Last summer, a team of faculty and students from the College of Architecture at Texas A&M University placed second, earning $30,000 in a nationwide competition aimed at providing the city of Austin, Texas with innovative ideas for encouraging the friendly coexistence of the city’s beloved trees with its much-needed utility infrastructure.
The National Research Ideas Competition was sponsored by the city’s municipally owned electric company, Austin Energy. The company was looking for pioneering, cost-effective ways for integrating utility lines in urban areas, for promoting street tree planting, and for protecting existing mature urban trees while maintaining electrical system reliability.
The Texas A&M competition team included students in urban design studios led by professors Jody Naderi and Pliny Fisk. Their entry, “EM Power,” with “EM” standing for “environmentally managed,” presented four major goals with strategies and recommendations for each:
Faculty from all four departments in the College of Architecture also assisted students with their competition preparations.
“The participating faculty contributed to each others’ ideas for a truly trans-disciplinary approach,” said Naderi. “Our solutions drew from the latest design innovations in power distribution systems that facilitate expansion of the urban forest while enhancing the development of high-quality civic space,” she said.
The Aggie team’s proposal included a reforestation strategy, enhancements to Austin’s pedestrian environment and alternative power distribution suggestions. Additionally, the students provided participatory planning strategies, including a board game that garnered wide acclaim from the competition jury.
The game, developed with assistance from Vinod Srinivasan, assistant professor of visualization, was designed to teach the merits and conflicts inherent to maintaining a sustainable green infrastructure. In the game, players are tasked with helping the urban treescape to flourish while considering the design and operation of a power system. They also have to contend with the hard-to-measure costs and benefits of evaluating a community’s willingness to pay for innovation and alternative energy methods.
In developing the game, the competition jury commented, the students recognized “the value delivered by the urban forest, the flexibility of having a set of technical alternatives, and that the costs and benefits of environmentally managed power should be addressed community-wide.”
Other College of Architecture faculty contributing to the students’ competition solution included Charlie Culp and Robin Abrams from the Department of Architecture, Jerry Jackson and John Nichols from the Department of Construction Science, and Forster Ndubisi, Elise Bright and Chris Ellis from the Department of Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning. Additionally, the student received advice from Gina Rheault, an electrical engineer from Amherst Massachusetts and Don B. Russell, a Texas A&M electrical engineering professor.
The $30,000 earned for the Aggie team’s second place finish was distributed between participating faculty and will be used to advance research in sustainable urbanism. The student competitors also received an honorarium.
