Living Infrastructure

Co-designing resilient spaces with the communities that need them

Place: Los Angeles, California
Timeline: 2021 – 2025
Clients: SphericalAccelerate Resilience L.A. (ARLA)
Role: Product Lead at Spherical, overseeing strategy, design, and data science
Services: Product
Design
Data
Strategy
Ops

Overview

Building on the pioneering work of Andy Lipkis in urban watersheds, ARLA partnered with Spherical to develop a platform for resilience in Los Angeles County. The goal: cultivate a pipeline of infrastructure projects that benefit L.A.'s watersheds, communities, and ecoystems.

Spherical helped ARLA develop a Living Infrastructure framework: regenerating natural and built systems through community care. ARLA's support allowed the platform to be free for the public—and enabled community groups to participate.

Over four years, I helped define the vision, hire the team, design the platform, and write educational content. The result was an accessible map-based planning tool, compendium of local data sets, and guidebook of resources.

From a map to a funded project

Find places that need attention, design remedies with neighbors, and turn the result into a proposal.

remedies for cooling, food access, habitat, and flood safety: 40+
local data layers, curated into thematic visualizations: 65+
benefits modeled for each project, along with costs: 13+
for the public: Free

Learn about places

The first step of planning a project is identifying a site and understanding what it needs. Unlike the data layers of traditional GIS tools, we curated visualizations around project goals like Cooling and Recreation. For each theme, we designed a site prioritization metric and visualization. For Cooling, we created a first-of-its-kind hyperlocal 1-meter heat data layer with the University of Pennsylvania, and visualized it alongside tree canopy and cooling centers.

Through community workshops and public boards, project creators collect qualitative needs and opportunities on the site—like where people gather or see issues. With quantitative and qualitative data together, creators can prioritize sites and understand exactly what needs their site needs—down to where exactly on the site interventions should be made.

The Cooling pack in the guidebook, listing its heat, cooling center, and tree canopy layers — A data layer pack in the guidebook

The heatwave temperature layer over a park site, with its legend and the site’s cooling opportunity — The Cooling layer on a site, showing where lack of tree canopy leads to higher heat

Design with remedies

We wanted designing projects to feel generative—more like using a whiteboard and less like CAD. Users can drag stickers representing needs and remedies onto the map. A library of remedies, from rain gardens to shade trees, shows what each one costs to create and care for and what it gives back: habitat, cooling, water quality, and jobs. Teams place them on a site together and watch the benefits and costs add up.

The rain garden remedy, with its costs, benefits, and an illustration — A remedy in the guidebook

A storage pond placed on a park site, with the project’s benefits and costs updated — Placing a remedy updates benefits and costs

Submit funding proposals

Through our partnerships with L.A. County government agencies, we designed a project report for creators toattach to funding applications. At a quick glance, stakeholders can understand the project, along with its projected benefits and costs for both creation and long-term care.

Government agencies and community groups continue to co-create projects and needs assessments through the platform.

A proposal page titled Park Site: a sketch of remedies placed on an aerial photo of the park, with a list of each remedy and its count — A sketch of the project and its remedies

A proposal page titled Project Benefits and Costs, rating each modeled benefit, from cooling to water quality, on a five-step scale — Modeled benefits, ready for a grant application

Work