This month, we sit down with two PhD candidates from Arizona State University, Jason Sauer and Yuliya Dzyuban, to talk about their recent trip to Hermosillo, Mexico. We learn the difference between "enchilada" and "enchilado", how temperatures differ in new and old buses, and the unique ways in which people from Hermosillo react to flooding in their city. Despite lacking some of the resources that residents of other cities might have, locals in Hermosillo illustrate a strong capacity to react to and cope with extreme events. Yuliya and Jason wrap up the episode with haikus about their research! 


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If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, e-mail us at [email protected] or find us on Twitter @FutureCitiesPod. Learn more about the Urban Resilience to Extremes Sustainability Research Network (UREx SRN) at www.sustainability.asu.edu/urbanresilience.

Both infrastructure disasters and infrastructure funding bills are back in the news, so
Jason Sauer sat down with Dr. Sam Markolf to talk about a paper Sam published last year about disasters and better infrastructure design. We talk about how old infrastructure “locks us in” to living with its consequences and how it creates path dependencies in creating future forms and functions of cities. We end up talking a lot about Miami, but the lessons here also apply to cities across the US and around the world!

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If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, e-mail us at [email protected] or find us on Twitter @FutureCitiesPod. Learn more about the Urban Resilience to Extremes Sustainability Research Network (UREx SRN) at www.sustainability.asu.edu/urbanresilience.

Hospitals are critical to the health of any city, providing essential care to the communities that they serve. Unlike many other buildings, hospitals can't simply close and send everyone away during an extreme event since it would be dangerous to the patients in need to critical care. In this month's episode, Stephen Elser interviews two leaders from the CannonDesign firm, whose work includes designing hospitals to be resilient to a wide variety of disturbances. We discuss what it means for a hospital to be resilient, the use of landscaping to create "healing environments", and the importance of tailoring a design strategy to meet specific needs. We also hear about their past work in Nantucket Island, Miami, Houston, and Manhattan and the types of design used in those cases.

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Mike Cavanaugh and Brett Farbstein are, respectively, the Directory of Sustainability and the Directory of Resiliency at CannonDesign. To learn more about the firm and the work that they do, visit www.cannondesign.com. 

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If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, e-mail us at [email protected] or find us on Twitter @FutureCitiesPod. Learn more about the Urban Resilience to Extremes Sustainability Research Network (UREx SRN) at www.sustainability.asu.edu/urbanresilience.

Extreme heat and how to cope with it are two major areas of interest in cities like Phoenix, Arizona. Recently, Maricopa County (where Phoenix is) partnered with a group of researchers at ASU to develop new technologies and solutions that are deployable in local communities to help reduce urban heat and improve air quality. This partnership illustrates that extreme heat and its adverse impacts on human health are highly important not only to researchers, but also to those responsible for implementing adaptation strategies. This month, Dr. Yeowon Kim interviews Mark Hartman, the Chief Sustainability Officer at City of Phoenix, Melissa Guardaro, a graduate fellow of UREx SRN, and Charles (Chuck) Redman, the founding director of School of Sustainability at Arizona State University and project director of UREx SRN, about their collaborative efforts on mitigating and adapting to adverse impacts of extreme heat in the metro urban area of Phoenix, Arizona.


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If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, e-mail us at [email protected] or find us on Twitter @FutureCitiesPod. Learn more about the Urban Resilience to Extremes Sustainability Research Network (UREx SRN) at www.sustainability.asu.edu/urbanresilience.

This month, Stephen Elser interviews UREx SRN fellow and ASU School of Sustainability PhD student, Yuliya Dzyuban, about her research involving extreme heat and the ways that people perceive and cope with that heat. They discuss the different aspects that affect one's thermal comfort, Ukrainian bus stops, and how there's a lot we can do to improve  urban design in Phoenix. Yuliya shares her research illustrating that integrating artistic elements into bus stops can actually make people feel cooler than they would in a bus stop with no such elements. Finally, Yuliya becomes a poet and shares with us a beautiful haiku describing her research.

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If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, e-mail us at [email protected] or find us on Twitter @FutureCitiesPod. Learn more about the Urban Resilience to Extremes Sustainability Research Network (UREx SRN) at www.sustainability.asu.edu/urbanresilience.

In this episode, Dr. Yeowon Kim explains the difference between “fail-safe” and “safe-to-fail” infrastructure and how shifting towards this new “safe-to-fail" design paradigm could help cities prepare for extreme events like floods. Risks and uncertainty associated with climate change in the future make predicting infrastructure failures very difficult, so designing and implementing infrastructure to be more flexible in the face of uncertainty is highly important to deal with a wide variety of circumstances. Dr. Kim also talks about the “infrastructure trolley problem” and gives us a brief lesson on Korean poetry! If you have questions about Dr. Kim’s research, you can e-mail her at [email protected]. 

The paper we discuss, entitled "Fail-safe and safe-to-fail adaptation: decision-making for urban flooding under climate change" was published in 2017 in the journal of Climatic Change.

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If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, e-mail us at [email protected] or find us on Twitter @FutureCitiesPod. Learn more about the Urban Resilience to Extremes Sustainability Research Network (UREx SRN) at www.sustainability.asu.edu/urbanresilience.

The proposed addition to the US census of a question regarding the legal status of census respondents poses a major problem for both vulnerability researchers and the vulnerable undocumented immigrant community. Vulnerability scholar and PhD student, Jason Sauer, discusses how the change to the census may interfere with efforts to identify vulnerable communities, and may stymie efforts to make these undocumented communities more resilient to extreme weather events and climate change. He also interviews Masavi Parea of Chispa, an organization advocating for resilience and environmental justice in Phoenix, about his own history as a formerly undocumented immigrant, the ways the undocumented community and Latinos are systematically made vulnerable, and what organizations like Chispa are doing to increase community resilience.

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If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, e-mail us at [email protected] or find us on Twitter @FutureCitiesPod. Learn more about the Urban Resilience to Extremes Sustainability Research Network (UREx SRN) at www.sustainability.asu.edu/urbanresilience.

In this episode, UREx postdoctoral researcher, Sam Markolf, interviews Dr. Dan Eisenberg about resilience from an engineering perspective. When is being more robust the solution? When is flexibility preferred? Dan shares stories to illustrate when it may be advantageous to abandon standards of practice, how to deal with different types of surprises, and the differences between robust design and extensible design. They discuss the importance of designing infrastructure with human-technological interactions in mind. 


If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, e-mail us at [email protected] or find us on Twitter @FutureCitiesPod. Learn more about the Urban Resilience to Extremes Sustainability Research Network (UREx SRN) at www.sustainability.asu.edu/urbanresilience.

UREx post-docs Bernice Rosenzweig and Marissa Matsler report from on-the-ground in Baltimore. Looking to learn more about how the Memorial Day Weekend extreme rain event affected he city, they interviewed Pastor Michael S. Martin of the Stillmeadow Evangelical Free Church, an emergency response hub in a community that was severely flooded. Hear about the emergency response and continuing concerns of those living the aftermath and remediation of the Memorial Day Weekend flood, along with discussion of overlaps with UREx research. See footage of the flood here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3RZ4vK-mi0 and learn more about Team Rubicon, a veterans group that plays a critical role in the response to extreme events, here: https://teamrubiconusa.org/. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, e-mail us at [email protected] or find us on Twitter @FutureCitiesPod. Learn more about the Urban Resilience to Extremes Sustainability Research Network (UREx SRN) at www.sustainability.asu.edu/urbanresilience.

In this episode, Stephen Elser sits down with Drs. Lauren McPhillips and Marissa Matsler to talk about their recent paper published in Frontiers in Built Environment entitled "Temporal Evolution of Green Stormwater Infrastructure Strategies in Three US Cities." We discuss the history of stormwater management in the U.S. and the rise of "green stormwater infrastructure" as a popular solution in cities across the country. The three cities compared here (Baltimore, Phoenix, and Portland) are vastly different from each other in terms of their history, culture, climate, and many other factors, which has led to unique patterns in their implementation of green stormwater infrastructure. Understanding these patterns of implementation allows us to better understand the suite of benefits that these features provide. We also hear haiku summaries of the paper! If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, e-mail us at [email protected] or find us on Twitter @FutureCitiesPod.