Faculty Spotlight: Allison Lassiter

Dr. Allison Lassiter joined the University of Pennsylvania’s Weitzman School of Design Faculty in 2017, following work with the Cooperative Research Centre for Water Sensitive Cities in Melbourne, Australia. 

Her research and teaching focus on managing urban water resources in the context of climate change, from watershed-based approaches to “smart water” technologies. Through her work, she examines opportunities to use landscape infrastructure and emerging technologies to build resilience and increase adaptive capacity in cities. She’s currently working on a project through an award from the National Science Foundation to improve the nation’s water infrastructure system.

Lassiter complements her research by participating in national and international meetings on water management, such the U.S. EPA’s Creating Water Resilient Utilities water-finance workgroup or the Aspen Institute-Duke Nicholas School of the Environment Water Forum, and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Conference of Parties.

For Weitzman’s Department of City & Regional Planning, she teaches courses on sustainable cities, smart cities, and water policy.

Please tell us about your work, which integrates economics, remote sensing, hydrology, and systems engineering as well as planning. What motivated your research direction?

I work on adapting drinking water systems to climate change. But, there are some substantial challenges facing water systems today, even without considering climate change. Many water systems are struggling to raise sufficient revenue and are behind on required maintenance. We need to develop approaches that fix today’s problems, while also leaving systems prepared to adapt to tomorrow’s changes. This is a tall order. We are going to need to approach water system fundamentals in a new way.

Interdisciplinary insights are key. I think of water systems as a product of four interacting infrastructures—natural, physical, social, and digital—and believe transformation will come by innovating within and across these four infrastructures. To develop and evaluate potentially transformative approaches, I work with researchers at global universities in social sciences, physical sciences, engineering, business, and design. No discipline will figure this out in isolation.

You’ve been looking at the threat sea level rise poses to drinking water systems as the planet heats up. So now what? What is smart water? What are the main takeaways for urban water management in this dystopian reality?

The past few years, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how sea level rise may contribute to increased levels of salt in the drinking water supplies of coastal communities. I published one paper on this subject and my lab is finishing up three others.

Now, I’m working with a team of scientists under the National Science Foundation Convergence Accelerator program to develop a tool called SaltCast. One of the intentions of the tool is to give coastal water suppliers information they can use to understand future salinity threats.

Next, with my lab and partners, I’m starting to think about how community water systems might adapt to changes in salinity levels. It’s difficult to remove salt from water and building a desalination facility is expensive, even with state-of-the-art equipment. Are there alternatives? In collaboration with a large research team in Europe, Smart Water Futures: Designing the Next Generation of Urban Water Systems, my lab is thinking about how newer digital technologies can contribute to cost-effective adaptation. I’ll report back more on our findings soon!

Can you tell us about your work serving on Penn’s delegation to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Conference of Parties and specifically your work with UNFCCC on adaptation? How do these experiences influence your research and its real-world applications? 

It’s been such an honor to join the Penn delegation to COP over the last four years, watch the negotiations, attend side events, and meet other people working on similar climate adaptation problems around the globe.  

My own engagement with the UNFCCC is primarily under a program called National Adaptation Planning (NAP). This program is intended to help countries prepare to adapt to climate change and then implement planned projects. I’ve been contributing to a project on developing indicators to track adaptation, which can help monitor and evaluate the success of NAPs. In addition, my lab is working on a supplement to the NAP Technical Guidelines. The supplement, Transforming Water Management for Resilience and Security in a Changing Climate, will feature successful case studies on decentralized, cost-effective water management strategies from around the world, providing inspiration and examples for countries working on adaptation planning.

How do you integrate your research on water policy, sustainable cities, and smart cities into your teaching? What ideally should planners come away with after taking these courses? 

I teach graduate-level seminars on water policy, sustainable cities, and smart cities. My research directly feeds into these classes – it influences the material we cover, the examples I present, and the guest speakers I invite into class. I’m constantly updating my syllabi to make sure that the courses reflect cutting-edge concepts.

All these subjects are complex. Both the problems and possible solutions are changing alongside evolving societal values, economic contexts, climate, and technology. This leads to two big goals when I teach: (1) to clearly unravel complex, interdisciplinary interdependencies and trade-offs, so students can develop sophisticated ideas; (2) to help students learn to ask good questions.  

I do this by using teaching style known as discussion-based learning. The idea is that the instructor acts as facilitator, while students collectively discuss ideas and collaboratively learn. (This can be a little bit harder in my larger classes, but I still try to keep it conversational.) Discussion-based learning is associated with increased critical thinking skills, problem solving skills, understanding of diverse perspectives, and development of the learners’ autonomy. I hope when students finish my classes they have a holistic and nuanced view on water, sustainable cities, and smart cities and will continue to update and re-evaluate their views over time.

You collaborated with us on a popular event last fall, AI and the City, which examined how planners are balancing the use of AI tools in their work for efficiencies while grappling with its inaccuracies and ethical conflicts. What has changed since that conversation, now nearly a year later? 

Yes, it was a great event! AI tools are increasingly more sophisticated, but the fundamental challenges aren’t different. Depending on the application, AI outputs can be deeply biased and inaccurate. Implementing an AI approach can be expensive, too, especially if weighed against how the outputs from the tool can be reasonably and responsibly used. Some problems aren’t meant to be solved with AI. My lab thinks about the right place and time to use AI in the city, in water systems, and in climate adaptation. I tend to take a less-is-more approach. As a whole, the many researchers and practitioners working on urban technology and AI are still figuring out the opportunities AI presents and the guard rails that need to be put in place.

What are you excited about for this coming year? What will you dive into next?

I’m thrilled to continue work on drinking water systems and climate adaptation. These are big, tricky problems that I’ll be working on for a long, long time.