MAPPING INSTABILITY:
The Effects of the Pandemic on the Civic Life of a Small Town
Project Date: September 2020 - Present
Type: Interdisciplinary Research
Pari Riahi, Co-PI
Narges Mahyar, PI: College of Computer Science and Information technology, UMass Amherst
Ali Sarvghad, C0-PI: College of Computer Science and Information technology, UMass Amherst
Erica Dewitt, (MARCH 2024)
Cami Quinteros, (MARCH 2023)
Fey Thurber, (BARCH 2023)
Large crises affect many facets of a community’s life in drastic ways and multiple durations. Preoccupied with the rapid transformations caused by the current pandemic, this project endeavors to analyze its long- and short-term impacts on the civic lives of a small town’s residents specifically as it concerns their mobility and access to collective resources. This interdisciplinary project joins forces from Architecture and Computer Science combining our research in built environment and digital civics to investigate how a major crisis and its social, economic and cultural repercussions affect one’s sense of community and social connectedness.
More than ever, contemporary architecture has been adjusting to understand the built environment as part of a larger cycle of ecological and biological continuum. The steady growth of conservation and adaptive reuse of the built environment rather than building a new, the inclusion of other disciplines that inform architecture of natural and technological advances relevant to its development and the opening of the field towards understanding, social, economic and cultural forces as important vectors that affect architecture have been all too present in the past years. However, architecture remains slow in reacting to change. With this project and further extended work planned with this group of investigators, the Co-Pis focused on making architectural analysis more synchronous, nimble and responsive to forces that affect it. By using techniques and methods of data gathering from Computer science and investing in the potential of the new field of Digital Civics, the project offers a new and notable avenue of investigation for a symbiotic and multi-disciplinary action that can become significant as a model for collaboration
The research has been supported by a UMass Amherst ADVANCE Award.