Urban environmental management is increasingly shaped by sensors, artificial intelligence, digital monitoring, data dashboards, and evolving technical standards. While these tools promise new data and insights, they raise critical questions about whether data-driven interventions advance socio-ecological justice and transformative development or if they re-entrench unequal power. This co-taught graduate seminar equips students to conduct mixed methods urban environmental research that is both technically informed and socially accountable, with a focus on the digitization, smartification, and datafication of water, sanitation, and energy systems.

Students will learn to design cross-disciplinary, community-engaged studies that integrate qualitative, quantitative, and ethnographic methods to investigate the field deployment of sensors, monitoring systems, and dashboards. They will examine the ethical, political, and practical dimensions of using these technologies in environmental governance, including consent, risk, data ownership, stewardship, and dissemination, environmental impacts, and researchers' responsibilities to historically under-served communities. Bridging engineering design cultures with geographic and planning traditions of critical inquiry, the course prepares students to develop technical fluency in emerging "smart" technologies while honing their ability to examine what counts as data, how it is produced, and mobilized in environmental decision-making. Students will be prepared to conduct rigorous, responsible multidisciplinary research that advances just development.