Unraveling New York City's Underground

Free Online Program

A growing Smart Cities movement uses networked technologies and data collection to understand and improve urban life and infrastructure. However, this movement’s potential is limited by its overemphasis on city surfaces, missing the rich data available from sources underground. What’s more, a lot of this information is isolated from related research efforts, or lost to time, ultimately restricting opportunities for innovation. An initiative spearheaded by urban engineering scholars at New York University attempts to remedy these shortcomings by studying New York City’s urban landscape and exploring new methods to understand the space beneath our feet. 

Join scholars Debra Laefer, Professor of Civil and Urban Engineering and Director of Citizen Science at NYU Tandon's Center for Urban Science and Progress, and Kim Hertz, Ph.D. candidate in Urban Infrastructure Systems, to learn about the uneven history of urban data collection and their revolutionary efforts to address the gaps. Their findings have the potential to improve New York’s mass transit system’s resiliency in the face of a changing climate, and more generally, to increase the sustainability, efficiency, and security of city life.