SCC-CIVIC-PG Track A: Youth-Centered Civic Technology and Citizen Science for Improving Community Heat Resilience Infrastructure

One challenge for cities, especially under conditions of global climate change, is developing effective ways to keep residents safe from extreme heat. Within cities, historically marginalized neighborhoods often have measurably higher temperatures and fewer economic and social resources to mitigate the impacts of heat. The participation of these groups in planning how cities address heat is critical.

To improve urban resilience to increasing temperatures and heat waves, this project develops a civic-engaged planning process that integrates strategically deployed sensor technologies with a community-informed data hub to forecast areas most in need of heat reduction intervention. The project will train city youth to collect, monitor, and communicate data on urban temperatures and experiences of heat through a citizen science program integrated with public decision-making processes.

This project involves academic, government, public schools, nonprofit, and resident partners from the City of Roanoke, Virginia.

This project incorporates novel linkages between processes of resident and organizational learning, social trust, coordination, and governance capacity necessary for long-term adaptation. The project builds on a previous place-based STEM and urban planning citizen science program implemented in Roanoke, VA. The current citizen science efforts will be expanded to include the deployment of wearable temperature sensors and stationary temperature monitoring equipment, as well as training youth in Photovoice methods using photography to document the effects of heat on their communities while simultaneously learning the language of urban planning.

Key research questions include: (1) How do informal educators characterize leverage points to engage families around citizen science and heat resilience? (2) How can civic technologies help forge collaborations necessary to proactively address extreme heat in cities? and (3) How can digital infrastructure for diverse types of data be designed to facilitate how residents and government officials make sense of the problem of extreme heat and priorities for heat resilience? Outcomes include the deployment of a civic technology platform that will be co-designed with government officials, residents, and academic partners to incorporate the quantitative and qualitative data generated through youth and family engagement, as well as the development of replicable materials and methods to increase diverse citizen participation in increased urban resilience to the impacts of climate change.

This project is in response to the Civic Innovation Challenge program—Track A. Living in a changing climate: pre-disaster action around adaptation, resilience, and mitigation—and is a collaboration between NSF, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Department of Energy.

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.