Addressing the challenges of sustainable and equitable city management in the 21st century requires innovative
solutions and integration from a range of dedicated actors. In order to form and fortify partnerships of
multi-sectoral collaboration, expand effective governance, and build collective resiliency it is important to
understand the network of existing stewardship organizations. The term ‘stewardship’ encompasses a spectrum of
local agents dedicated to the evolving process of community care and restoration. Groups involved in stewardship
across Baltimore are catalysts of change through a variety of conservation, management, monitoring, transformation,
education, and advocacy activities for the local environment – many with common goals of joint resource management,
distributive justice, and community power sharing. The “environment” here is intentionally broadly defined as land, air, water, energy and more.
The Stewardship Mapping and Assessment Project (STEW-MAP) is a method of data collection and visualization
that tracks the characteristics of organizations and their financial and informational flows across sectors and
geographic boundaries. The survey includes questions about three facets of environmental stewardship groups:
1) organizational characteristics, 2) collaboration networks, and 3) stewardship “turfs” where each organization works.
The data have been analyzed alongside landcover and demographic data and used in multi-city studies
incorporating similar datasets across major urban areas of the U.S. Additional information about the growing
network of cities conducting stewmap can be found here: https://www.nrs.fs.usda.gov/STEW-MAP/
Romolini, Michele; Grove, J. Morgan; Locke, Dexter H. 2013. Assessing and comparing relationships between urban environmental
stewardship networks and land cover in Baltimore and Seattle. Landscape and Urban Planning. 120: 190-207. https://www.fs.usda.gov/research/treesearch/44985
Johnson, M., D. H. Locke, E. Svendsen, L. Campbell, L. M. Westphal, M. Romolini, and J. Grove. 2019. Context matters:
influence of organizational, environmental, and social factors on civic environmental stewardship group intensity. Ecology and Society 24(4): 1. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-10924-240401
Ponte, S. 2023. Social-ecological processes and dynamics of urban forests as green stormwater infrastructure in Maryland,
USA. Doctoral dissertation, University of Maryland, College Park, MD.
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Environmental Justice and Stormwater Management: An East Tampa Case Study Towards Equitable Decision Making.
African American communities experience higher incidences of health disparities due to inequitable exposures to environmental stressors. With the increase of climate threats, stormwater runoff and flooding are major concerns that can be linked to environmental injustice in African American communities, including illegal dumping, and even proximity to major highways. Efforts to improve stormwater ( management overlap with efforts to increase green space through the implementation of urban green infrastructure ( presenting the opportunity for UGIUGIto be utilized as a measure to improve geographical and social equity. However there are still many communities who have yet to transition into using green infrastructure for SW management and research is limited on how equitable current stormwater best management practices(SW BMPs) are, particularly in regards to management processes and decisions . The goal of this research is to characterize SW infrastructure in an African American community in Tampa, East Tampa, through the lens of sustainability and environmental justice to better inform management practices towards equitable management of SW infrastructure in the community.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1735320
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10111442
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- National Alliance for Broader Impacts
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Integrating the Spatial Configurations of Green and Gray Infrastructure in Urban Stormwater Networksmore » « less
Abstract Green infrastructure (GI) practices improve stormwater quality and reduce urban flooding, but as urban hydrology is highly controlled by its associated gray infrastructure (e.g., stormwater pipe network), GI's watershed‐scale performance depends on its siting within its associated watershed. Although many stormwater practitioners have begun considering GI's spatial configuration within a larger watershed, few approaches allow for flexible scenario exploration, which can untangle GI's interaction with gray infrastructure network and assess its effects on watershed hydrology. To address the gap in integrated gray‐green infrastructure planning, we used an exploratory model to examine gray‐green infrastructure performance using synthetic stormwater networks with varying degrees of flow path meandering, informed by analysis on stormwater networks from the Minneapolis‐St. Paul Metropolitan Area, MN, USA. Superimposed with different coverage and placements of GI (e.g., bioretention cells), these gray‐green stormwater networks are then subjected to different rainfall intensities within Environmental Protection Agency's Storm Water Management Model to simulate their hydrological benefits (e.g., peak flow reduction, flood reduction). Although only limited choices of green and gray infrastructure were explored, the results show that the gray infrastructure's spatial configuration can introduce tradeoffs between increased peak flow and increased flooding, and further interacts with GI coverage and placement to reduce peak flow and flooding at low rainfall intensity. However, as rainfall intensifies, GI ceases to reduce peak flow. For integrated gray‐green infrastructure planning, our results suggest that physical constraints of the stormwater networks and the range of rainfall intensities must be considered when implementing GI.
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Emphasizing socio-political context in undergraduate engineering courses is a complex challenge for accredited American engineering programs as they strive to pivot towards a more equitable future. Teaching engineering problem solving by isolating the technical perspective is the dominant culture, and change has been slow and insufficient. Looking at the complex human circumstances in which engineered systems are situated has significant, and sometimes life saving, benefits. On the contrary, the common de-contextualized approach to teaching engineering has been shown to have significant impacts on how students behave as future engineers. Furthermore, eurocentric teaching practices have been documented as a contributor to the lack of gender and ethinic diversity in engineering. Re-contextualizing civil engineering courses has shown to increase students' motivation, sense of social responsibility, and agency. The ASCE Code of Ethics states that “Engineers … first and foremost, protect the health, safety, and welfare of the public,” a notion that was first added to the code in 1977. In recent years, some civil and environmental engineering (CEE) faculty members and programs have responded to this ethical imperative by re-contextualizing civil engineering education in relation to the communities (“the public”) the civil engineer is ethically obligated to protect and serve. To determine the extent of these efforts to re-introduce socio-technical context in CEE curricula, we are conducting a systematic review of the published literature. The objectives of this research are to document, synthesize, and amplify the work of these scholars and to encourage the community of CEE faculty to re-contextualize the knowledge and skills taught in the CEE curriculum. This paper describes the methodology, including search terms and sources examined, reports the preliminary results of the review, and synthesizes the preliminary findings. Future work will propose strategies and structures that could be adapted and employed by civil engineering faculty throughout the U.S. to 1) engage and retain students from groups that historically have been excluded from CEE and 2) better educate CEE students to engineer a more equitable and just future.more » « less
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Emphasizing socio-political context in undergraduate engineering courses is a complex challenge for accredited American engineering programs as they strive to pivot towards a more equitable future. Teaching engineering problem solving by isolating the technical perspective is the dominant culture, and change has been slow and insufficient. Looking at the complex human circumstances in which engineered systems are situated has significant, and sometimes life saving, benefits. On the contrary, the common de-contextualized approach to teaching engineering has been shown to have significant impacts on how students behave as future engineers. Furthermore, eurocentric teaching practices have been documented as a contributor to the lack of gender and ethinic diversity in engineering. Re-contextualizing civil engineering courses has shown to increase students' motivation, sense of social responsibility, and agency. The ASCE Code of Ethics states that “Engineers … first and foremost, protect the health, safety, and welfare of the public,” a notion that was first added to the code in 1977. In recent years, some civil and environmental engineering (CEE) faculty members and programs have responded to this ethical imperative by re-contextualizing civil engineering education in relation to the communities (“the public”) the civil engineer is ethically obligated to protect and serve. To determine the extent of these efforts to re-introduce socio-technical context in CEE curricula, we are conducting a systematic review of the published literature. The objectives of this research are to document, synthesize, and amplify the work of these scholars and to encourage the community of CEE faculty to re-contextualize the knowledge and skills taught in the CEE curriculum. This paper describes the methodology, including search terms and sources examined, reports the preliminary results of the review, and synthesizes the preliminary findings. Future work will propose strategies and structures that could be adapted and employed by civil engineering faculty throughout the U.S. to 1) engage and retain students from groups that historically have been excluded from CEE and 2) better educate CEE students to engineer a more equitable and just future.more » « less
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Emphasizing socio-political context in undergraduate engineering courses is a complex challenge for accredited American engineering programs as they strive to pivot towards a more equitable future. Teaching engineering problem solving by isolating the technical perspective is the dominant culture, and change has been slow and insufficient. Looking at the complex human circumstances in which engineered systems are situated has significant, and sometimes life saving, benefits. On the contrary, the common de-contextualized approach to teaching engineering has been shown to have significant impacts on how students behave as future engineers. Furthermore, eurocentric teaching practices have been documented as a contributor to the lack of gender and ethinic diversity in engineering. Re-contextualizing civil engineering courses has shown to increase students' motivation, sense of social responsibility, and agency. The ASCE Code of Ethics states that “Engineers … first and foremost, protect the health, safety, and welfare of the public,” a notion that was first added to the code in 1977. In recent years, some civil and environmental engineering (CEE) faculty members and programs have responded to this ethical imperative by re-contextualizing civil engineering education in relation to the communities (“the public”) the civil engineer is ethically obligated to protect and serve. To determine the extent of these efforts to re-introduce socio-technical context in CEE curricula, we are conducting a systematic review of the published literature. The objectives of this research are to document, synthesize, and amplify the work of these scholars and to encourage the community of CEE faculty to re-contextualize the knowledge and skills taught in the CEE curriculum. This paper describes the methodology, including search terms and sources examined, reports the preliminary results of the review, and synthesizes the preliminary findings. Future work will propose strategies and structures that could be adapted and employed by civil engineering faculty throughout the U.S. to 1) engage and retain students from groups that historically have been excluded from CEE and 2) better educate CEE students to engineer a more equitable and just future.more » « less
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