On Thursday, July 25, the National Science Foundation will host Sustainable Arctic Villages and Oil Development: Planning to Avoid the Natural Resources Curse, a presentation of the Bloustein School’s recent Arctic Planning Studio project, “Community Impact of Moving Oil to Market.” The presentation will be available online by webcast. Instructions for viewing the webcast are included below. The event begins at 12:00 p.m. EDT.

Bloustein School graduate students worked with the Ocean Conservancy (OC) to develop planning scenarios for Wainwright, Alaska. The primary objective of the studio was to address the question of how villages like Wainwright can leverage off-shore oil development to support long-term planning. To answer this question, the graduate studio developed four development planning scenarios for Wainwright to leverage the potential benefits from development—both for economic development and to address climate hazards (e.g., erosion and partial village relocation)—while minimizing negative social impacts of natural resources development known as the “natural resources curse.” The scenarios are intended to be tools the community can use in a community-driven planning process.

The course was led by Bloustein professor Hal Salzman, who is the principal investigator on a National Science Foundation Polar Social Science Program grant examining socio-economic impacts and sustainability of arctic Alaska villages. The studio was assisted by Tony Nelessen, Bloustein School professor of planning and a leading practitioner in the fields of visioning, planning, and urban design.

The students presenting will be Mary Martha Gaiennie, Sujee Jung, and Michael Brady. Mary Martha Gaiennie is a second-year student in the Bloustein School’s Master in City and Regional Planning (MCRP) program, concentrating on Environmental and Physical Planning with a focus on urban design and land-use planning. She earned her undergraduate degree from the University of Georgia with a major in Real Estate Finance. Sujee (Suzy) Jung is a second-year student in the MCRP program and her interest focuses on measuring the dynamic impacts of urban development on the community by utilizing a community-oriented mapping tool (Mappler) and geographic information systems (GIS). As an undergraduate she studied urban sociology at University of Seoul, Korea as well as la Universidad de Granada, Spain, where her academic interests were shaped by issues ranging from the local conflicts of ethnic clustering areas and urban segregation to the neighborhood effects. Michael Brady is a geography Ph.D. student and School of Arts and Sciences Graduate Fellow at Rutgers University and a research assistant for The Rutgers Initiative on Climate and Society. His research focuses on hazard risk governance, mainstreaming disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation strategies into local planning, and integrating GIS with remote sensor data for spatially-explicit vulnerability mapping. , Mike previously served as a marine science technician in the U.S. Coast Guard, with experiences ranging from sea duty in the Bering Sea to responding to the 2010 BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.