with research presentations from each of the REUs (picture 2). For a full list of this year's participants, as well as their research and respective mentors, click this link.
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