Lassiter Receives NSF Grant

Penn IUR Faculty Fellow Allison Lassiter won a prestigious Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) award from the National Science Foundation for a project to improve the nation’s water infrastructure system and adapt to climate change. The CAREER award comes with $500,000 in funding over five years.

As the climate changes and sea levels rise, saltwater can infiltrate farther inland than it has in the past, said Lassiter, Assistant Professor, Department of City and Regional Planning, Weitzman School of Design. It can then enter municipal drinking water systems, potentially making them unpotable. Her project, which looks at climate change and urban adaptation in the U.S. through 2050, begins by asking: Which communities are facing the threat of seawater intrusion into the drinking water system? And then, which communities are most vulnerable to salinization due to social, environmental, and physical factors?

Lassiter and her team will examine possible solutions. Desalinization facilities can be expensive and are unlikely to comprise a widespread solution; these facilities may be within reach for wealthier communities, but will likely be unfeasible for most small- to medium-sized communities (those with municipal water systems serving fewer than 100,000 people).

For these communities, Lassiter is looking to smart city technologies for solutions. These technologies might include, for example, distributed smart valves that more efficiently distribute water through a network of pipes. They could also include dynamic integration of water of multiple qualities to better match demands with supplies (enabling a system to prioritize the delivery of potable water for drinking rather than, for example, washing a car).

“Many emerging smart city technologies are decentralized and modular,” she says. “This could make them more resilient—when challenges emerge, these technologies can be adapted, and when failures occur, these failures can be isolated and repaired.” Decentralized and modular technologies also may be more equitable, she says. Because they may not require a single massive investment (in the way a desalinization facility might), they have the potential to be more affordable.

Still, many water agencies and cities are not used to adopting new technologies. Lassiter’s project will study the dissemination of smart city technologies and develop tools to improve uptake and implementation of emerging tech. To answer this question, she will apply to the water sector the concept of “technology roadmapping”—a flexible planning method that supports long-range planning by strategically matching short- and long-term goals with specific technological solutions, a technique that first emerged in the business sector.

Finally, Lassiter will also use the award to develop a pedagogical approach to technology planning in city and regional planning. The field needs professionals with expertise in implementing and innovating new smart city solutions—this project will help define the training that these professionals will need. “This grant will catapult Allison, her team, and Penn students to the forefront of addressing threats caused by global warming to the nation’s many coastal urban water systems,” said Penn IUR Co-Director Eugénie Birch.