Exploring a Research Network of Urban Sustainability Observatories via Data-Enabled University-Community Partnerships

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One of the existential problems facing civilization in the 21st century is mobility. A crowded urban planet must determine how to move people through cities and provide access to opportunities in an environmentally-friendly, socially-just and economically efficient manner. Both due to these concerns and the availability of new communication and location-aware technologies, we are witnessing the introduction of disruptive mobility services in many communities. However, this is often happening in an ad-hoc, bottom-up manner: examples include ride-hailing services such as Uber and Lyft, dockless bike-sharing and scooters. Consequently, researchers, public officials and other stakeholders are struggling to keep up with these innovations and understand their potential impacts on equity, the environment and economic performance. Thankfully, these new mobility technologies generate a large amount of "digital exhaust:" incidental data that is a byproduct of their use. Also, urban processes are increasingly digitized, urban environments are increasingly sensed, and people contribute to this urban data maelstrom through social media and citizen science. We can leverage these new data sources to understand the impacts of new mobility technologies and services on urban sustainability. We will conduct a two-day interactive workshop in Columbus, Ohio in July 2019 to engage community-based stakeholders and a diverse group of researchers in a facilitated dialogue on how to use these data to generate transformative urban sustainability science and actionable knowledge for evidence-based policy.The workshop will focus on the opportunities and challenges of building and maintaining an urban sustainability data observatory (USDO): technological and organizational system for persistent collection, cleaning, fusing, analysis and sharing of urban data. A USDO can enable new measures and analyses of progress towards sustainability over time. It can also leverage real-world events to develop retrospective and prospective natural and quasi-experimental designs that provide stronger support for causality than cross-sectional designs. The workshop will focus on two specific cities in which USDOs are currently being planned and are also experiencing the introduction of disruptive mobility technologies and services, Columbus, Ohio and Portland, Oregon. In addition, the workshop will seek to develop a convergent sustainable urban systems (SUS) framework that can support the development of a network of urban sustainability data observatories and lay the foundation for a new kind of data-driven, comparative observatory science guided by SUS theories of change. A key principle that will be explored is the role of partnerships among researchers, public entities and community stakeholders in co-developing research questions that advance an understanding of SUS. Organizers envision a comparative approach that generates more nuanced, context-sensitive approaches to evidence-based policy, facilitates the sharing of best practices, and ultimately leads to a deeper understanding of the principles underlying urban sustainability.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.