The Collaborative Projects are the centerpiece of the Sustainable Cities Program. Each Collaborative Project (for which students receive 4 credits) is directed by at least two faculty from different disciplines, and includes graduate students from at least three. The projects will tackle real problems, training students in effective teamwork, communication across disciplines, and cooperative interaction with decision makers and stakeholders from industry, trade groups, government, nonprofits, and political organizations.

Both natural habitat and open space resources are scarce in  Los Angeles county. This project aims to develop an open space/habitat network system that will specifically target some of the region's most diverse and impoverished communities in Los Angeles. The project will involve building a GIS/planning model of the area that will include the complex patterns of existing land,  brownfields and vacant lands, as well as an economic development component.  Project collaborators (Jennifer Wolch, Geography; Stephanie Pincetl, Geography; Achva Stein, Architecture; Theo Tsotsis, Chemical Engineering; Tridib Banerjee, Planning Policy Development; John Wilson, Geography; David Dale-Johnson, Real Estate; and Susanne Edmands, Biology), have been working with various departments in the City of Los Angeles and  nonprofit organizations , on defining the project. The next steps will involve creating the GIS planning model and developing an analysis of the possibilities for habitat restoration/rehabilitation and recreation facilities.  

This project addresses the lack of affordable, effective pollution control technologies for small businesses. It has several components: 

1. Design of small-scale, inexpensive, reliable biofilters.
2. Developing approaches for operation and maintenance that are cheap and reliable.
3. Outreach and education to regulators and small business owners.
4. Implementation of technologies.

Sustainable Cities Program funding has been supplemented with money from the USC Undergraduate Research Program,  supporting a team of students who are summarizing and organizing mathematical models of biofilters. Graduate students are making calculations to trace the passage of air through biofilters, to develop methods of ensuring the homogeneous flow that is necessary for complete treatment. The project team includes Joe Devinny and Mike Pirbazari from Environmental Engineering; Theo Tsotsis and Yanis Yortsos from Chemical Engineering; Eckart Meiburg from Aerospace Engineering; Sheldon Kamieniecki from Political Science; Doug Andrews from Business Communications; and Ed Reynolds, owner of a private consulting firm that supplies biofilters.      

The LACE project is an interdisciplinary effort to understand the links between stormwater, coastal ecosystem health, and the local economy. This summer  graduate and undergraduates students from USC (including two Sustainable Cities doctoral fellows and two Sustainable Cities undergraduate fellows) and the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies (Wrigley Summer Fellows) worked on a variety of issues related to stormwater including: the microbiology of stormwater pathogens, the economic valuation of stormwater impacts, the role of demographic factors in the perception of marine water quality, and a thorough mapping of beaches in Los Angeles and Orange Counties. Currently, a broad consortium of funding agencies has come together to fund LACE related projects. Primary funding comes from NOAA, the State Water Quality Control Board, The California Department of Fish and Game, The Santa Monica Bay Restoration Project, The Wrigley Institute for Environmental Studies, The Southern California Studies Center, and USC Sea Grant. The LACE group includes Linwood Pendelton, Economics; Sheldon Kamieniecki of Political Science; and Tony Michaels, Donald Manahan, Jed Fuhrman, and Burt Jones of Marine Biology. LACE  also collaborated with faculty from UC Berkeley and UC Davis on a major phone survey during the summer to assess beach use behavior and its relationship to marine pollution.

Sustainable development requires a sustainable industrial ecosystem. Industrial ecology is a new field that is concerned with the environmental impact of products, processes and industrial infrastructures. This collaborative research project will first develop a framework for the integration of current tools and techniques and their implications for all life-cycle stages of an industrial system. Two of the more widely used approaches are Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) and Design for Environment (DFE). Current research shows these tools to be useful in analyzing environmental impacts at micro-level or macro-level of complexity.

The research team is currently exploring the development of a modified DFE for sustainable industrial products and processes. Because this field is relatively new, the research team hopes to be able to provide a significant contribution in both theory and practice of DFE and its related life cycle design approaches. Participants in this project include: Mansour Rahimi, Industrial and Systems Engineering; Najmedin Meshkati, Civil/Environmental Engineering; Detlof von Winterfeldt, Policy, Planning and Development; and Linwood Pendleton, Economics.

Catalina Island is located twenty-six miles offshore from Los Angeles  and receives a million visitors a year. Environmental preservation and conservation are a top priority for the Santa Catalina Island Company, which operates tourist facilities on the island, and the Catalina Conservancy, a nonprofit organization charged with protecting the island's habitat. The USC Wrigley Institute for Environmental Studies and the Sustainable Cities Program are exploring alternative energy generation potential for the island, assessing the effect of various wastewater disposal alternatives on ocean health and conducting other scientific analyses of the effects of island development on the local coastal waters. In addition, the economic feasibility of developing an ecotourist village will be explored. Participating faculty members include Tony Michaels, Director of the Wrigley Institute for Environmental Studies; Jed Fuhrman, Marine Biology; Tridib Banerjee, Policy, Planning and Development; and Stephanie Pincetl, Geography.

An important challeng for urban sustainability is to reduce residents' exposure to hazardous emissions while maintaining employment. Southern California supports the largest metal finishing industry in the United States. Metal finishing uses toxic materials, and is characterized by small, often undercapitalized firms. The industry is becoming increasingly regulated -- the South Coast Air Quality Management District has recently listed soluble nickel, used in metal finishing, as a carcinogen, posing the possibility of making it prohibitively expensive to operate in the region. The collaborators on this project (Theo Tsotsis, Chemical Engineering; Sheldon Kamieniecki, Political Science; Joe Devinny, Environmental Engineering; Florian Mansfeld, Material Sciences Engineering; Stephanie Pincetl, Geography) are working with a local firm to assess the potential of new technologies for compliance with the nickel regulations and to transfer successful technologies to other firms. They are also be developing a community outreach component to disseminate information about pollution-related health problems and best practices. This will create a forum for industry and community members to address each other's concerns.

The primary objective of this project is to involve students and faculty in a comprehensive systems approach study of how earthquake risk is quantified, how the information is communicated to policy makers and how they can make the best policy decisions  based on this information. These decisions have important implications for urban sustainability as they will determine how urban systems will respond in the event of such a natural disaster. The Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC), a Science and Technology Center funded by the National Science Foundation and the United States Geological Survey, brings together a group of experts in engineering, economics, policy analysis, computer science, geographical information science and geology. USC faculty involved include Tom Henyey (SCEC/Earth Sciences), Charlie Sammis (Earth Sciences), Geoff Martin (Civil Engineering), Peter Gordon and Harry Richardson (Policy, Planning and Development).

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