SAI: Enhancing Flood Resilience in Coastal Urban Communities

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. Coastal cities across the world face new frequencies and intensities of risk associated with storms and flooding because of a changing climate. This is particularly true in the United States, which is expected to face above-average risks for damage to coastal property and infrastructure driven by sea level rise and storm surge. Coastal cities need to prepare for these challenges by boosting the resilience of both physical and social infrastructures. This SAI project investigates how engaging communities directly in stormwater management could help to make property and infrastructures more resilient. A special focus of the research is how coastal communities can make the best use of green stormwater infrastructure, where natural processes help communities to manage stormwater more effectively. The research explores two interventions to improve upon conventional stormwater infrastructure approaches. One is to increase civic engagement in infrastructural design, implementation, and maintenance processes (infrastructural citizenship). This improves stormwater infrastructure design by harnessing local knowledge of flood risks and engaging a broader range of stakeholders in the imagination of possible social solutions. The other is to utilize the potential of green stormwater infrastructure techniques, such as rain gardens, bioswales, and green detention/retention basins. This creates more frequent, affordable, and substantive opportunities for civic engagement than conventional stormwater infrastructure. With a convergence of expertise in anthropology, urban design, and civil engineering, the project includes field research, participatory design work and hydrological impact analysis in three demographically distinct, flood prone Houston, TX neighborhoods. The project aims to produce innovative portable and actionable urban designs that can guide stormwater infrastructure development processes in Houston, TX and beyond. This award is supported by the Directorate for Social, Behavioral, and Economic (SBE) Sciences, the Directorate for Geosciences, and the Directorate for Engineering. 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.