Sustainable Pervasive Urban Resilience at UTSA

In 2019, 82% of the US and 55% of the global population lived in densely populated urban areas. Our largest cities are becoming “too big to fail” because the wellbeing of residents is highly dependent on the operability of critical infrastructures and vulnerable supply chains. Disruptions to these critical systems affect a disproportionally large number of people, require overwhelming amounts of resources to address, and have a large economic impact.

Challenges surrounding sustainable growth and economic equity will become increasingly acute as the projected percentage of the population living in urban centers increases to 90% in the US and 68% of the worldwide by 2050.

San Antonio is the nation’s seventh most-populous city—and the fastest-growing one, on pace to receive one million new arrivals in the next 25 years.

These population projections are a warning to prioritize investments on infrastructures and policies that have the greatest impact on human wellbeing. To be effective, new data-driven approaches capable of replicating complex interactions between human wellbeing and the network of interdependent systems needed to support it are needed to drive informed decision-making.

Building on existing efforts by stakeholders across San Antonio, SPUR will help craft a sustainable approach to growth through best practices and policies concerning how we build; how we power our homes, cars and businesses; how we travel; how we conserve water and green space; how we reduce air pollution; and, most importantly, how we take care of our most vulnerable neighbors.

SPUR is grounded by four foundational components:​

• Data-driven research on critical systems​
• Developing an innovation ecosystem ​
• Preparing the workforce for the future​
• Maintaining a culture of diversity and inclusion​

To create a data science and distributed sensor framework founded on new discoveries to enhance performance, eliminate inefficiencies, and allow agencies and the private sector to make decisions that yield the most benefit to urban residents, particularly during strenuous circumstances.

As a large urban serving institution in a city with publically owned utilities, UTSA is uniquely positioned to lead convergent research advances and prepare the diverse workforce of the future in this area by leveraging an existing foundation of strategic initiatives and research centers on sustainability, climate science, water resources, data science, cyber security, artificial intelligence, and energy.

Data analytics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence experts will advance fundamental knowledge in their collective domains. Through their efforts, SPUR will enable research and technology to improve urban infrastructure resilience through:

• Real-time data acquisition and processing,
• Data harmonization and blending,
• Studying the impact of critical infrastructure and supply chain disruptions on human wellbeing and the local economy

Collaborative efforts hosted by the ERC will allow the creation of controlled testbeds that provide real-time data sets that researchers can use to develop and validate new intelligent systems, explore interfaces between data streams and high-performance computing servers that house them.

Researchers will test their accuracy, security, and explainability during normal operating conditions, and during different types of disruptions such as cyberattacks, hurricanes, and floods.