SCC-IRG Track 1: Empowering Environmental Justice Communities with Smart and Connected Technology: Air and Noise Pollution, Wellbeing, and Social Relations in Times of Disruption

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Major construction projects across the U.S. can have heavy impacts on communities that can last decades. These projects can generate noise and air pollution, disrupt traffic, and affect individual and community health and social structure. Environmental justice communities, or communities with large numbers of minority and/or low-income households, are disproportionately subject to negative health and environmental effects. This project partners with three environmental justice communities in Denver, Colorado to understand and help mitigate disruption caused by two major projects, including a highway reconstruction project and related neighborhood redevelopment. This effort will create a socio-technical system that equips community members with environmental sensors to monitor their personal environment (air and noise pollution) and a set of smartphone apps to report their individual wellbeing and social relations. The data reported through the sociotechnical system will allow us to 1) understand how community members are affected by planned environmental disruptions, 2) mitigate negative impacts of future planned disruptions, and 3) connect policymakers to data generated by citizens within local communities. By providing communities access to data with smart and connected cutting-edge tools and the ability to interact with these tools, the project aims to improve community members’ personal environment, wellbeing, and social relations, while enabling evidence-based responses to community members’ experiences and informing policy and decision makers in real-time.The project’s overarching goal is to improve the quality of life within environmental justice communities that are impacted by planned, major built environment disruptions, such as the construction of new highways and infrastructure projects. To meet this goal, a socio-technical system (STS) composed of environment sensors, smartphone platforms, and a data analytics server equipped with predictive modeling and visualization is being designed and integrated into communities in order to: 1) understand how individuals’ personal environment (air and noise pollution), wellbeing, and social relations is affected by a planned disruption; 2) mitigate negative impacts of a planned disruption; and 3) equip policy and decision makers with predictive information about potential negative impacts of upcoming disruptions to help them plan appropriate safeguards. This community-embedded research project will study two prototypical, planned built environment disruptions in Denver Colorado: the Central 70 project and the National Western Center redevelopment. The research collaboration proposed in this project is with three affected environmental justice communities: Globeville, Elyria-Swansea, and Cole. It is a partnership of the residents, local community organizations, government entities, and University of Colorado faculty in computer science, air quality engineering, sociology, and engineering education.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.