Ezra Systems Seminar: Graeme Troxell Ph.D. ’24 (Colorado St.)
Developing Decision-Support Tools for Urban Sociotechnical Systems
Urban sociotechnical systems are increasingly under pressure from aging legacy systems, rapid urbanization, and environmental stresses like climate change. Urban planners and municipal policymakers struggle to navigate these challenges due to the interdependent nature of such systems, where isolated interventions can have unforeseen consequences across the broader urban landscape. Furthermore, existing decision-making frameworks often fail to account for the social and policy contexts that influence infrastructure development and operation. This presentation introduces a few approaches for supporting sustainable, equitable decision-making regarding urban sociotechnical systems.
The talk will introduce the application of systems architecture to the early-stage design of urban infrastructure, demonstrating its potential as a decision-support tool for urban planners and project stakeholders. Drawing on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway redevelopment case, the systems architecture framework revealed design solutions that aligned more closely with stakeholder and sustainability goals than initial city proposals. The presentation will also cover research on a decision-support tool that uses a multinomial logit model to inform energy efficiency improvements in regional rental housing markets. Among other things, the tool helps address the split incentive problem in the rental housing market by estimating how energy efficiency influences prospective renters’ willingness to pay. The talk will conclude by briefly exploring the development of a real-time decision support platform for urban planning and policymaking.
Bio:
Graeme Troxell is a young academic with a background encompassing systems engineering, urbanism, and philosophy. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow in systems engineering at Colorado State University and a visiting lecturer in systems engineering at Cornell University. He holds a Ph.D. in systems from Cornell University, where his dissertation, “Systems Architecting Urban Infrastructure,” has been accepted for publication by Cambridge University Press. His academic foundation in philosophy uniquely equips him to tackle the transdisciplinary challenges of today’s complex built environment. Graeme’s research broadly focuses on the design, development, and management of sociotechnical systems, with an emphasis on urban systems.