Conference: Challenges to and Opportunities for Resilience in Rapidly Developing Urban Corridors; Austin, Texas; August 14-16, 2019

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This project funds a three day conference to be held August 14-16, 2019 at the University of Texas, Austin. The goal is to bring together researchers, stakeholders, and policy influencers to explore scientific themes around natural -engineered-human subsystems comprising Sustainable Urban Systems in semi-arid regions. The ideal outcome of the conference is a cohesive network of project proposals around the grand challenges of Sustainable Urban Systems. The conference will have presentations and breakout sessions and innovative activities of breakout sessions mental models exercises, toolbox dialog initiative, and design thinking. This scientific research contribution thus supports NSF's mission to promote the progress of science and to advance our national welfare. In this case, the benefits will be insights to improve urban sustainability which will save lives and economic losses.This conference explores four themes: 1) Processes and Feedbacks, 2) Big Data, 3) Integrated Models, and 4) Co-Designed Research. While necessarily technical in nature, these conference sessions are designed to elucidate disparate and converging approaches to these themes within the context of holistically advancing cross-sector partnerships that engage the broadest range of participants, from citizen scientists and community organizers to sustainability professionals and elected policy makers. To support this approach, facilitated break-out sessions will use established system-modeling toolkits to delve deeper into discussions initiated during presentations to integrate ideas across theme topics. Improving transdisciplinary communication is an overarching goal, and the discussions will enhance scientific collaboration by developing a common research language and by measuring the degree of pre- and post-conference convergence among participants around their epistemic valuation of Sustainable Urban Systems Science.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.