Student Sustainability Project Wins Award from AICP

Body

Charles Connerly, Paul Hanley, and Aaron Strong helped mentor UI Urban and Regional Planning graduate students in conducting a groundbreaking sustainability project focused on Dubuque, Iowa. The project received national recognition this week when it was selected to receive the American Institute of Certified Planners (AICP) 2013 Student Project Award for Contribution of Planning to a Contemporary Issue. The award will be presented on April 16 at the National Planning Conference in Chicago.

For The Sustainability Progress Report, 2012, a group of seven graduate stduents worked with community and municipal leaders in Dubuque to develop a set of 60 specific indicators intended to help the city benchmark and track the progress of its 11 sustainability initiatives. The project was completed during the 2011-2012 academic year, and used five years of data from Dubuque and four peer cities to assess its sustainability progress based on those 60 indicators. This is one of the first sustainability indicator studies conducted for a small city in the United States.

Charles Connerly and Paul Hanley are professors associated with the Transportation Policy Program at the Public Policy Center; Professor Aaron Strong is with the PPC Environmental Policy Program. Graduate student Lindsay Salvatore worked as a graduate research assistant for the Environmental Policy Program under Strong's supervision.