NSF Org:	SMA SBE Office of Multidisciplinary Activities
Recipient:	UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN
Initial Amendment Date:	April 27, 2015
Latest Amendment Date:	June 19, 2015
Award Number:	1513395
Award Instrument:	Continuing Grant
Program Manager:	Josie S. Welkom SMA  SBE Office of Multidisciplinary Activities SBE  Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences
Start Date:	September 1, 2015
End Date:	August 31, 2017 (Estimated)
Total Intended Award Amount:	$253,317.00
Total Awarded Amount to Date:	$253,317.00
Funds Obligated to Date:	FY 2015 = $253,317.00
History of Investigator:	Steven Moore (Principal Investigator) samoore@austin.utexas.edu Peter Ward (Co-Principal Investigator) Kristine Stiphany (Co-Principal Investigator)
Recipient Sponsored Research Office:	University of Texas at Austin 110 INNER CAMPUS DR AUSTIN TX  US  78712-1139 (512)471-6424
Sponsor Congressional District:	25
Primary Place of Performance:	University of Texas at Austin TX  US  78712-1532
Primary Place of Performance Congressional District:	25
Unique Entity Identifier (UEI):	V6AFQPN18437
Parent UEI:
NSF Program(s):	SPRF-IBSS
Primary Program Source:	01001516DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT
Program Reference Code(s):
Program Element Code(s):	820900
Award Agency Code:	4900
Fund Agency Code:	4900
Assistance Listing Number(s):	47.075

ABSTRACT

The Directorate of Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences offers postdoctoral research fellowships to provide opportunities for recent doctoral graduates to obtain additional training, to gain research experience under the sponsorship of established scientists, and to broaden their scientific horizons beyond their undergraduate and graduate training. Postdoctoral fellowships are further designed to assist new scientists to direct their research efforts across traditional disciplinary lines and to avail themselves of unique research resources, sites, and facilities, including at foreign locations. This postdoctoral fellowship award supports interdisciplinary research that draws on statistical and mixed method approaches in collaboration with community groups in two large consolidated settlements. The fellowship will significantly advance the professional training of the postdoctoral fellow, due to the mentorship provided by two exceptional scholars at the University of Texas at Austin whose pioneering work has been instrumental to urban planning, development, and sustainability studies in Texas and the urban Global South.

The study will (1) identify the factors that informal settlement residents, planners, architects, and policy makers believe contribute to successful development; (2) apply criteria to a participatory post-occupancy evaluation of the processes and outcomes of four development typologies shared by the two settlements; and (3) input data findings to a parametric framework through which to test possible community development outcomes. The combined use of assessment criteria, evaluation, and the parametric tool offer significant potential to: (1) synthesize the efforts undertaken by diverse actors and institutions involved in development; (2) increase citizen participation and project equity; (3) visualize the fusion of policy goals and diverse user needs; and (4), better align the goals and actual achievements of policies that guide urban development. The study advances current research by (1) contributing to urban planning's emerging interest in the relational analysis of social and spatial data; (2) producing a modifiable, participatory framework for evaluating development impacts and applying data to concrete outcomes; and (3) exploring how to practically transform the development of informal settlements from a housing-centric, expert-driven enterprise to an evidence-based platform that increases citizen participation and addresses the multiple risks that afflict cities in the developing world. The broader impacts of this research include the empowerment of community groups with data development and its application to graphic formats that can visualize, and thus help to catalyze, long-term change. Furthermore, the parametric framework facilitates a common, data driven language through which community groups, planners, architects, and policy makers can test and discuss possible future development scenarios.

PROJECT OUTCOMES REPORT

Disclaimer

This Project Outcomes Report for the General Public is displayed verbatim as submitted by the Principal Investigator (PI) for this award. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this Report are those of the PI and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation; NSF has not approved or endorsed its content.

 

SBE Fellow Kristine Stiphany uses digital technologies to draw social parameters into the design and construction of infrastructure in the urban Global South. Undertaken in collaboration with residents of Brazilian informal settlements in Sao Paulo, her study utilized situated data to reveal how people continually shape housing systems, and the political implications of doing so. This research broadens architecture’s scope to assimilate various social and material elements of urban infrastructure, and addresses an emerging interest in calibrating big data to the experiences that organize space and impact social welfare in the contemporary city at the local level. Combined with a previous NSF dissertation improvement grant, the research is innovative for integrating ethnographic analysis and data studies for urban design.

 

The completed SBE study specifically focused upon the process of developing participatory forms of data collection, analysis, and visualization for measuring the impacts of urban policy on social welfare. Although low income informal settlements have been mapped for some time, Stiphany assessed the extent to which improved computing capacity more adequately addresses their complex built environments. Stiphany spent 12 of the grant’s 24-month period in São Paulo, Brazil, where she established a collaborative urban lab for using 2D and 3D technology to assess the impacts of housing and infrastructural improvements (“informal settlement redevelopment”) on social mobility, and created a website and digital tool that can help low income residents to visualize, and thus catalyze, long-term change. Project details and the tool itself, are available at www.chapa.io .

 

This research was most recently presented by Stiphany and her SBE mentors Peter M. Ward and Steven A. Moore at the United Nations Habitat III Conference in Quito, Ecuador, and informs two forthcoming peer-reviewed papers and a manuscript in-process about emerging forms of urbanism in the Global South, generally and Latin American specifically. Stiphany also applies this research with scenario planning in order to enhance decision-making for informal settlement redevelopment or upgrading. Latest studies include an analysis of rental options for improving housing access in case study communities, presented at the 2017 Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning conference; and a graduate studio for the adaptive reuse of industrial tracts for housing in São Paulo, a collaboration between Texas Tech University and Mackenzie University in São Paulo.

 

A registered architect and urban planner, and as an outcome of the NSF support, Stiphany was recently appointed to an Assistant Professorship in Architecture at Texas Tech University, where she is developing a Latin American Urban Lab and advancing work on the role of technology for understanding – and transforming – the social and cultural dimensions of informally constructed environments, both in Latin America as well as emerging informal settlements and housing improvement practices the USA.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Last Modified: 11/30/2017
Modified by: Kristine Stiphany

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