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

21世纪文明面临的生存问题之一是机动性。一个拥挤的城市星球必须决定如何以环境友好、社会公正和经济高效的方式让人们在城市中穿梭，并提供机会。由于这些担忧，以及新的通信和位置感知技术的出现，我们看到许多社区引入了颠覆性的移动服务。然而，这通常是以一种特别的、自下而上的方式发生的：例如优步和Lyft等叫车服务、无码头自行车共享和滑板车。因此，研究人员、政府官员和其他利益攸关方正在努力跟上这些创新的步伐，并了解它们对公平、环境和经济表现的潜在影响。值得庆幸的是，这些新的移动技术产生了大量的“数字废气”：使用这些技术的副产品--附带数据。此外，城市进程日益数字化，城市环境被越来越多地感知，人们通过社交媒体和公民科学为这一城市数据漩涡做出贡献。我们可以利用这些新的数据源来了解新的移动技术和服务对城市可持续发展的影响。我们将于2019年7月在俄亥俄州哥伦布市举办为期两天的互动研讨会，让社区利益相关者和不同的研究人员参与促进对话，讨论如何使用这些数据生成变革性的城市可持续发展科学和可操作的知识，用于循证政策。研讨会将侧重于建立和维护城市可持续发展数据观测站(USDO)的机遇和挑战：持续收集、清理、融合、分析和共享城市数据的技术和组织系统。美国农业部可以对随着时间推移在可持续性方面取得的进展进行新的衡量和分析。它还可以利用现实世界的事件来开发回溯性和前瞻性的自然和准实验设计，这些设计比横断面设计对因果关系提供了更强有力的支持。研讨会将聚焦于目前正在规划USDO并正在经历颠覆性移动技术和服务引入的两个特定城市，分别是俄亥俄州哥伦布市和俄勒冈州波特兰。此外，讲习班将寻求制定一个融合的可持续城市系统(SUS)框架，以支持城市可持续发展数据观测站网络的发展，并为以SUS的变化理论为指导的一种新的数据驱动的比较观测科学奠定基础。将探讨的一项关键原则是研究人员、公共实体和社区利益攸关方之间的伙伴关系在共同开发研究问题以促进对SUS的理解方面的作用。组织者设想了一种比较方法，以产生更细微的、上下文敏感的循证政策方法，促进最佳实践的分享，并最终导致对城市可持续发展基本原则的更深入理解。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.