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SU Professor and Students Helping Syracuse's I-Team Tackle Infrastructure Problems

City of Syracuse

The City of Syracuse is continuing its partnership with an S.U. geography professor in an effort to tackle the city’s most pressing infrastructure problems.  University students will help the city’s innovation team with research and investigation in hopes of identifying solutions.

  Assistant Professor Jonnell Robinson has been Syracuse’s community geographer for more than a decade.  Now as a faculty fellow with the innovation team, she knows there are challenges ahead to address infrastructure that’s hidden and taken mostly for granted.

"There's been decades of deferred maintenance, so we're starting to reach a critical point of needing to focus attention on it.  There are a lot of complex variables at play that affect and impact the current condition of our systems, and obviously we're limited by what we can do financially as a city."

Robinson says the issues are no different than those of any other industrial rust belt city.  I-team Analytics Coordinator Sam Edelstein says they’ve been meeting with city engineering, water, and public works departments in hopes of getting a bigger picture.

"They work very hard and do what they can, but they don't really have a chance to step back and say, 'how can we be doing this better.'  So that's were we step in.  A lot of it is just us going to them and saying, 'OK, take a step back, and how can we do things better.' But we have traveled to some different cities, we've done a lot of research about things that have worked in other cities."

Credit City of Syracuse
Jonnell Robinson is an SU Assistant Geography Professor, Director of the Syracuse Community Geography Program, and Faculty Fellow with the city's Innovation Team.

The other challenge for the innovation team is to digitize city records and maps, many of them dating back decades.  Team leader Andrew Maxwell says this will make it easier to locate and visualize problem areas.

"Our effort is to bring that together in a more holistic way, and to get a fuller snapshot of the nature of our infrastructure, its condition, its needs, where it's gone through stress, where we've had water main breaks, things of that nature.  It's really about having a more consolidated approach to it across the city."

The innovation team and the services of Professor Robinson are being funded through the Bloomberg Philanthropies grant.

Scott Willis covers politics, local government, transportation, and arts and culture for WAER. He came to Syracuse from Detroit in 2001, where he began his career in radio as an intern and freelance reporter. Scott is honored and privileged to bring the day’s news and in-depth feature reporting to WAER’s dedicated and generous listeners. You can find him on twitter @swillisWAER and email him at srwillis@syr.edu.