Center for Smart Cities and Regions

Futures Catalyst. To fully realize the potential of smarter cities and regions, governments need the skills to plan for, and actively manage, increasingly sophisticated technologies. To anticipate the effects and tradeoffs of the design choices of emerging technological infrastructures and have the deep understanding necessary to use them. CSCR works with local and regional governments to develop capacities to anticipate, design, experiment, iterate, and manage emerging technologies to meet public needs and implement specific actions.

• Initial Projects:
  • Greater Phoenix Smart Region Initiative
  • Governance of Autonomous Vehicles
  • Equity and Engagement in the Smart City
  • STIR Cities
  • MacArthur Research Network for Opening Governance

Community Nexus. CSCR works as a boundary organization to collaborate with publics, community groups and non-profits through public engagement and public science to foster the ability of communities to envision, articulate, and bring about the future they want.

• Initial Projects:
  • Urban Resilience to Extremes Sustainability Research Network
  • Arizona Education Modeling
  • Opening Pathways for Discovery, Research, and Innovation in Health
  • Extreme Heat Research
  • Synthetic Empathy

Educational Programs. CSCR has developed educational program offerings around smart and connected cities/regions in close collaboration with SFIS.

• Smart City Academy. The Smart City Academy will support individuals and organizations in their efforts to develop, implement and manage smart city endeavors effectively.
• Graduate Certificate in Policy Informatics. This certificate provides knowledge and skills for students seeking careers that will use informatics tools, models, and simulations to help individuals and groups deliberate and evaluate policy decisions as well as explore new governance infrastructures. Graduate Certificate in Policy Informatics. This certificate provides knowledge and skills for students seeking careers that will use informatics tools, models, and simulations to help individuals and groups deliberate and evaluate policy decisions as well as explore new governance infrastructures.

Innovation Hub. The Center serves as a national and, potentially, international hub for discussions about the future of cities and regions, hosting events, meetings, and speakers.

Greater Phoenix Smart Region Initiative

CSCR is working with Arizona Institute for Digital Progress (iDP), Greater Phoenix Economic Council and communities in the Greater Phoenix area to create the first smart region initiative.

Governance of Autonomous Vehicles

CSCR is working to advance the anticipatory capacity of urban governance institutions and local communities to shape the present and future of driverless vehicles. We are working to create a transferrable integrative research and engagement framework through initial studies, workshops and scenarios. We are currently collaborating with the City of Tempe to support early policy initiatives on AVs.

Equity and Engagement in the Smart City

CSCR is collaborating with city and regional government in Portland, OR to create a framework for how cities can be proactive in leverage emerging smart technologies and data analytics to advance equity outcomes.

STIR Cities

STIR Cities is a National Science Foundation funded project that compares emerging smart energy and city systems in the Phoenix and Portland urban areas. Researchers are developing tools and methods to help key stakeholders understand and manage societal complexity when making technical decisions related to power grid design, while studying and interacting with experts from public utilities, planning offices, industrial operations, and national and academic research labs.

Urban Resilience to Extreme Weather Events Sustainability Research Network

The UREx SRN is a five year, $12 million project funded by the National Science Foundation to advance urban resilience across 9 US and Latin American Cities.

Arizona Education Modeling

This project is an effort funded by the Arizona Board of Regents in partnership with ASU’s Decision Theater and the Achieve60AZ initiative to build an interactive model to examine the current state of Arizona’s educational systems and innovate ways to improve the future health of the system.

Opening Pathways for Discovery, Research, and Innovation in Health

This project is a collaboration between patients and traditional researchers to explore the processes around discovery, research, and innovation in health and healthcare. The project is unique because it is led by a patient as Principal Investigator. The project is supported with grant funding by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Extreme Heat Research

Extreme heat is among the leading causes of weather-related deaths in the US. Electrically-powered air conditioning can reduce heat exposure and thus protect human health. Due to rising demand and more frequent severe weather, electrical blackouts have become increasingly common. The goals of this project are to estimate mortality and morbidity associated with simulated grid failure events during heat wave conditions in the cities of Atlanta, Detroit, and Phoenix in response to current and future climate conditions, and to assess the effectiveness of specific environmental changes, technological improvements, and behavioral adaptations in mitigating a growing heat hazard. Models of regional climate, building interior heat exposure, and human health effects combine to simulate human heat exposure under heat wave and electrical grid blackout scenarios, quantify heat-related illness, and evaluate the potential for individual and institutional adaptive strategies to lessen the impacts of extreme heat. The outcomes of this research will advance the progress of science through the development of a new approach to measuring indoor heat exposure and enhance national health through the testing of electrical generation, passive cooling, and behavioral adaptations to protect health during extreme weather hazards. This research further supports the development of new protocols for emergency response planning pertaining to heat risk monitoring and evacuation.

MacArthur Foundation Research Network of Opening Governance

Spearheaded by the GovLab at New York University, and made possible by a three-year $5 million grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation as well as a gift from Google.org, the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Opening Governance leverages emerging information technologies, open governance programs, and diverse public participation platforms with the goal of improving outcomes for governments and the people they serve, and making governance more effective and legitimate. Through both face-to-face and online collaboration, the research network will work on assessing existing innovations in governing and experimenting with new practices and norms for how our institutions make decisions at all governance levels.

Synthetic Empathy

Building Synthetic Empathy for Consensus-Oriented Decision Making in a Collaborative Setting is an ongoing project funded by the National Science Foundation, Social-Computational Systems at Arizona State University School of Public Affairs and Policy Informatics at Decision Theater, in collaboration with Decision Center for Desert City, School of Social Work, and W.P. Carey School of Business. This project seeks to explore collective behavior among individuals in a group setting for consensus-oriented decision making to solve collaborative problems for societal advancement. This project uses a computer-mediated synthetic environment as a deliberation space for individual participants to explore different perspectives, arrive at consensus, and make decisions for sustainable outcome under conditions of uncertainty. The interactive computer simulation model is a portable version of WaterSim. This model is based on water demand and supply in Phoenix metropolitan Area, and can be used for: (1) providing a scenario context to complex dynamics embedded in water management (specifically for urban areas); (2) exploring the effectiveness and efficiency of different water policy decisions and their impact on future water availability; and (3) exploring various challenges and uncertainty associated with human-induced climate change, urban growth, and urban developmental policies.

June 1, 2022: CSCR Affiliate Dr. Melissa Guardaro discussed the danger of a heat catastrophe in the Phoenix area in abc15's article on the region’s preparations for extreme heat conditions.

April 22, 2022: Co- Director Dr. Diana Bowman and Sandra Day O’ Connor College of Law student Walter G. Johnson authored Partnering with Non-State Actors to Govern Nexus Problems and Promote Climate Action in Smart Cities and Region discussing how cities are not truly “smart” until sustainability and quality of life are centered in the planning, governance, and innovative processes operating within.

February 21, 2022: CSCR affiliates helped launch the Thunderbird School of Management at Arizona State University’s Smart Cities & Urban Innovation Certificate Program. The certificate includes three modules: 1) Smart Communities: Definitions, Myths, History, and Future, 2) The Fourth Industrial Revolution and the City, and 3) Smart Community Strategies: Lesson from the Past, Building Blocks for Success.

January 26, 2022: Co-Director Dr. Diana Bowman and Timothy Derden authored a paper interrogating how smart cities can incorporate mobility and autonomous vehicle technology in the SciTech Lawyer Winter 2022.

January 3, 2022: Co-Director Dr. Diana Bowman spoke on how collaborative projects like work on the Belmont project contributed towards Arizona State University’s holding of U.S. News and World Report’s title of #1 in innovation.

February 7, 2022: The Zimin Institute for Smart and Sustainable Cities at ASU continues its goal of identifying and supporting research and development projects likely to translate applied technologies that better lives. Current areas of focus include increasing pedestrian safety and using storytelling robots to assist caregivers of patients with Alzheimer’s disease.

June 22, 2021: CSCR Affiliate Dr. Melissa Guardaro was quoted in this article discussing the legacy of redlining in connection with heat resilience in Phoenix.

January 19, 2021: CSCR Affiliate David Hondula spoke on work to develop a more complete vulnerability index for heat-vulnerable people taking into account where exposure occurs in an article by AZ Central discussing the risk of excess heat and efforts to mitigate it.

December 16, 2020: The film ASU KER- Recognition of Resilience won the 2021 Rocky Mountain Emmy Award for Editor Content, and was also up for the 2021 Societal Concerns Long Form Content Rocky Mountain Emmy Award. The film looked into how community leaders addressed issues like the pandemic’s health effects, the economic impact of safety closures, the unacceptable state of social and racial justice, and how record-breaking heat compounds these issues.

October 29, 2020: The European Commission’s 100 Intelligent Cities Challenge recognized the Center for Smart Cities and Regions for its work developing an educational program around smart and connected cities, and our partners like The Connective in its discussion of Phoenix.

August 31, 2020: AZ Central wrote about a paper CSCR Affiliate Dr. Melissa Guardaro co-authored as part of a project looking at how to address safety and quality of life in communities most affected by extreme heat.

July 17, 2020: Co-Director Dr. Diana Bowman and Former Dean of the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law Doug Sylvester and other involved partners discussed Arizona State University’s contributions to the development of Belmont, a new smart community envisioned in the West Valley.

April 6, 2020: CSCR affiliate and ASU Law Director of the Center for Science, Law, and Innovation Gary Marchant and co-author Rida Bazzi published Autonomous Vehicle Liability: What Will Juries Do? in the Boston University Journal of Science and Technology Law.

January 23, 2020: CSCR affiliates Bill Gates, representative from District 3 on the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, and Dominic Papa, vice president of Smart State Initiatives at the Arizona Commerce Authority discussed how the Connective, a collaboration bridging public, private, university, and community partners can work to solve regional challenges in an op-ed.

January 23, 2019: CSCR affiliates discuss Waymo's new self-driving ride share program in Phoenix and how cities might guide the implementation of emerging technologies to shape future urban transportation systems.

December 13, 2018: Former Co-Director Thad Miller and City of Tempe Sustainability Manager, Braden Kay, presented a report to Tempe Mayor and City Council on policy recommendations for autonomous vehicles in the city.

October 16, 2018: Extreme weather events are increasing in strength and frequency, meaning communities - and people - are forced to confront the next disaster before they've recovered for the firsts. In this interview with WNYC's The Takeaway, former co-director Thad Miller and former FEMA administrator Craig Fugate talk about how we might our own weaknesses, from building codes to community efforts, and how we might rethink the future in light of these new condition.

April 11, 2018: Former Co-Director Thad Miller's new piece in Slate Future Tense calls for cities to join together to set rules and expectations for the autonomous vehicle industry.

April 4, 2018: Former Co-Director Thad Miller spoke with local television news station, NBC 12 News, about the need for transparency on self-driving cars safety and performance.

April 4, 2018: CSCR Affiliate Bas Boorsma discusses the skills required for smarter communities.

April 3, 2018: ASU Now press release on the launch of our center and our partnership with the Institute for Digital Progress and the Greater Phoenix Economic Council.

April 2, 2018: ASU Now covers a lively discussion on the future of autonomous vehicles featuring CSCR affiliates. 

March 27, 2018: Former CSCR Co-Director Thad Miller was quoted in a Wall Street Journal article on the impact of the recent Uber crash in Arizona (subscription required to view article).

March 27, 2018: ASU helps Phoenix refine its first HeatReady program.

March 19, 2018: CSCR affiliates discuss the need for public engagement in the wake of the first pedestrian fatality caused by an autonomous vehicle.

March 19, 2018: Former Co-Director Miller quoted in Bloomberg article on the Uber crash in Tempe.

February 2, 2018: Former Co-Director Miller discusses infrastructure and resilience with Gridium's podcast Finely Tuned.

November 13, 2017: Former Co-Director Thad Miller and colleagues in the Urban Resilience SRN discuss the need for cities to get smarter on climate change after Hurricanes Maria, Irma, and Harvey.

September 13, 2017: Environmental journalist, Andrew Revkin, discusses infrastructure resilience with Co-Director Thad Miller.

September 7, 2017: Former Co-Director Thad Miller and Mikhail Chester posit 6 rules for infrastructure resilience in the wake of Hurricane Harvey.