Doctoral Dissertation Research: Innovating Housing Design in Response to Ecological Hazards

William Marsh Rice University, Houston TX

Investigators

Abstract

This dissertation project will investigate how resident communities, working with professional planners and non-governmental design experts, develop novel infrastructural visions and capacities for new public housing. Exploring urban design initiatives that involve under-served neighborhoods in the creation of future housing designs and policy strategies, it analyzes their efficacy in responding to inequalities as well as ecological disruptions (such as fires, flooding and droughts). In addition to providing funding for the training of a graduate student in anthropology in the methods of empirical, scientific data collection and analysis, the project will enhance the scientific understanding of contemporary urban housing needs by communicating its findings in visual presentations, workshops, and reports to stakeholder communities and experts. The results will also be shared with planning officials and design professionals as they formulate the next generation of housing designs and policies assessments. This research will assess and interpret the values, visions, and potential advantages of housing infrastructure that is incrementally built and upgraded through citizen’s participation in the design, building, and maintenance over time. By analyzing how planners and designers introduce new scalable housing solutions, this research will examine the economic, social, and affective investments of both residents and professionals. Through twelve months of extended ethnographic research, including participant observation, semi-structured interviews, archival work, spatial mapping and with a collaborative analytic, this research will investigate how the strategies utilized by resident communities, design and planning professionals, and government initiatives, may be creating innovative responses to continuous socio-economic inequality, dispossessions, and ecological hazards. The research results will address concerns regarding how people cope with and react to the rise of housing demands and new infrastructure requirements in an era of ecological hazards, scarce urban land, and continuous socio-spatial segregations. 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.