This month, our host Alysha Helmrich and her guest Lynn Abdouni are coming to you live from halfway across the world.

This pair of UGA engineering professors recently visited Doha, Qatar for a meeting about the Proactive Resilience Plan (PReP), a collaboration between UGA, Texas A&M, and the Qatar Foundation. During their trip, they took a moment to chat about urban morphology: "the study of the buildings, the streets, and the spaces in between them."

"We're talking about the urban fabric- it's alive," Dr. Abdouni said. "The streets are for walking, but they're also for meandering to shop, for having impromptu conversations, for chasing after pigeons- whatever you want to do, it's for multiple uses."

Abdouni's interest in this topic started early. She grew up in a semi-rural area of a postwar Lebanon, and noticing where features like sidewalks were (or weren't) placed inspired her to connect to places through urban design. By designing public spaces with humans in mind, we can foster personal connections to place and more flexible, long-lasting cities.

"I'm obsessed with anything mundane and boring- gas stations, take me there; parking lots, I love them- anything boring," she said. "You take some of these mundane places where we spend a lot of time, and you start thinking about them as, 'what else could this be?'"

Listen now to hear all the thoughts, feelings, and even some controversial takes on urban design, such as the correct parking-spots-per-bowling-lane ratio and why the San Antonio Riverwalk is the best riverwalk.

Lynn's Haiku (co-authored by Alysha):

Flex the space, anew
Human is the center, now:
Past, future, combined.


Lynn's other poem, "Urban Morphology: A Checklist":

Urban morphology, a checklist:
Flex,
humanize,
imagine.


Links:

Dr. Lynn Abdouni: https://engineering.uga.edu/team_member/lynn-abdouni/

Dr. Abdouni's new publication, "Bridging the Gap: Morphological Mapping of the Beqaa’s Vernacular Built Environment": https://cpcl.unibo.it/article/view/16887/17779

Read more about the Proactive Resilience Plan (PReP): https://research.uga.edu/research-insights/proactive-resilience-plan-prep-an-integrated-framework-applied-to-critical-economic-sectors-bjorn-birgisson/

This month, we're welcoming practitioners from Atlanta Regional Commission: Katherine Zitsch, Deputy COO, and Jon Philipsborn, Climate and Resilience Manager.

Regional commissions work on many subject areas across a metropolitan area, from community development and transportation to water security and climate change. At ARC, resilience is a key defining factor in how they make decisions around all of these topics and more. In this episode, hosts Alysha and Todd and their guests discuss how ARC is helping Atlanta tackle big development questions, challenges and opportunities.

The group also tackles larger questions like the role of government, specifically local governments, in engineering and environmental decisions, as well as specific projects ARC is working on to solve problems and build relationships across Atlanta.

"What's interesting about resilience is that everybody comes at it differently. Every city is in a different space, and every county is in a different space, and what we're trying to do at ARC is leverage the ones that are ahead towards helping the ones that are interested, but haven't had the space to get there yet."

Both guests also responded to our usual request for a haiku about their episode's subject matter, despite some debate about syllables...

Katherine's poem:

Atlanta's future
Knitting our resilience
Bridges to new paths

Jon's poem:

Disasters happen
Our choices influence the impact
Future is open

Learn more about Atlanta Regional Commission here.

This month, anthropologist and historian Dr. Eric Cline and USACE research social scientist Dr. Ben Trump come together with hosts Alysha and Todd to explore large-scale regional destabilization and collapse in the Late Bronze Age.

Around 1200 B.C., an interconnected network of eight large, thriving civilizations collapsed in a matter of decades. Dr.s Cline and Trump wanted to explore how this collapse came about, whether the civilizations could have predicted or prevented it, and what resilience strategies some of these civilizations exhibited.

"They went down. There's no reason to suspect that we won't as well... It would be absolutely hubristic to think that we would be the first ones that are immune from that."

We promise it's not all that ominous. Listen to learn more about what these researchers describe as a "poly-crisis," and how we can learn from it today to be more resilient to environmental, economic and social disturbances, and how recovery from collapse takes place.


Dr. Eric Cline, Professor of Classical and Ancient Near Eastern Studies and of Anthropology; Director of the GWU Capitol Archaeological Institute: https://cnelc.columbian.gwu.edu/eric-h-cline

Dr. Ben Trump, Research Social Scientist, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benjamin-trump-ba062523

Check out the paper: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959378023001589/pdf

Check out Dr. Cline's book, 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed, here: https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691208015/1177-bc

Preorder Dr. Cline's upcoming sequel, After 1177 B.C.: The Survival of Civilizations, here: https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691192130/after-1177-bc

You can also preorder the graphic novel version of 1177 B.C., coming soon: https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691213026/1177-bc


Ben's Haiku:

Complexity's cost.
Dependency's brief fragility.
Resilience is key.

Eric's Haiku(s):

Bronze realms crumble,
empires fade in twilight's grasp,
ages mourn their fall.

Civilizations wane,
bronze echoes in silent ruins,
time's shadow devours.

Bronze echoes shatter,
civilizations entwine,
silent ruins weep.