Workshop on Bio-Inspired Adaptation of Urban Infrastructure; Sept. 9-10, 2019; Cleveland, Ohio

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Eighty percent of the U.S. population lives in urban areas. As hubs for economic powerhouses, urban communities generate around 85% of tthe U.S. GDP. Therefore, the sustainability of urban communities underpins the sustained prosperity of the Nation. Large urban cities across the U.S. are increasingly faced with the rapidly decaying infrastructure, critical maintenance and repair needs across city systems, and a need for modernization. Sustaining the urban infrastructures and their quality of service to the evolving climatic and socio-economic demands call for innovative strategies for their adaptations. This workshop will explore the potential of biological systems, which demonstrate amazing adaptation strategies to extreme climatic conditions, i.e., extreme cold, extreme hot, marsh, salinity, and drought, to provide a rich repository of information as source of inspiration for the smart adaptation of urban infrastructure. The outcome of the workshop will be to design a research and educational roadmap and to build a convergent research community to explore the frontier of bio-inspired adaptation of urban infrastructure systems. The workshop on Bio-Inspired Adaptation for Urban Infrastructure Systems will leverage the intelligence and adaptation strategies of biological and ecological systems as sources of inspiration for creating new approaches to design and implementation of adaptive urban infrastructure systems. The workshop program will focus on four major thrust areas: adaptation in biological/ecological systems; bio-inspired adaptive infrastructure systems; bio-inspired adaptive decision and governance; and education and workforce planning for urban adaptation. The workshop will be a two-day event providing various opportunities for team-building, keynote speeches, panels, facilitated group discussions, and poster sessions. This program will facilitate transdisciplinary exchange among researchers, practitioners, community leaders, and decision-makers. The workshop will provide extensive opportunities for dynamic interactions among attendees who bring together transdisciplinary expertise, with the aim of advancing the science of the 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.