The Citizen-Architect: Solving Long Term Challenges to Decentralized Infrastructure By Educating the Next Generation

Courtney Crosson (The University of Arizona)

The paper uses recent citizen-scientist literature to frame a new ‘citizen-architect’ model where urban actors claim agency in the design and long-term performance of decentralized infrastructure nodes. Municipalities are increasingly identifying renewable, decentralized sources of energy and water (e.g. rainwater harvesting, photovoltaics) as opportunities to add resilience to their cities. Green Infrastructure (GI) is a growing trend where stormwater is managed by increasing pervious areas of natural vegetation throughout a city. However, current implementations largely rely on untrained citizens adjacent to a GI site to provide the necessary upkeep to ensure design performance. Numerous studies have pointed to long-term maintenance as a problematic unknown for the success of decentralized infrastructure. This paper provides a replicable case study for academia to join with local government to fill this current gap.

In the case study, twelve Bachelors of Architecture (B.Arch) and Masters of Architecture (M.Arch) students collaborated with the K-12 STEM organization, Project Wet, and the community outreach director of County Flood Control to develop an interactive, didactic card game. Through this innovative game, elementary and middle school students are trained to maintain the peak performance of GI projects recently installed by the City in their communities. The game has students build their own decentralized infrastructure networks with the competitive goal of mitigating the most flooding by accruing the greatest number of high performing sites. Student motivation to actively implement learning outcomes in their communities is evaluated in pre and post surveys. The paper concludes that by educating young, citizen-architects about new paradigms of infrastructure in their city, they can advocate as citizen-architects for implementation and long-term performance through maintenance of the decentralized solutions.