NSS Member Highlight: Shruti Syal, Assistant Professor, Virginia Commonwealth University

Shruti Syal is a social ecological systems scholar-practitioner and assistant professor in the urban and regional studies and planning program at Virginia Commonwealth University. She studies cities as integrated human-environment systems, focusing on water and waste dynamics, urban greening, infrastructure, institutions, and “informality.”

Give us your cross-sectoral, transdisciplinary, and intersectional elevator pitch.

As you know with assistant professors, half our job is research, half our job is teaching, and then there's service sprinkled everywhere. We're scholars and educators at the same time, and both those things feed off of each other.

I study cities as complex systems, where a lot of different parameters across different disciplines are interconnected, because cities are in polycrisis. It's a lot of different compounding crises that cause cities to continually face challenges and not necessarily recover. Resilience is aimed at helping cities recover from those challenges.

I come at this from a deeply theoretical perspective. I was a biology student who then transitioned to environmental science, who then transitioned into planning. I don't really think I'm at home in any one of these disciplines.

I am a systems researcher, that's where I found my niche, because it allows me to connect all of these different disciplinary backgrounds.

My understanding of urban resilience comes from ecology, which is my base discipline, where you think of resilience as three types, [as illustrated by] “the ball and cup model.” One, where you consider a system as a ball at the base of a cup. And the minute there is an external disturbance to that system, maybe the ball doesn't even flinch. That's robustness or engineering resilience. That's typically the kind of resilience people seek, because you want predictability in your processes and outcomes. The second is where you hit the ball, the ball moves up, but it comes back into the base of the cup very naturally, and that is the idea of the bounce-back resilience, where, sure, things get out of balance, and then they come back into the base of the cup. That's called ecological resilience, and that is typically what people's understanding of resilience is. Then there's something called transformative, or adaptive resilience, where the ball escapes from the cup. While we might think the cup is the actual environment, there are a lot more cups in the landscape, so you just go from one cup to another, and you need to learn what your baseline is.

I like this ball and cup model because it helps us understand that people's conception of resilience can be very different, and that's an important thing to know when you're planning for resilience.

Resilience has become something like an all-or-nothing word, like sustainability, where it includes everything, and it means nothing.

I try to use my interdisciplinary journey and knowledge to understand, in a particular context, in a particular place and time, in a particular location, what are the challenges or the poly crisis that that city is in? And then based on that, what is the city trying to do, or what do they need to be able to address that?

My cross-sectoral, transdisciplinary, intersectional elevator pitch is,

I study cities as complex interconnected systems and polycrisis. I try to translate very complex theories and conceptions of urban resilience into usable, open access tools that allow people to gain ownership of space and place and the preferred resilience outcomes.

** Read more about Shruti’s projects at the end of this interview!

What's one persistent challenge you face in your work?

I will talk about this in the context of my current job, which is as an assistant professor, tenure track, in an R1 university or research-intensive university:

My persistent challenge has been aligning the long timescales and narrow incentives of academic research, with the fact that we are trying to use this research to address urgent challenges where things shift so quickly, and it takes so much time to collect this data and to present it.

I don't think I ever saw myself as a scholar practitioner. But I think that's what I am. I thought scholar practitioners are in the community responding to the needs of a particular community, but a recent conversation with a colleague made me realize I am a scholar practitioner. What I'm trying to do is produce some tools that our planning agencies and government agencies can use: a network or GIS map that is not scary for any of these actors. They understand these data sets, they understand their use, they even have the capacity, at least in cities like Richmond, to maintain these tools and use them to implement projects on the ground.

But the reality with green spaces, for instance, or with communities like informal settlements where the challenge is that the settlement is not considered to be legitimate, the reality is they deal with the impacts of that socio-ecological system, and they contribute to the maintenance as well as the destruction of that system.

When you don't bring stewardship in, or communities into your process of generating and thinking about solutions, you're forgetting the entire stewardship and impact angle.

With green spaces, stewardship and monitoring is a major piece of maintenance. It doesn't mean that a park that's managed by Parks and Recreation, or a stormwater infrastructure that's managed by a Department of Public Utilities, that it's only their responsibility. If you don't take the time to get the community to experience and understand the space, you're not going to get that investment.

It has taken a lot of time for me to leverage my courses, my research, my relationship building, and my knowledge from hopping across different disciplines, to make this work a reality in terms of publications, so that is a persistent challenge for me, where the timescales for doing good [scholarly] work and doing community work [don’t align]. I don't think that a lot of our incentive structures institutionally really support that.

What is something that brings you hope for a sustainable future?

I tow the line between hope and cynicism. When you study structures, institutions, or systems, what you realize is how difficult individual action actually is, and how challenging it can be to do something innovative when it feels so solitary. And then, how do you build some sort of group and communal accretion around that? It's imparted a lot of cynicism in me.

You see the same story on repeat. As academics we have to study so much literature to be able to have a strong understanding of the background on an issue that you see the same story happen everywhere, so there's an additional challenge of, well I'm working in this area, and I'm seeing it happen, and then I know the history of this also having happened 20 years ago, and 40 years ago in these other cities.… it's very hard to not be cynical.

I think sometimes I have transferred that cynicism into my courses. In my second year, when I was teaching environmental management I saw a sense of exhaustion from students. I took a step back and I said, I can keep going but I feel like there's an exhaustion here. One student commented, ‘I feel like there's nothing we can do about it.’ That was the moment where I realized cynicism might have worked for me, because it pushes me to say, ‘well, I'm gonna push against it, I try to do something about it.’ But it's interesting to see it from the perspective of the student, because they're not getting that out of it. So what I pivoted to - and I think it’s why the products that I create are so focused on this:

I found strength in data. My mom always said, no knowledge goes to waste, and I kind of leaned on that a lot especially as I went from one discipline to another.

In hindsight, I've collected all this information and learned all of these things, but data was something that I relied on quite a bit. I went from hard sciences and quantitative or empirical data sets to understanding and legitimizing stories, narratives, interviews, field observations, things that came from social sciences and so I leaned on data, and that's what I encourage my students to do. I pivoted in my lecture material: I let them listen to the challenges in a recorded lecture, but when we came to class, we were doing something. [For example], in my research methods course, students do a research proposal to explore what to do about a particular challenge. The assignment was all built on, where do I get the data from? Every course of mine moved to that model. Now, at the end of the course students come back with, ‘I really liked this tool. I really liked being able to explore my own research.’ They liked that they could take a research proposal and do an independent study, or they presented it at a student symposium, or they took it further, and they actually are working with some organization to try and implement it.

If you could have lunch with a famous person, who would you choose, and why, and what would you talk about?

I've always found it really hard to find just a person that I would admire. I still don't, but I will say that when I was at a very critical juncture of idea formation for my Delhi project, I attended the Delhi Sustainable Development Summit in 2012. And I heard someone speak that I'd never heard of before. Elinor Ostrom. I had never heard of her before.

She was talking about commons and governance and community-based resources… I was sitting there thinking, this person is saying exactly what I'm thinking of and what I've learned. I went back and Googled her, and I was embarrassed that I had no idea who she was.

I would want to show these projects to her, and tell her about the role that she played in me thinking about them, and thinking that systems is a valid academic exercise. Her speech that day, I don't even know what she said, but that made a difference to me, because she worked in different regional and resource contexts. I would have loved to talk to her about how I've tried to adapt her work in the context of dense urban cities and infrastructure.

I would also ask her, ‘What did it take for you to come up with something that nobody understood for decades before we understood it?’

What hobbies or interests do you have outside of work in all your free time?

My answer is, I don't have a life outside of work! As a tenure track professor, that's been my reality.

But what I'll say is, having you ask that question made me realize that as a kid, I used to paint a lot. I used to dance. I used to read a lot. And I used to read across different disciplines. I was somebody who wasn't really focused on a niche. What I realized was, even though none of those hobbies currently exist, as in there's no time in my schedule, they have informed what I choose to do with my time at work, my understanding of getting to know a city – through sampling restaurants and street food, through walking along different green spaces and water-based landscapes. It's based on my having lived in these different cities and experienced cities that look so different.

So, yes, it's not a hobby - it is part of my work - but that's one of the things that I do, which is experiencing a new city using these lenses.

Another aspect [of my work] is art. When you think about data dashboards, social network analysis, you know, GIS, these are very deterministic, very technical and technocratic pieces of work. But I'm very driven by emotion and connection

...because you can only protect what you understand, and you can only understand something you've experienced and built a connection with.

So thinking about art as a way to connect people, even though the work that I've generated is just technocratic, it comes from the artist in me, or even thinking across scales is something that comes from the artist in me. I used to draw diagrams of human anatomy when I was getting into medicine initially, and those things would take hours of my time. I would sit and stare at those diagrams. It was very technocratic, but scale was something I learned from that.

My ability to see things and experience scale instinctively comes from that inner artist.

How can the NSS support you in your career or other sustainability-related aspirations?

I will say that the conference was really helpful, in terms of sustainability education. All of the workshops and presentations that I attended helped me stitch together a network of people that work on sustainability and to get a sense of the case studies, the pitfalls, and opportunities.

The conference, and the mix of research and education and pedagogy-focused sessions is already really great. So, in this way NSS is already helping.

One of the things I'm learning is how difficult it is to maintain interdisciplinary relationships within an academic institution, which is very vertically hierarchical and has certain incentive structures where you have to do things in a certain order. Therefore, interdisciplinary work doesn't get showcased as much or even done as much because there are no incentives built in, and there’s little recognition of and accommodation for this kind of work in research and in teaching. So, I'm wondering whether there can be some consistent working group meetings that NSS members can be a part of, such that the working group can be understood as service [in the academic advancement sense]. A sustainability education working group that brings practitioners and scholars together to share ideas on (for example) urban resilience and sustainability research. Those kinds of working groups would be really helpful, where you kind of structure regular interaction. Another idea is a residency-style program where you come in for a particular period of time, and there are certain projects that you're trying to do. That would be really useful because you’d then have the time and the momentum to get something done.

This has been so wonderful. This is such a beautiful interview with you, Shruti.

Thank you so much for reaching out. I'm so glad. I'm glad to find another community with NSS where equality and resilience are front and center, and there's a recognition of going across silos, which is something I have not seen in any other group.

MORE ABOUT SHRUTI'S PROJECTS

My longest project has been trying to merge the city's social justice agendas with its environmental remediation agendas in Delhi. 

My focus population is about 1 to 1.5 million people that live in informal settlements, problematically called slums, along open access stormwater drains in the city. Those open access stormwater drains are heavily polluted, and the water goes into the river, and it's part of one of the world's most densely populated river basins in the world, the Chesapeake Bay.

How do you actually make sure that there's enough water going into that river, but not pollution, while trying to provide water sanitation and hygiene services to people who live along those settlements and who bear the brunt of the pollution and the flooding that actually happens in those drains? 

The challenge is that the informal settlements are not formally considered to be part of the city, and its built structure, even though they've existed there for 60, 70 years. They're physically a part of it, they're part of the reality of the city, the physical fabric of the city, but thy are not considered formal and legal, and therefore this leads to a lot of complicated governance issues.

This is where a systems perspective helps me tie in issues of law, policy, legislation, and people's conceptions and ideas, with the ground realities of lived experiences. Also, the actual environmental metrics of that network of drains and the water that you're trying to protect and maintain. That's an ecological system, so I am a social-ecological systems researcher.

In the American context, I work in Richmond, Virginia. 

I supervise research, experiential learning, and independent projects with students. Every course of mine has students doing research, and I realized after 3 years of supervising student research - and our students tend to be very domestically focused - that there were some particular environmental problems that the city of Richmond was facing, and they were integrated with some social equity issues. You know, Richmond was the seat of the Confederacy, so there are those long-standing impacts of redlining that have been cataloged very well.

The same socio-ecological issues would come up. There would be food insecurity. There would be inequity in access to green spaces. There would be flooding in specific neighborhoods or specific areas. There would be heat stress in those very same neighborhoods and areas. And then there was the river itself. The James River flows just through the state of Virginia, and it's a part of the Chesapeake Bay, so that's a massive ecosystem of value.

The kinds of organizations that the students would find that are working on these issues, and the kinds of strategies that these organizations would use, I realized something similar was happening in Delhi, which is: Although people are working on sanitation and environmental issues in silos, they're using the same technologies. They're using nature-based solutions. They're trying to do the same things, but they're not coordinated. The Delhi project is therefore trying to figure out how to coordinate these actors. The projects are trying to do the same things, typically using the same nature-based solutions and technology, but they don't really know what the other person is doing, and they're actually causing problems for each other. 

It's a similar thing in Richmond, where they're not necessarily causing problems for each other, but they're competing for the same resources. A lot of these issues are addressed using green infrastructure. A tree canopy cover project to tackle heat island effect or heat stress, A community garden to help build a little bit of food security to get people access to healthy food, in neighborhoods that don't actually have grocery stores with access to healthy food options at good prices, or that take SNAP benefits. Or, community gardens where we are trying to conserve pollinator species and certain ecosystems in order to be part of the Biophilic Cities Network,

There's a lot of river pollution because Richmond is a river city and has a combined sewer system. Which is too old. And much like other East Coast cities, when we have too much rainfall - which is happening with greater frequency and in higher magnitude - we have a lot of combined sewer overflow (CSO) events. In these events the river, which is such a central part for people's activities in the city, is suddenly unavailable for use for a certain period of time. So, green infrastructure was coming up in all of these areas. In Richmond, there are a lot of civic, governmental, non-profit connections there, across different spatial scales. But the heat camp people are not talking to the water people, are not talking to the food insecurity. There's so much amazing stuff happening, so we asked, can we map all these existing infrastructures at a granular level from all the green roofs of the City of Richmond, all the tree planting projects, to all the state capital trails and other regional trails that are connected to local trails…. 

We mapped all of these green infrastructures and put it up on a dashboard, along with a map of the hundreds of actors that are actually involved in different capacities. Because even if we know where everything is, who do you need to speak to to connect to these things? That is a big gaping hole. Our network map is a tool that allows people to search for themselves to understand their network. 

I take complicated ideas from systems research frameworks, and figure out how to create and consolidate large datasets that can make sense to people.