Sustainability class contributes to a greener C-U

As sustainability continues to gain more of the national spotlight, civil engineering students are shifting their focus to local and regional opportunities thanks to a new department course offering.

Sustainable Urban Systems, one of the special topics offered as CEE 598, debuted in the fall 2011 semester with Professor Barbara Minsker and her teaching assistant Tristan Wietsma. The course’s 19 students, split between five project groups, worked on various projects designed to improve sustainability in the Champaign-Urbana area. Through site visits and communications with local residents and city officials, the students gained an understanding of two issues plaguing the community: storm water runoff and poverty. The groups were free to choose any project topic as long as they stayed true to the essence of sustainability. 

“Their requirement was that they had to address the three dimensions of sustainability—social, economic and environmental—and it had to be about Champaign-Urbana,” said Minsker, who is the Nauman Faculty Scholar in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. 

The groups chose topics that suited the unique skills and strengths of their members. They worked toward solutions with nothing more than the skill sets they brought to the first day of class, along with assistance from Wietsma, Minsker, and a large team of consultants from the community and university. 

“What I was trying to do was teach them systems thinking and how to integrate their previous knowledge with what sustainability is about,” Minsker said. 

Sammy Rivera, a CEE graduate student studying sustainability, said he thought this teaching style was beneficial for his growth as an engineer. 

“I think what Barbara wanted us to see was the actual world of sustainability and not having someone there backing you up every time you have a doubt,” he said. “I know that most of my group feels more confident attacking sustainability issues.” 

“What I wanted them to understand is how you go from a very mushy, open-ended problem and define it down to something you can carry out as an engineering analysis,” Minsker said. “When they leave, that’s what they will have to do all the time. So it’s a big shock when you get out there and discover the real world is very messy, and all those nice equations aren’t doing you any good whatsoever.” 

All in all, Minsker said she enjoyed watching them use their creativity while working on projects.

“It was one of the most rewarding teaching experiences I’ve ever had in 15 years,” Minsker said. “It was really fun working with the students on their projects and just fascinating learning about the sustainability issues in Champaign-Urbana, especially some of the poverty issues. People don’t think about that a lot when they work on sustainability.” 

For a handful of students, the open-ended nature of the course was difficult, Wietsma said. 

“When you provide a blank slate for everybody, some students are okay with that and some get a little lost,” he said. 

Minsker is planning a more structured approach for the fall 2012 class, which would also make the course more similar to a typical relationship between engineering consultants and clients, who usually have a problem in mind, Minsker said. This could be recreated in the course by having community members and city officials identify problems and present requests for proposals to the students. 

The course was designed to evolve with each teaching, Wietsma said. This involves use of the Medici data and information management system developed by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. 

“The idea is that every semester we can create a body of work on specific topics and upload that to this management system, and then future courses will be able to draw on that,” he said. 

This work would include collected data, topic-related papers, and previous course projects, for example, and would give future students reference points to jumpstart their own projects. 

At the end of the course, the students made a final presentation attended by about a dozen local leaders. Their final reports will be sent to the city governments of Champaign and Urbana. 

Maria Jones, a CEE graduate student studying environmental engineering, continues to work toward making her group’s project a reality. Her group consisted entirely of students from developing countries, so social justice was the primary reason for her group’s topic selection. They examined a vacant lot at Fifth Street and Hill Street — a low-income area of Champaign--for a possible sustainable development with features such as urban farming. Jones said engineering projects typically focus on how to meet a system’s demand by only examining the technological solutions and ignoring the most important part of all: the people who will be affected by these projects.  

Though she says her project is currently “standing on shaky ground” as she navigates the politics of working with municipalities, she is dedicated to the task. 

“I’m willing to take it on as long as I’m in this community,” Jones said.
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Contact: Barbara Minsker, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, 217/265-5293.

Celeste Arbogast Bragorgos, director of communications, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, 217/333-6955.

Writer: Thomas Thoren

If you have any questions about the College of Engineering, or other story ideas, contact Rick Kubetz, editor, Engineering Communications Office, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 217/244-7716.