SAI: Community-Centered Sociotechnical Innovation to Tackle Urban Polycrises

Strengthening American Infrastructure (SAI) is an NSF Program seeking to stimulate human-centered fundamental and potentially transformative research that strengthens America’s infrastructure. Effective infrastructure provides a strong foundation for socioeconomic vitality and broad quality of life improvement. Strong, reliable, and effective infrastructure spurs private-sector innovation, grows the economy, creates jobs, makes public-sector service provision more efficient, strengthens communities, promotes equal opportunity, protects the natural environment, enhances national security, and fuels American leadership.

To achieve these goals requires expertise from across the science and engineering disciplines. SAI focuses on how knowledge of human reasoning and decision-making, governance, and social and cultural processes enables the building and maintenance of effective infrastructure that improves lives and society and builds on advances in technology and engineering.

The design of technological infrastructures in many U.S. cities contributes to multiple social, economic, and environmental crises. Where facilities are sited, unfair practices of administration, and inequitable distributions of costs and services have been linked to urban heat, air pollution, housing scarcity, energy insecurity, racial inequality, and environmental injustice.

These crises are often place-based and reinforce one another. A key opportunity for innovation and strengthening of American infrastructure is to redesign infrastructures in ways that reduce their contributions to inequality, insecurity, and injustice in the communities that live in and around them. This requires new methods of infrastructure design that allow cities to: (1) reimagine technologies and how they provide services to cities and communities; (2) develop new tools and methods for evaluating the human outcomes of infrastructure design; and (3) create new approaches to infrastructure planning that enable diverse communities and stakeholders to collaborate in the co-design of solutions that address multiple social, economic, and environmental problems.

This project advances innovative approaches to design and planning of energy infrastructures, with an emphasis on the Phoenix, Arizona metropolitan region. Energy infrastructure failures currently contribute to many social, economic, and environmental crises facing Phoenix and other U.S. cities. Energy infrastructure redesign offers an opportunity to simultaneously address multiple crises, especially by finding ways to design future energy infrastructures that are carbon-neutral, provide significant benefits to communities, and advance community goals.

To accomplish these goals, this project engages communities, municipalities, and energy utilities in co-designing energy infrastructure solutions that are built using distributed solar energy and battery storage technologies and deployed within the city itself. The project maps the geography of potential urban solar deployment in Phoenix and establishes a collaboration with communities and stakeholders to co-identify potential solar infrastructure designs, co-develop evaluation criteria and methods for assessing the community benefits that would flow from those designs, and co-create research insights that inform energy infrastructure planning decisions.

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.