SRS RN: Connecting Rural and Urban Environments for Equitable Access to Transportation, Telecommunications and Energy (CREEATTE)

The United States faces growing challenges from the combination of climate change, aging infrastructure, and the economic transformations and disruptions driven by rapid technological change in electricity generation, transportation, and high-speed telecommunications. These challenges interact because climate change and aging infrastructure threaten economic well-being, and coordination between different kinds of technological infrastructure and services offers opportunities for economic growth, reducing vulnerability to climate change, and reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

The Southeastern states are especially vulnerable to climate change because many jobs require outdoor work and because agriculture is important to these states’ economies. In contrast with the region’s rapidly growing cities, rural communities in the Southeast also experience high concentrations of poverty and many are poorly served by existing infrastructure.

In this project, a team of engineers, natural scientists, and social scientists will work with representatives of state and local governments, businesses, and communities to understand the challenges they are experiencing. With these groups a plan will be developed for a research network to investigate opportunities for coordinating new electricity, transportation, and communications infrastructure and services to address the needs communities across the Southeast, with an emphasis on the region served by the Tennessee Valley Authority.

In this project, an interdisciplinary team of researchers will engage with a diverse group of stakeholders representing government, business, community, and civic organizations to develop a proposal for a large-scale research network to identify and address grand challenges to sustainable coupled infrastructure systems serving rural and urban communities. This research will advance understanding of interactions and connections among electricity, transportation, and broadband telecommunications infrastructure.

The team frame infrastructure as technology that encompasses social, behavioral, political, and economic aspects of the ways people use infrastructure and the barriers they face in accessing infrastructure services. This project will apply socio-technical and socio-ecological perspectives to developing new insights into the challenges and opportunities of integrating electricity, transportation, and telecommunications infrastructure across urban and rural communities.

This project will also document its process and produce new understanding about how teams of researchers with diverse specialties learn to work effectively together with one another and with diverse stakeholders from government, business, civic, and community organizations. The project will produce a plan for a research network that will deliver practical and useful results for members of diverse constituencies, and will develop new tools for education and public outreach so that members of different stakeholder groups will be able to understand and fully participate in planning for the future.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.