PJ Dick Innovation Fund Project Grant: From Pipes to People and Places: Regime Change in Urban Water Infrastructure

From Pipes to People and Places: Regime Change in Urban Water Infrastructure
Christine Mondor, Special Faculty, Carnegie Mellon Architecture

This project addresses the challenge of transitioning stormwater infrastructure to a more resilient and socially integrated urban system. It contributes to Carnegie Mellon Architecture's priorities of addressing climate change, advancing social equity and leveraging AI to inform innovative design practices. By focusing on the concept of infrastructural regime change, the project explores the shift from centralized “grey” systems to decentralized green stormwater infrastructure (GSI) that integrates ecological health, social equity and long-term resilience into urban environments. This approach reframes infrastructure as a dynamic part of urban design, emphasizing human well-being, co-production and quality of place.

This grant will expand data-driven research with a creative inquiry into social factors and develop a publication structure to contextualize the work. The first section will present the empirical research establishing the distributed infrastructure regime change concept, providing a foundation for understanding this critical evolution. The second section will map the spatial geographies of infrastructural social dynamics, uncovering the relationships between physical systems and the social and ecological forces that influence their adoption and adaptation. The third section will explore visual geographies, using photographic and collage methods to investigate how infrastructure shapes – and is shaped by – environmental beliefs and behaviors. These visuals will engage ecological semiotics and the framing of engineered systems as natural or inevitable that influence public acceptance of ecological infrastructures.

By integrating quantitative, spatial and visual approaches, this project acknowledges the many intelligences needed to address complex, wicked problems. It positions architects as key contributors in rethinking infrastructure, bridging insights from social systems, public policy and ecological design, and can advance regime change toward more integrated and adaptive infrastructure systems.

Image credit: Christine Mondor.