Pima County Regional Flood District Monthly Brown Bag Series
Speaker: Courtney Crosson, Assistant Professor, College of Architecture, Planning, and Landscape Architecture, UA
Date / Time: Wednesday, October 10, 12–1 PM
Location: 201 North Stone Ave, 9th Floor
Globally, cities are facing increased water stress under growing populations, degrading infrastructure, and changing climate patterns. This imbalance between available water resources and projected urban water demands presents tremendous challenges for water resource management, necessitating novel planning and design strategies and tools. Rainwater harvesting (RWH) has been identified as one partial answer; however, the capacity of such a solution to address urban water deficits had been largely untested. The speaker, Courtney Crosson, will discuss two components of decentralized water infrastructure’s ability to meet urban water stress: network capacity and regulatory restriction. First, the talk will discuss recent research that evaluates the capacity of Tucson to become water independent using rainwater. Remote sensing, localized daily rainfall, and municipal water meter data were used to construct a dynamic model of the city’s potential passive and active RWH network. Second, Crosson will discusses the regulatory hurdles to make such infrastructure a reality at a commercial scale.
Image: Arch451b instructor: Crosson | students: RJ Castro, Kate Stuteville, Jasmine Tamayo