Syracuse University’s geography department and the city of Syracuse’s Innovation Team have partnered up to allow undergraduate geography students to innovatively address infrastructure problems in the city.

Syracuse’s Innovation Team was formed after the city received a grant from Bloomberg Philanthropies to form a team that would creatively approach a solution to one of the city’s problems: infrastructure, according to an Innovation Trail article.

Through the foundation, which was established by former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, 12 cities across the United States were selected to receive grants to address a specific problem in the city, according to the article.

To begin its work, the Syracuse team will focus on issues with infrastructure, according to the article, but will later gravitate toward other issues the city faces.

Jamie Winders, a professor of geography at SU, said the team’s goal “is really to bring together people to think about ongoing, difficult issues for cities and think outside the box.”

Winders, the chair of the geography department, said the team will use various types of geospatial analysis to see infrastructural issues in a different light and get an overall picture of Syracuse’s problem with infrastructure. For the project, Winders is collaborating with Jonnell Robinson, an assistant professor of geography at SU, and undergraduate students in the community geography program.

Students at SU will also work with Robinson to do much of the “hands-on” work, which includes mapping out infrastructure and digitizing maps to grasp the big picture, Winders said.

Robinson, who could not be reached for comment, is the city of Syracuse’s community geographer and a geography fellow with the Innovation Team.

“Her unique skills in geospatial analysis does the work of improving social conditions in the city,” said Andrew Maxwell, the Innovation Team’s director.

With help from Robinson and SU student interns, Maxwell said geospatial analysis could help determine how to maximize the effectiveness of taxpayer dollars and community investment into the city’s infrastructure.

Maxwell said the collaboration between the city’s Innovation Team and the geography department’s faculty and undergraduate students will “lead to a greater degree of effectiveness and sophistication in our work, and also how we do geospatial analysis and other forms of analysis that would help our work here in the city.”

“For us at the department and SU, this is a win-win situation,” Winders said. “The kinds of research we’re doing and the kind of things we teach about, it’s very important that they have a real-world impact or social relevance.”

She added that the skills geography students at SU gain through this kind of experience are applicable after graduation. This type of project, she said, fits into a mission of the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs’ curriculum: public engagement.

Winders said the project is “a great example for us of one of the ways that thinking like a geographer can help address these intractable problems that cities have.”

Published on February 29, 2016 at 10:56 pm

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