Faculty Fellow Research Projects

Fallon Samuels Aidoo

Behind the Numbers of America’s “Most Endangered Places”: Artificial Intelligence and Actionable Insights into Coastal Heritage Protection

This project of “deep learning” about places considered “most endangered” uses artificial intelligence and analog interviews to learn the composition, collective insights and cumulative impact of hazard assessments by heritage authorities. Annually, for more than three decades, statewide, county, and city preservation advocacies in every US state join the National Trust for Historic Preservation have identified the “most endangered places” in their midst. These watch lists of heritage at risk of loss to disasters, development, disinvestment, or disrepair prompt action, raise awareness, mobilize stakeholders, and activate patronage. Yet, they take forms of storytelling that appeal to patrons of heritage preservation and conservation not planners of hazards mitigation, climate adaptation. This research project aims to bridge the digital divide separating actionable information and insights from individuals and institutions empowered to intervene and invest in the future of historic resources. The proposed project (1) builds a prototype geodatabase of previously listed ‘most endangered’ places in 3 coastal counties (of LA, MA, and WA), (2) trains a Large Language Model to characterize places and recognize patterns across the set of unstructured, tabulated, visual and vector documentation provided about them; and (3) tests the generative and predictive capacities of current OpenAI models purporting to chart and characterize changes in a property over time, from taxable improvements to regulatory intervention. Incorporating students and colleagues of computer science and historic preservation, the project is designed to yield 3 outputs: methodological and empirical articles for publication in peer-reviewed journals for heritage and hazards research, and an ArcGIS dashboard of data and documentation tracing the history and future of architecture progressing rapidly from endangered to extinct (e.g. seasonal mission cottages). In the process, this year-and-a-half long project involves training, testing, and teaching artificial intelligence applicable and appropriate for the researching heritage, hazards, and the history of both.

Image courtesy of Professor Aidoo

Tiong Gim Aw

Urban Rainwater Harvesting for Sustainable Water Management in Mexico City

Climate change is exacerbating both water scarcity and water-related hazards, e.g. floods and droughts, creating profound challenges for urban areas. Cities are increasingly vulnerable as strained water resources and aging infrastructure face mounting pressure while flood risks continue to grow. Rainwater harvesting (RWH) is a system that collects, diverts, and stores rain in a catchment tank such as a barrel or buried cistern, distributing it as treated or untreated water for various domestic uses (de Sá Silva et al. 2022). This approach has emerged as a promising solution to address urban water management concerns, aiming to manage stormwater runoff to enhance flood resilience while supplementing water supply to alleviate pressure on other water sources. However, the lack of scientific studies validating the public health safety of this practice has limited its wide adoption.

The Basin of Mexico, home to over 22 million people and anchored by Mexico City, exemplifies the urgency of this challenge. Decades of poor resource management, over-extraction of groundwater, and climate change has culminated in a severe water crisis (Chen & Bilton, 2022). Residents face unreliable water access, worsening scarcity, and degraded water quality. RWH, which involves installing rainwater harvesting systems and water purification technologies in houses, apartments, and public buildings is one solution to the water crisis. Yet the variable quality of harvested rainwater, influenced by roof type, catchment conditions, and storage practices, complicates its safety. Therefore, it is essential to identify contaminants and contributing factors to guide treatment strategies and build confidence in RWH as a safe, scalable solution. Additionally, water insecure households employ coping strategies to meet immediate needs, including RWH, but often with the tradeoff of exposure to lower-quality or unsafe water sources. Understanding community perceptions of RWH and how they intersect with coping is critical to overcome barriers and encourage widespread adoption of RWH.

Our preliminary work detected a variety of contaminants in untreated rainwater, including those that degrade plumbing and negatively impact water quality (Ley et al. 2020). Building on these findings, the goal of this proposed research is to better understand factors affecting the quality of harvested rainwater and social factors influencing its acceptance and safe use in Mexico City. We will pursue two major objectives:

1. Assess physicochemical and microbiological quality of harvested rainwater collected from different building We will partner with researchers at UNAM and the NGO Isla Urbana to identify study areas and sampling locations. Rainwater samples will be collected during rainy season. Water quality parameters include temperature, pH, turbidity, metals, fecal indicator bacteria and selected pathogens of public health concern will be measured.

2. Analyze public perception, adoption barriers and behaviors toward RWH We will administer a structured questionnaire to assess prevalence and severity of water insecurity, types of RWH systems, their uses, users’ behaviors (e.g. storage, consumption, water treatment), and coping strategies to manage water insecurity using a novel index.

This project is significant because it provides scientific evidence to support urban RWH adoption and in turns, strengthens urban water security and climate resilience.

Image courtesy of Professor Aw

Andrea Bardon de Tena

Q’eqchi’ Rural Area: Vulnerability in Indigenous Informal Settlements

The research proposal seeks to shed light on the vulnerability many indigenous peoples suffer while facing climate change due to the urban morphologies imposed by foreign countries. This topic is embedded within my doctoral research, using the same case study - the Q'eqchi' population of Alta Verapaz, Guatemala - and providing the proposal with rigor and previous foundations. The approach proposed for this grant will materialize in a peer-reviewed articles and a small publication -pamphlet or booklet- for distribution since it is crucial to divulge the fragile situations of the urbanism of the Global South, both in the academic field and in the architectural and urbanistic practice.

The spatial constraints imposed by foreign economic forces have organized Q’eqchi’s settlements since the sixteenth century. The morphology of the territory, the cities, the villages, and the rural settlements of Alta Verapaz has been developed by overlapping its traditional primitive patterns with the impositions of Spanish, Germans, and large multinational powers. This interlocking of different urban schemes has led many Indigenous communities to live in environmentally risky places with deficient connectivity to essential public resources.

On the other hand, the agricultural changes linked to coffee exploitation since the 19th century – mainly developed by German entrepreneurs- forced the Q'eqchi' society to abandon the traditional diverse crop system that gave them nutritional autonomy. Since then, most Q'eqchi'es have depended on food stores and central markets to supplement their diet, making accessibility to trading places and urban centers a popular necessity and exacerbating the extreme poverty and hunger that affects more than half of the department's population.

Nowadays, the hybridized nature of the Alta Verapaz territory leaves many indigenous communities in a particularly delicate situation. Climate change seriously threatens informal settlements in rural areas - both because of the impact of climate change on their homes and crops - rains, floods, droughts - and their poor accessibility to food due to the lack of infrastructure. A clear example of this fragile situation was the effects of storms Eta and Iota in 2020. The storms caused overflowing rivers, entire villages flooding, material losses, and human lives lost. The Q'eqchi communities of Alta Verapaz exemplify a problem that is not unique in the world; instead, it affects a large part of Latin America and the Global South. The vulnerability of the built environment reflects the historical evolution of exploitation and impositions. This research aims to provide rigorous documentation -graphic and theoretical- of the Q'eqchi situation territory, local habitat, and identify the needs that must be addressed to achieve sustainable urban schemes for the local population and their adaptation to climate challenges.

Image courtesy of Prof. Bardon de Tena

Liz Camuti

Under the Weight of Water: Evaluating the Impacts of National Climate Adaptation Plans on Rice Cultivation Practices Across the Americas

In response to the escalating impacts of climate change on global agricultural landscapes, this comparative study examines how institutional climate adaptation plans are shaping daily labor and environmental stewardship practices among farmers in two major, water-stressed rice-producing regions. In 2016, Uruguay, the sixth-largest rice exporter globally (FAO, 2023), began developing a National Adaptation Plan (NAP) for the agriculture sector with the support of the UN’s Integrating Agriculture into National Adaptation Plans (NAP-Ag) program. This program provides comprehensive support for climate adaptation through coordinated planning, technical capacity building, and international knowledge exchange. In contrast, the United States’ recently released USDA Climate Adaptation Plan (2024-2027) focuses primarily on departmental operations and program delivery, leaving climate adaptation at the farm level predominantly in the hands of individual farmers.

While Louisiana and Uruguay produce similar volumes of rice—approximately 1.4 million tons annually (Uruguay Rice Growers Association, 2023; USDA, 2022)—and face intensifying water
stress in these inundation-dependent landscapes, they have adopted markedly different institutional approaches to climate adaptation and water governance, with largely unexamined impacts on the evolving design and management of rice-producing landscapes. Expanding on Eriksen et al.’s (2021) critique of internationally-funded adaptation strategies, which argues that institutional policies may inadvertently reinforce localized vulnerabilities, this study examines whether Uruguay’s UN-supported, coordinated NAP-Ag adaptation approach or Louisiana’s largely farmer-driven efforts are more effective in supporting the development of resilient, context-sensitive management practices in water-stressed agricultural landscapes. Specifically, this research investigates how these contrasting policy frameworks influence soil and water management practices, farmer knowledge systems, and climate vulnerabilities, examining whether these different policy approaches reduce, redistribute, or exacerbate the vulnerability of these systems through observable management practices.

Through mixed-methods research combining ethnographic fieldwork, geospatial analysis, and visual documentation of local rice cultivation practices, this study investigates:

1. How different institutional frameworks influence agricultural workers’ capacity to develop locally appropriate adaptive practices
2. Whether soil composition acts as a material constraint or enabler of innovative management under different policy frameworks
3. How diverse management practices across these geographies might inform the design of agricultural landscape adaptations that avoid what Eriksen terms “retrofitting adaptation into existing development agendas.”

The study will produce both scholarly and applied outcomes, including peer-reviewed articles for an upcoming thematic collection of Modern Agriculture (submission deadline: December 2025) and Landscape Journal. These papers will analyze and compare how climate adaptation frameworks are shaping the design and management of rice-producing landscapes, propose a representation methodology for documenting innovations in management strategies (Landscape Journal), and develop preliminary policy recommendations and/or design guidelines for supporting adaptive rice cultivation practices across these varied geographic contexts. 

Image courtesy of Prof. Camuti

Aarthi Janakiraman

Coastal World Heritage and Climate Change: Conservation as Adaptation?

UNESCO first included climate concerns to its Operational Guidelines in 1997, recognizing climate change as one of the most significant threats to World Heritage. According to World Heritage Center, one in three natural sites and one in six cultural heritage sites are currently threatened by climate change. However, despite this recognition that the conservation of heritage is inherently wrapped-up in climate resilience these remain largely distinct endeavors. Although countries are required to design effective World Heritage management systems that plan for climate change, the emphasis of these plans largely focuses on tourism and development pressures. For instance, while Mumbai’s World Heritage dossier notes that the site and its buffer zone experience annual flooding during the rainy season, this is simply described as a “factor affecting the site.” Meanwhile in Singapore, severe weather events are discussed as a “key management issue” in the context of plant collections, although notably the identification of this issue has led to the commission of a Climate Change Study. In other cases, such as Melaka and George Town, the World Heritage dossier simply notes that there is no environmental pressure on the site including from climate change! The parsing of climate vulnerabilities from those of heritage conservation presents a missed opportunity to approach these congruent concerns through the notion of heritage resilience. Focusing on World Heritage coastal cities in the Indian Ocean Region, this project asks: how does the conservation of urban heritage as World Heritage address the threats of climate change (or not)? What opportunities/implications does the integration of World Heritage conservation and climate change adaptation present? Building on an ongoing transnational comparative study in the Indian Ocean Region, this project aims to understand the emergent challenges for the future of World Heritage and its conservation in the face of climate change.

Data for this study will be collected from three main approaches: archival research including document/media analysis; critical spatial analysis; and semi-structured interviews. In addition to a review of documents in the UNESCO Archive including World Heritage dossiers and heritage management plans for all coastal cities in the Indian Ocean Region, my research will also include spatial analysis of World Heritage boundaries alongside flood mapping, as well as a number of semi-structured interviews with a range of built environment professionals across coastal World Heritage sites in India and Singapore.

Image courtesy of Prof. Janakiraman

Yeonhwa Lee

Who Is Moving to the Sun Belt? Unpacking The Policy Implications of Recent Boom.

The Sun Belt region of the U.S. has experienced rapid growth in recent years. Following the COVID-19 pandemic, several metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) in the Sun Belt region were among those that saw the largest absolute population growth, while MSAs in the non-Sun-Belt region were among those that saw the largest absolute population loss in the contiguous U.S. Both research and journalistic accounts suggest that the migration is driven by housing supply and economic growth. However, the Sun Belt encompasses especially disaster-prone areas, with a major hazard being extreme heat, the single largest cause of weather fatalities in the U.S. in 2022. As such, a booming Sun Belt, which increases the population at risk, is a phenomenon that requires careful consideration. This paper examines who has been moving to the Sun Belt and the tradeoffs assumed by such mover households in terms of housing affordability and exposure to heat. To do so, it leverages the American Community Survey (ACS) Public Use Microdata Sample (PUMS) files for years 2014 through 2023, 5-year ACS data, and Landsat 7, 8, and 9 satellite imagery datasets on land surface temperature (LST). Preliminary findings show that moves to the Sun Belt increased in the last 10 years and that Sun Belt movers are generally associated with higher socio-economic status. Nevertheless, for certain groups, including Black and Hispanic householders, Sun Belt migration represents a move to a more affordable housing market. Meanwhile, migration to the Sun Belt incurs a significant increase in summertime LST, and consequently heat risk, with an average of 5.4°C (9.7°F). Our findings will highlight the need for a holistic, climate-informed policy framework, including incentives for migration and investment, and for the prioritization of mitigation strategies in the receiver communities in the Sun Belt.

Image courtesy of Prof. Lee

Heather Veneziano & Adrian Anagnost

Architectures of Coastal Survivance: GIS, Historical Imaginaries, & Gulf Preservation

This project centers on the creation of a sustainable, ArcGIS-based database that documents the impacts of climate change and coastal erosion on the built environment of southern Louisiana. Led by Professors Heather Veneziano (Historic Preservation, Tulane School of Architecture and Built Environment) and Adrian Anagnost (Art History, School of Liberal Arts), the initiative will combine archival images, maps, and historic records with architectural survey data gathered by Historic Preservation graduate students. The result will be a comprehensive spatial research tool for analyzing cultural heritage under threat from climate change.

The database is the primary outcome of this fellowship proposal. It will serve as a shared infrastructure for research and teaching, with capacity to grow over time as new records are added. Data will be structured and stored to allow future scholars to explore key questions: How do archival records document environmental change across time? How can historic preservation and the humanities contribute to resilience strategies for vulnerable cultural landscapes?

To launch this work, Professor Adrian Anagnost will design and teach a TIDES course in which first-year students learn to geo-tag archival images for inclusion in the database. This course will provide an entry point for students into digital humanities and place-based climate research, while generating the first wave of geo-tagged content. Professor Heather Veneziano will advise on integrating archival resources and preservation methodologies, ensuring that the data is compatible with ongoing survey work undertaken by graduate students in the Historic Preservation program. Together, these efforts will establish the foundation for a growing research ecosystem.

The anticipated outcomes include:

• Development of a robust, searchable ArcGIS database that combines archival images with architectural survey data. Bobbie Garner-Coffie, MSW, MLA, the Manager of Instructional Technology at Tulane's Innovative Learning Center will be assisting with this aspect of the project.
• Development of workflows for continued student and faculty contributions, ensuring long-term usability.
• A new TIDES course that introduces undergraduates to interdisciplinary research at the intersection of climate change, heritage studies, and geospatial technology.
• Scholarly outputs, including peer-reviewed articles and presentations, that model how archival imagery and geospatial tools can inform climate resilience research.
• The groundwork for future public engagements that highlight the database as a resource for the Tulane community and beyond.

Image courtesy of Prof. Veneziano