Project overview

This project helps improve water infrastructure to alleviate flooding and prepare for climate change and extreme weather. Flooding disproportionately affects overlooked constituencies due to a historical lack of investment in water infrastructure. We need new policies and innovative stormwater management approaches to address current flooding concerns, prepare for future climate change, and ensure equitable water management. However, this can only happen with active contributions from community members. We are crowdsourcing stormwater infrastructure-related data, educating community members about water infrastructure, and analyzing differences among the communities from which these data are drawn. The results are being used to develop policy prescriptions to prepare infrastructure for equitable solutions to climate change. This project aims to improve the knowledge of society, particularly overlooked constituencies in Chicago, with respect to water infrastructure.

Read more

Objectives

1. Improve citizen science and citizen education about water infrastructure [more details]

2. Assess water infrastructure differences between socio-economically disparate communities [more details]

3. Identify viable policy options using both economic and policy analysis [more details]

Team

The project team has expertise in hydrological modeling, political science, geography, and landscape architecture, urban design, and design justice methodologies that are combined to address water infrastructure, providing detailed updates of future inundation risks under various scenarios of infrastructure investment and climate change to communities that are affected.

Ron Henderson

co-principal investigator

Hao Huang

co-principal investigator

David Lampert

co-principal investigator

Matthew Shapiro

Lead Principal investigator

Brent Stephens

Senior personnel

Maria Villalobos Hernandez

co-principal investigator

Rashed Al Sakarnah

research assistant
CAEE

Darren Christoper

research assistant
COMPUTER SCIENCE

Deanna Exline

research assistant
CAEE

Caleb Hadley

FORMER RA
Landscape arch

Dharini Kanagaraj

research assistant
CAEE

Boyang Lu

research assistant
CAEE

Farzad Mohammadi

research assistant
CAEE

Eli Paschke

research assistant
Humanities

Michael Sansone

research assistant
CAEE

Irem Tekogul

research assistant
INSTITUTE OF DESIGN

Adelina Zahner

research assistant
BIO

Partners

MWRD

CMAP

CNT

CUASHI