Integrated Urban Infrastructure Systems

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The sustainability and resiliency of cities is of national and global concern due to their impact on the planet and their value to our society. Understanding, planning and designing for sustainability and resiliency of cities and urban infrastructure systems is fraught with challenges. These include how to plan for effective and efficient system-wide recovery and how to implement infrastructure systems such that they are sensitive to local and global resource and waste absorption constraints.The proposed research focuses on contemporary urban infrastructure systems at the infrastructure component, infrastructure systems and city scales using a variety of modeling and case study techniques. During the next five years the core infrastructure systems research questions are: (1) How do resilience and sustainability decisions impact one another? (2) How can the impacts of individuals' systems be valued in a broader system? (3) How can we determine system-wide resilience treatments? And (4) what infrastructure resiliency lessons can cities learn from one another? These questions are examined through four studies conducted by four undergraduate students, two master's students and two doctoral students.These studies (1) provide detailed delineations of the relationship between resilience and sustainability treatments; (2) demonstrate how stakeholder's systems impact one another and the broader urban system; (3) deliver advanced means to locate novel resilience treatments for infrastructure systems; and (4) produce comparative resilience assessments of cities to identify common and differing practices that aid and hinder recovery of urban infrastructure systems. In addition, this program maintains and builds Canada's profile in this critical field at the intersection of civil engineering and operations research, especially as cities continue to mount as global issue of concern.