Although the adoption of the American with Disabilities Act (ADA) shifted the paradigm for physical accessibility, many aspects of the built environment are still not easy or satisfying for people who use wheelchairs. This is mainly due to the practice of the building industry, i.e., the compliance of those guidelines mainly focuses on design and construction requirements whereas the actual experience of wheelchair users is not fully investigated after the construction phase.

Popular destinations, such as national parks, and their gateway communities are co-dependent, complex systems. The remote and fragile economies are exposed to compounding stressors, such as disasters, peak visit seasons, and infrastructure and workforce capacity limitations. Future long-term resiliency planning is critical; however, existing efforts have been siloed, non-comprehensive, and limited to short planning horizons.

This project will provide support to the third round of NSF’s Civic Innovation Challenge (“CIVIC 3.0”) program, a “research and action” competition driven by community priorities. MetroLab will provide the NSF with support to grow CIVIC’s impact, and provide outreach, capacity building, and programming, while elevating this unique program to the greater civic research ecosystem. MetroLab’s work will foster a Community of Practice, enabling and elevating the work of the teams receiving CIVIC awards.

Developing neighborhood connectivity, trust, and belonging is essential for the mental health of young people. Social connections help mitigate the stressors young people face. Technologies that build community engagement and include information of public and local interest, that is, civic technologies, have shown promise for improving social connections. Yet existing tools often fail to sustain public interest or help the public intuitively navigate the complex data displayed, and also often lack transparency.

On September 27, 2024, Hurricane Helene brought historic rainfall and related floods and landslides to Western North Carolina (NC), causing over 100 deaths, destroying or damaging tens of thousands of homes, and costing over $50 billion. The aim of this project is to collect hyper-local, individual experience data on the response and recovery efforts to Hurricane Helene in Western North Carolina to synthesize lessons learned and to better understand how communities with high risk of inland flooding can increase resilience to better prepare for future disasters.

Uncontrolled wildfires are among the most destructive natural hazards. They threaten lives, infrastructure, and ecosystems. A critical but understudied driver of their spread is the ember, a burning particle that detaches from the main fire; travels with the wind; and ignites spot fires far ahead of the main fire line. Because ember behavior is difficult to observe during actual fires, it remains poorly understood and underrepresented in operational fire models.

Communities in the Southern Great Plains are increasingly affected by winter ice storms. These pose serious yet often overlooked risks to urban environments and produce freezing rain that accumulates on trees. The resulting ice burden leads to tree failure and falls, widespread vegetation breakage, blocked roads, power outages, and damage to homes and infrastructure. While residents of the area are familiar with tornado and severe thunderstorm preparedness, there is less awareness and readiness concerning the cascading impacts of ice storms, particularly in urban areas.

U.S. households spent on average 5.6% of their income on energy, with 40% of energy losses through the envelope. Homes with deteriorated insulation and aging structure face disproportionately high energy costs. Retrofitting and weatherization are key strategies for enhancing building performance and resilience against environmental stress. However, traditional energy audits and retrofitting methods are labor-intensive, costly, and often inaccessible to the populations who need them most.

Gun violence and the reckless use of firearms have become a pervasive and growing problem in the United States that has only been exacerbated by easy access to firearms, and an increasing mistrust of law enforcement that often inhibits reporting by the community. This project seeks to build a community-based acoustic gunshot alert system for detecting and localizing gunshots using a distributed network of inexpensive acoustic sensors and pilot it in a community in Austin, Texas.

This Smart and Connected Communities (SCC) Civic Innovation Challenge (CIVIC) project is focused on increasing resilience of North Slope Alaskan Arctic coastal communities threatened by increased coastal erosion, flooding, and ground subsidence as a result a rapidly warming Arctic, changes that are threatening property and infrastructure and impacting food security and community well being. The project creates high spatial-resolution, reliable, hazard risk-assessment, forecasting, decision-support tools that can be used for disaster management and community planning.