Grant Kick-off Meeting in Port St. Joe

Through a generous grant from the Jessie Ball DuPont Fund, the Florida Resilient Cities (FRC) program has funded six multi-disciplinary courses and research projects. These include:

  • Cultural Resource Survey of North Port St. Joe: Practicum Course (Marty Hylton & Linda Stevenson, Historic Preservation Program)
  • Resilience, Well-being and Natural Resource Reliance in the Greater Port St. Joe Region (Richard Stepp, Anthropology; Tim Murtha, Landscape Architecture; Maddie Brown, FIBER Postdoctoral Associate)
  • Building Trust Through Stories in Port St. Joe (Jason von Meding, Rinker School of Construction Management; Colin Smith, Psychology)
  • Planning for Resilient Community: Rural Tourism and Home-sharing in Port St. Joe: Dissertation (Lori Pennington-Gray, Tourism, Hospitality & Event Management; Yuhua Xu, Doctoral Researcher)
  • Building a Resilient Urban Park System in Port St. Joe: Landscape Architecture Studio and Dissertation (Yi Luo, Landscape Architecture; Kanglin Chen, Doctoral Researcher)
  • An IoT-Enabled Critical Infrastructure Information Network (ICI-IN) for a Future Resilient City (Rui Liu, Rinker School of Construction Management; Xiao Yu & Xilei Zhao, Civil and Coastal Engineering)

The FRC funding is also supporting the Florida Climate Institute’s Spring Break Field Course and the Advanced Modular Multi-Family Housing Design studio, centered on designing a modular housing unit for six sites in the city.

On Friday, January 13, the FRC team and affiliate researchers held a kick-off meeting for Spring 2020 projects and courses based in Port St. Joe, a small city on the panhandle recovering after 2018’s Hurricane Michael. Principal Investigators met with local stakeholders to begin site visits, organize interviews and opportunities for data gathering. Participants included local and county government leaders, neighborhood representatives, arts and culture organizations, developers, real estate agents, housing and environmental non-profits.

The coursework and research projects will be visiting and working in Port St. Joe throughout the semester. The FCI Field Course will be in Port St. Joe during Spring Break, focusing on four-five design thinking projects. These students will present their projects to the community at the end of the week.

The one-year program will culminate a community presentation over the summer and an implementation summit held in early fall of 2020.

Port St. Joe is the first Florida Resilient City project and is led by The Florida Institute for Built Environment Resilience (FIBER), the Shimberg Center for Housing Studies, and The Center for Landscape Conservation Planning.

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