SRN: Integrated Urban Infrastructure Solutions for Environmentally Sustainable, Healthy and Livable Cities

Project summary:

This National Science Foundation Sustainability Research Networks (SRN) project brings together a network of universities, cities and industry partners to jointly co-develop the science of sustainability, the practical knowledge, and the policy innovations to enable urban infrastructure transformation toward environmentally-sustainable, healthy, and livable (EHL) cities. Three primary research thrusts support this transformation.

Theme 1 of the SRN develops the science of integrated measurement of environmental sustainability, health and livability (EHL), capturing linkages, synergies and trade-offs, considering human-environment interactions with all the seven infrastructure sectors together.

Theme 2 of the SRN develops new principles for designing integrated social-infrastructural solutions, with engineering and social science fully assimilated across home-, neighborhood- and city-regional scales, drawing upon innovative field experiments underway in the SRN cities (7 U.S. and 1 Asian) linked with test beds in SRN research labs.

Finally, Theme 3 operationalizes the new knowledge created in Themes 1 and 2, to describe the dynamic interactions between natural systems, urban design, infrastructures, and people in a democratized simulation environment, which expands upon a platform used by cities across the globe to allow multiple stakeholders to explore city futures with distributed infrastructure scenarios based.