Engineering Cities Initiative Receives NSF RAPID Grant for Haiti Project

April 29, 2010 The Drexel Engineering Cities Initiative team has been awarded a National Science Foundation RAPID Response Grant for their project “Supporting Haitian Infrastructure Reconstruction Decisions with Local Knowledge: A Case Study Focusing on Water and Sanitation in Leogane.”

The hypothesis of the project is that in the wake of the January 12, 2010 earthquake, sustainable reconstruction requires a focused effort to incorporate local knowledge into all levels of post-disaster infrastructure decisions. In addition, rehabilitation priorities based on local knowledge elicited through stakeholder-driven processes will differ fundamentally from those developed by technical experts based outside of the service area. To test this hypothesis, the team that includes Drs. Franco Montalto (CAEE), Michael Piasecki (CAEE), Patrick Gurian (CAEE) and Mimi Sheller (CoAS) will focus on water and sanitation issues in Leogane, a town of approximately 80,000 people located about 30 km to the west of the capital and at the quake’s epicenter.

The team will present its findings at an NSF sponsored workshop on Haitian reconstruction to be held in the fall. The total budget for this one year effort is $199,854.