Syracuse University Case Study 2016 Courses

March 27 (Syllabi in the Appendix)

Teaching Modern Urban Infrastructure in a New Modality

The Setting

Laura J. Steinberg is a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Syracuse University. In 2009, as Dean of Syracuse’s College of Engineering and Computer Science, she applied for an NSF grant to launch courses intended (her term) to “cross pollinate” the creative instincts of engineering students in their design capstone courses with the creative instincts of students in two other departments: Syracuse’s Newhouse School of Communications and the School of Architecture. Earlier in her career at Tulane University, she had helped formulate the university’s plan for a School of Urban Studies. At Syracuse, she later engaged in designing and teaching cross-campus courses in urban infrastructure and in “algorithmic thinking” for understanding complex current news stories. So, thinking and teaching across disciplinary boundaries was nothing new to her.

Syracuse University consists of 11 separate colleges. While the University has an arts and sciences requirement for all undergraduates, as is common, the university had so far not permitted engineering courses to be counted as part of these requirements. As a result, the undergraduate science requirement can only be satisfied with one or more science classes from the College of Arts and Sciences. Thus, any new course offered by Engineering, however, broad its content and accessible its pedagogy, could not at that point be “counted” for distribution credit. The very fact that the first time it was offered, ”Modern Urban Infrastructure” attracted seniors from the real estate program of the business school, encouraged Prof. Steinberg to seek relationships with other colleges on campus. Now that the course has been taught twice to a mix of engineering and non-engineering seniors, she expects the enrollment of students when she teaches it again significantly to increase.

Although Modern Urban Infrastructure is housed in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, it captures certain elements of CE that are not normally covered in other CE courses, such as: Infrastructure systems; political, social, and economic ramifications of infrastructure development; national security. In addition, Steinberg encourages her students to become conversant with industry standard techniques such as LEED, Envision, and the graphical software that is used in Infrastructure Asset Management.

II Reading/Writing/Assignments (see Appendix I for Full Syllabi of 2016 Courses)

Thespecific topics of the course appear to be fairly straight forward,

+ the state of U.S. infrastructure;

+ the interdependence of infrastructure components;

+the impacts of infrastructure on society;

+infrastructure sustainability and resilience, and

+ the planning and management of infrastructure assets

However, students are quickly made aware that the instructor wants to focus on cross-cutting themes as well: the public nature of infrastructure and the complexity of developing and managing these systems. The course is taught seminar-style, and class participation counts for 15% of the grade. Desks are arranged in a square so that students can easily engage in discussion around the room. It doesn’t take long for the students, even those who are majoring in engineering, to recognize that this is no ordinary course.

Take the readings for example. Students are assigned articles from the Economist, The New Yorker, The Wall St. Journal, and The New York Times along with topical readings on the Erie Canal and the Dixie Highway. And by the third week of class, every student has to have selected a book that will be the basis of a research paper. The instructor insists that the main source be a book, “…to give the student the experience of reading a book to get in-depth understanding.” Nor are their assignments ever short answer questions or formulaic in any sense of the word. Typical topics in the two semesters in which Modern Urban Infrastructure has so far been taught are: choosing, and explicitly justifying an infrastructure project; grading pavement quality in streets around campus according to specific asset management criteria; synthesizing data from many sources to describe Syracuse’s water supply system and to identify its vulnerabilities; also, to chart its evolution over time. Students are to contrast a pragmatic “worst first” infrastructure investment approach to a triple bottom line approach; and present breaking news stories of infrastructure topics (e.g. failures, new designs, political controversies) to the class.

The research paper is not a short-answer assignment, but is rather a case study of a particular piece of infrastructure, in which through the student’s narrative key questions will be posed and answered. To help the students explore the complexity of their topic, Professor Steinberg requires that the paper incorporate learnings from a book written about the infrastructure, as well from journals, newspapers, websites, and other sources. The paper counts for 30% of the grade in the course and requires a draft to be turned in a few weeks before it’s due so that the instructor can provide constructive feedback. Further help is provided through a template which tracks the students’ research, self-question posing and to which the instructor provides constructive feedback (see Appendix XX). For most of the students, it is the first time in conjunction with an engineering assignment, they have had to research a topic, read a book about it, and write a paper synthesizing various perspectives about it. And in the doing they learn how!

Analyzing an Issue through Multiple Frames

An overarching goal of the instructor is to teach her students over the course of the semester, to learn how to analyze infrastructure through multiple frames: economic; social and environmental impacts; long vs. short-term consequences of development; unintended consequences of development; differential impact of development on different subsets of people; in sum, who wins, who loses. Other topics touch on financing and maintaining infrastructure; evolution of new technologies; political concerns and implications.

Students are expected to actively participate. By the second class, three students are assigned to report on particular infrastructures, with instructions by the professor to talk about their history, design, and their social and economic consequences. And more than once over the course of the semester, they have to present analyses on a topic that is urgent and timely. Throughout, the instructor moderates class discussion, which in her words “helps maintain a focus on the interdisciplinary aspect of the course and prevents the students from relying on the technical knowledge base that engineering students are comfortable with.”

Learning Objectives

To get approval for her new course, Laura Steinberg had to list learning objectives in some specificity. After taking this course, students will be able to (she writes):

Describe the impacts of infrastructure on economic development, community, and the environment.
Evaluate the resilience of particular infrastructure projects.
Read the body of literature on modern infrastructure with comprehension and be able to summarize and comment orally on the readings.
Evaluate methods, technologies, and tools that are available to manage infrastructure assets.
Explain in writing the interdisciplinary aspects of infrastructure projects and analyze how these aspects interact.
Argue persuasively as to the value of infrastructure to society.
Identify and analyze ethical issues related to infrastructure
Participate in wide-ranging discussions with students in other majors on topics relating to infrastructure

Operationalizing Objective (4) Applying IAS to an Urban Infrastructure Problem

Infrastructure Asset Management (IAS) is an organized programmatic way that municipalities inventory, plan, and maintain their assets. It was important to Professor Steinberg that the students in the two iterations of the course be made to understand that IAS is the way to explain to business leaders and city managers what a municipality or other entity wants to have funded. With current techniques, infrastructure asset management is calculated and laid out by means of graphical software and even though her non-engineering students might never have to employ the techniques as members of the wider public, the instructor wanted them to know what it is. To do so, she managed to persuade the president of a Utah-based software company specializing in infrastructure and asset management to contribute both its system and himself to give her students hands-on experience in doing an assignment. The assignment: to assess the residual life of pavement on the streets of the city they live in, namely, Syracuse.

The president of the company conducted two webinars with the students in Steinberg’s class, enabling them to use his company’s software. And the ensuing homework problem sets involved calculating the residual life of Syracuse streets. The result: a histogram where y= % of the total area of pavement, x=residual life of the pavement. Steinberg saw this homework assignment as substantially hands on.

Other Class Assignments:

Supplying Water for Syracuse

To get students to see beyond infrastructure components to a system- level analysis, they are assigned to analyze how the water supply system works for the City of Syracuse. They begin by drawing the system on a map of the region indicating treatment plants, transmission lines, distribution system, pumping stations and reservoirs. For this, they have to consult and become familiar with the on-line annual report produced by the city and the construction updates page on the Onondaga County water system website, as well as a consultant’s map of the system.

When they learn that the Onondaga County’s system is used to supply water to Syracuse during times of low water levels in the city’s main water source, they directly encounter two critical elements in infrastructure systems, namely resilience and redundancy. Also, they learn how systems need to evolve as science evolves more and societal priorities change. This is when they discover that a treated water reservoir built in the 1950s was recently upgraded to include renewable energy from an engineered pressure loss system as well as state-of-the-art technology to reduce health threats from waterborne cryptosporidiosis.

This is not book learning, but learning by discovery.

A Subway System, an airport, and a power grid.

In contrast to the first, this is an in-class assignment in which students work in teams and are asked to draw schematics on the whiteboard of infrastructure systems they are most familiar with: a subway system, an airport, the power grid. Returning to the theme of resilience, students are asked to identify how a failure in one of the components of their system might affect the performance of the system as a whole.

The U.S. Infrastructure “Crisis”

Assignment 3 addresses the widely acknowledged infrastructure crisis in the U.S. as reported by the four-year annual “report card” of the American Society of Civil Engineers, which outlines what steps need to be taken to meet capacity, public safety, and rehabilitation needs. The assignment also serves to provide an overview of infrastructure systems less well understood by urban students, namely, ports, waterways and solid waste systems.

Students are given a framework within which to evaluate each infrastructure including: What group or government agency is responsible for building and maintenance? Whether the primary issue is capacity? Deterioration? Or being outmoded? What is (are) the proposed solution(s)? How do we measure return on investment vs. the risks of not taking remedial action?

From the instructor’s point of view, each assignment raises students’ awareness both of the ethical issues involved in infrastructure decision making and the tradeoffs between short- and long-term solutions.

Reflections by Laura Steinberg on her teaching:

Students seemed to genuinely enjoy the discussion format of the course. Those in engineering found it a welcome break from the power-point heavy, teacher-centered approach they found in most of their engineering courses. The expectation that the students would read and engage with information from articles and books, in addition to sources on the internet, may have discouraged some from taking the course, but those who enrolled found new ways of learning and expressing themselves. And, the engineering students appreciated that this was one of the few opportunities they had at the university to engage in spirited, data-driven conversations.

For the professor herself, the prospect of leading a seminar-style course had been a bit intimidating as she had little experience with the format. As a remedy, she prepared discussion questions for each class, engaged the students in classroom team activities, brought reticent students into the conversation with directed questions, and encouraged open, non-judgmental discussion. She also emphasized to the students how important it was to come to class ready to discuss the readings and, to make her point that 15% of their grade would be for class participation. Ultimately, Dr. Steinberg found the discussions so stimulating and the assignment of readings so worthwhile that she plans henceforth to assign some supplementary readings in her more traditional engineering courses.

What surprised her most was that her students seemed to be missing crucial information like the industrial history of the last century, including regulation by federal and state governments; basic engineering science, such as basic biochemistry of water oxygenation and de-oxygenation; and widely-known techniques such as linear regression analysis. The way she handled these learning gaps was to take time out to explain, provide a home work or reading specific to the operation, and continually refer back to the concept in succeeding classes.

The mode of collecting student course evaluations is standard at Syracuse University. But reading them, revealed to the instructor some non-standard responses. From a non-engineer: “I learned more in this class than in all my other classes combined.” From engineers: “We have learned so much more about engineering in the sense of its impacts in society and the field itself. Once the engineers got used to it, they liked the small discussion format “I would recommend this class to every CIE student.” “… every student could benefit from learning about all the aspects that should be considered when designing a structure.” ”I never felt I shouldn’t express my opinions.” From all that she retrieved from students throughout the course, Dr. Steinberg had reason to conclude that the students had absorbed and appreciated a key message of the course, namely that infrastructure is a complex technical and societal undertaking. And, she is as certain as they are, that they could now engage in a knowledgeable, fact-based discussion on the topic.

Future of the Course

Professor Steinberg intends to teach the course each fall. She will update the curriculum to reflect emerging issues, such as public-private partnerships, and breaking news stories. She wants to expand the non-engineering enrollment in the class and so is reaching out to program chairs in the Whitman School of Management and the Maxwell School of Public Affairs for their help. She is also considering applying for inclusion of the course in the Honors College’s offerings.

Appendix 1 Readings (Abridged list)

Public Infrastructure Asset Management, Chapters 1 and 4, The Challenge of Managing Infrastructure, and Database Management, Data Needs, Analysis, Waheed Uddin, W. Ronald Hudson, and Ralph Hass, 2nd Ed., 2013.
American Society of Civil Engineers Infrastructure Report Card,
A Time for Renewal, Economist Magazine, March 13, 2013,
Infrastructure Report Card: Purpose and Results, Neil Grigg, Journal of Infrastructure Systems, 21 (4), 2015.

The Dixie Highway: Roadbuilding and the Making of the Modern South. Introduction and Chapter 1, Tammy Ingram, University of North Carolina Press, 2014.
The Erie Canal, Historical Encyclopedia of American Business, Salem Press, Pasadena, CA 2009.
Landlords Dig Second Ave. Subway, Joe Anuta, Crain’s New York Business, Feb. 24, 2014,
Extreme Engineering: The Big Dig, video, Public Broadcasting System, 2003.

New York State Department of Transportation Asset Management Plan, Draft Version, 2014,

Critical Infrastructure, Interdependencies, and Resilience, T.D. O’Rourke, The Bridge, 2007.
Infrastructure Resilience to Disasters, Stephanie Chang, The Bridge, 2009.
National Infrastructure Protection Plan, US Department of Homeland Security, 2016.
Draft Environmental Impact Statement, South Park Bridge Project, Seattle, WA, 2005
The Really Big One, Kathryn Schultz, The New Yorker Magazine, 2015.
The City Shaper, Robert Caro, The New Yorker Magazine, 1998.
Envision: Rating System for Sustainable Infrastructure, Institute for Sustainable Infrastructure, Washington DC, 2015.
Sustainable Infrastructure after the Automobile Age, Jeffrey D. Sachs, Boston Globe, September 26, 2016,

Appendix 2

Comparison of Course Outlines for first two iterations of the Course – Spring 2016, Fall 2016

Class / Spring 2016 / Fall 2016
1st day / Discuss syllabus / Discuss syllabus
2nd day / Student presentations / Student presentations
3rd day / Discussed types of infrastructures; resilience concepts / Student presentations; historical perspectives
4th day / ASCE Report Card / Biochemical oxygen demand (BOD) presentation by student; historical perspective; diagram solid waste system
5th day / Dixie Highway; historical perspective / News on VW auto emissions; BOD review; RCRA student presentation; reviewed solid waste
6th day / Solid waste infrastructure; Flint water crisis; Erie Canal / Students completed diagrams of infrastructure systems; explored effects of disruptions
7th day / 2nd ave subway; Woodland reservoir in Syracuse / ASCE organization functions; ASCE report card
8th day / Big Dig (Boston) video / Syracuse water supply system; ASCE report card; water pressure review[1]
9th day / Discuss Big Dig; Gross Domestic Product; articles from ASCE Journal of Infrastructure systems / Woodland Reservoir; group summaries of ASCE report card
10th day / Infrastructure asset management; Euclid and Comstock intersection analysis; Video of smart tech for underground pipes / ASCE report card; components of US federal budget. Jeff Sachs article on future US infrastructure
11th day / Infrastructure condition assessment / Methane in landfills; NJ transit crash; impacts of infrastructure; 2nd ave subway, GDP
12th day / Minneapolis bridge failure; 50 minute demo of AssetWorks / GDP; frames for thinking about infrastructure; Erie Canal; prep for midterm
13th day / Review of AssetWorks; DOT video on asset management; intro to CUPSS (EPA asset management software) / Syracuse water system hmk; Dixie highway; frames for infrastructure (again); Big Dig video
14th day / Guest from Campus Planning on Asset management / Midterm exam 1
15th day / CUPSS software; Deterioration prediction articles; regression modeling / Big Dig video
16th day / Midterm / Review midterm 1; in-class Big Dig team assignment; Machiavelli; started discussion of City Shaper article by Robert Caro
17th day / Review midterm; review regression modeling lecture / Guest speaker on LEED and Envision
18th day / Resilience; resilience plot / Review LEED; examples from City Shaper
19th day / Videos of infrastructure and community resilience / City Shaper; Envision software for sustainable infrastructure; LCA; LCCA
20th day / Guest from Campus Planning on construction / Envision; EIS
21st day / Resilient infrastructure and communities / No class
22nd day / Summarized resilience; Department of Homeland Security; in-class case studies; community resilience video; started study of Environmental Impact Statements (EIS) / iWorq presentation on asset management
23rd day / New NYC water tunnel; EIS; reviewed construction presentation / Used iWorq to create budgets; question and answer with company founder
24th day / Individual meetings with students re: their paper drafts / Asset management diagram. Discussed EIS and Big Dig homework; first student presentation
25th day / Resilience;; critical infrastructure; risk and consequence; mitigation / Midterm #2
26th day / Life cycle assessment (LCA); Life cycle cost analysis (LCCA) / Paper presentations; resilience
27th day / Paper presentations / Paper presentations; review midterm #2; ABET “life-long learning” criteria; Jacob Riis’ How the Other Half Lives
28th day / Paper presentations / Paper presentations; quick discussion of resilience diagram; reviewed Learning Objectives of course
29th day / Midterm 2

Apendix 2 Modern Urban Infrastructure Paper Outline