GIS Seminar: Greening the City - Integrating Green Infrastructure Into the Urban Landscape

As cities continue to expand, the issues of flood control and urban water quality have risen to the forefront of modern sustainability challenges. Green infrastructure, the use of nature-based solutions to target, treat, and store stormwater at its source, has emerged as a possible solution. While green infrastructure does offer multiple benefits for urban users, its performance is also highly variable.Reshmina presents a risk-based approach that can be used to quantify green infrastructure performance uncertainty, then builds on this approach to answer key questions about the roles that design and policy play in shaping green infrastructure efficiency at the individual and network scales. In doing so, she highlights the need to integrate conversations about policy and sociology into engineering discourse, in order to better understand and design for a sustainable urban future.Speaker: Reshmina William, Department of Civil Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-ChampaignReshmina William recently defended her doctoral dissertation in Civil Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She completed her M.S. and B.S. degrees in Civil Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, with a minor in Political Science. Her doctoral research explores the nexus between green infrastructure, urban policy-making, and risk management. Her work, which encompasses aspects of environmental law and game theory as well as urban hydrology, has been showcased in a variety of publications and presentations, including an invited speaker presentation to the Chicago chapter of the American Society of Civil Engineers. Outside of her research, she is a passionate advocate for environmental equity and interdisciplinary education, and has honed her ability to facilitate conversations between scientists and policy makers as an executive board member of the UIUC Science Policy Group.