SMART ANALYTICS FOR RESILIENT COMMUNITIES

BY SARBESWAR PRAHARAJ, PH.D.

A smart analytics platform designed at Arizona State University to integrate and analyze multiagency data offers many ways of visualizing big data to a non-expert target audience. This work contributes to a fast-growing conversation around geospatial data visualization technologies that are increasingly playing a vital role in shaping government policies, including resiliency planning and disaster-preventive infrastructure.

I’m a professor at ASU and associate director of the Knowledge Exchange for Resilience. We are looking at analytics, not analytics per se, for smart cities but resilient communities. We focus on leveraging data and technologies to support and build resiliency within the community. My work is funded through the Virginia G. Piper Charitable Trust’s $15 million donation to support this work over the next several years in the community.

Our motto is “Building Resilience with Dividends.” To illustrate this concept of resilience with dividends, you see a picture of a concrete river running through the city. Why do we build concrete rivers? Because this is an area that has faced tremendous threats from flash floods. However, the city in discussion chose another path. It tackled flood management not as an engineering solution but as a complex socioecological system, where we built a passive green infrastructure network that not only absorbs water to stop the flooding but provides a magnificent open space right in the city where people can come and play. Flash floods and rain would occur probably two or three times a year in this desert landscape. Think about this space for the rest of the year. This is a beautiful park and a playground for the community all season. That is what we mean by resilience with dividends.

All our cities’ infrastructure and capacities are built to respond to emergencies rather than stopping and tracking those events from happening in the first place. Much about this problem in our mindset is elaborated in a book by Dan Heath called Upstream, a New York Times best-selling book that inspires our work. At the ASU Knowledge Exchange for Resilience, we are building a new narrative on how our communities can come together to prevent crises from happening in the first place. We focus on knowing the community and want to find those community members interested in building the community.

We operationalized data infrastructure that can lead to knowledge exchange, a two-way exchange rather than a one-way communication. We have built several data tools and participatory solutions working with the community in the last two years, from looking at green infrastructure to addressing poverty differently. How do we find out who is poor and where they live? We have been tracking and dealing with evictions, which are the issues that occur right in the community and impact the most vulnerable.

We don’t want to talk about technology just for the rich and the superfluous. We want to understand how data and technology can track the poorest of the poor and who needs support from the community. We are looking at climate change because Phoenix is the hottest and driest city in the country. We are constantly tracking the temperature patterns and supporting communities with data. And, of course, during COVID, we have done active data tracking with the public health department to support tracing, tracking, and responding during the crisis. Let me discuss a couple of solutions in a little more depth.

We recently built a Tree Data Inventory Exploration Tool for the city of Phoenix. Each tree is important for the community. We don’t want to talk about big technology with less impact. We want to talk about small technology with huge impacts. We have traced and tracked each of these trees. That is a tremendous amount of work and years of data collection that the city has done. Our tool lets the community know which species, where, and what their condition is by zip code and by neighborhood; you can go there and click and right now understand which trees’ conditions are good, which are fair, which are bad, and which need attention today or the next week.

Many tree tools across the U.S. have talked about green coverage across your neighborhoods but do not talk about the importance of species. Because this is an arid region, we do not want invasive species. We do not want species that consume more water. We do not want species with high BVOC emissions, which is the problem constantly faced by the city that has never been addressed. Many cities are expanding their tree coverage, saying we have gone from 15% tree coverage to 40%. But what is the quality of that green cover? Does that reduce your greenhouse emissions? Does it help minimize your air pollution? Is it a native or invasive species? We have tracked all these features and are making an impact not just for today but to address long-term climate change and extreme heat issues, and all that matters for community resilience.

We built the Height Poverty Dashboard with data collected from eight agencies to give a granular picture of how the community is dealing with the economic crisis unfolding in our community. When I talk about poverty, what comes to your mind? How do we know where poor people live? Who are the people who are poor and need assistance during things like COVID? Over the last 60 years, you’ll be amazed to know our poverty measurement formula has not changed. And what is the formula the U.S. census uses? It looks at your diet in a day and converts that to a dollar amount, then determines if your income supports your food consumption.

Food is important for surviving, but does it end there? Our families need childcare and health care, but what happens to the rent, which has increased significantly in the last several decades, way more than food? This tool combines several factors into this poverty calculation. For the first time, we are looking at things like childcare, transportation, and health care costs, all of these put together to calculate a ballpark number for families of different types: if there is a one-adult family, one adult plus one child, whether there are women in the family. When you go into this tool, you’ll see that you can drill down by various levels of county and neighborhoods, and you can see that less than half the number of people in poverty are documented and getting assistance. Those who did not get assistance during COVID will hopefully get it in the future. That’s what we need. How can our data reveal those people hidden by these big numbers and technologies? How can we find them out?

Overall, we are looking at problemoriented data that can identify unattended issues. The central part of our work has been engagement and co-creation with the community. We bring together the community to co-create data, test technologies, and design solutions. This way, we can address the resiliency challenges that are facing our communities. This could be a good model where you look at resilience, not just from infrastructure resilience but how we can build resilience within our communities with dividends.

Sarbeswar Praharaj, Ph.D. Associate Director, Knowledge Exchange for Resilience at Arizona State University Phoenix, Arizona

Sarbeswar Praharaj, Ph.D., is the associate director (data and visualization) and assistant research professor at the Knowledge Exchange for Resilience, School of Geographical Sciences & Urban Planning at Arizona State University. He is a senior global futures scientist at the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory. Praharaj leads research on smart cities, data visualization and dashboards, and resilience. He engages in research-led interactive teaching and learning pedagogies in urban planning and geographical science.