University at Buffalo - The State University of New York

Published: January 31, 2008

By KEVIN FRYLING
Reporter Staff Writer

A geographer who charts “mental maps” in order to understand such difficult problems as resource sharing, migration and urban decline in areas hit hard by postindustrialism has joined the UB faculty.

Sara Metcalf uses mental models to study shared problems like land use, urban sprawl, brownfields, water resources and climate.
PHOTO: NANCY J. PARISI

Sara Metcalf, assistant professor in the Department of Geography, College of Arts and Sciences, came to UB last fall after completing a doctorate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), where she served as a researcher on a $625,000 project funded by the National Science Foundation that is investigating stakeholder perceptions of urban sprawl, brownfield redevelopment and water-resource allocation in the metropolitan regions of Chicago, Atlanta and St. Louis.

The principal investigator on the project is Bryan Norton, a professor of philosophy in the School of Public Policy at Georgia Tech, who spoke at UB last March as part of a semester-long series of speakers and activities under the theme “A Greener Shade of Blue.”

“I’m looking at situations where resources are shared and at how people are addressing the planning and allocation of these resources,” says Metcalf. “A mental model is a sort of schema or map of associations between concepts—a network where the nodes are concepts and the links between them are associations. The idea is to look at how we can encode these in computer models to represent how stakeholders,” among them business leaders, mayors, planners, environmental activists and residents, “conceive of shared problems, such as land use, urban sprawl, brownfields, water resources and climate.”

Metcalf says the thing that fascinates her most about mental models is how they’re able to connect abstract concepts in order to shed light on how people’s thoughts and social relationships impact the physical environment. For example, she notes that perceptions about inner-city schools often fuel suburban growth despite regional population decline—a phenomenon that requires looking beyond the physical layout of a city to explain.

“That might be a reinforcing link since as people move to more outlying areas because of school quality they change the property-tax base, and thereby enhance the likelihood that that suburban school continues to be higher quality,” she says. “Perception basically reinforces the reality.”

The recipient of bachelor’s degrees in chemical engineering and biochemistry from Texas A&M University and master’s degrees in chemical engineering and management from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Metcalf spent several years in the private sector with companies like General Motors and United Technologies Corporation Fuel Cells. She developed a dynamic simulation model of consumer adoption of alternate energy vehicles, such as fuel cells and hybrids, before choosing to pursue a doctorate in geography. “I hadn’t been doing geography, but I was doing modeling,” she notes. “It’s a pretty universal methodology.” She says her thesis advisor at UIUC, Bruce Hannon, taught her to apply the principles of dynamic systems modeling toward answering questions far beyond the concerns of the marketplace.

Metcalf says that while her current work on mental models involves creating and validating computer algorithms with survey data collected by a colleague in Georgia, she also ventures into the field to collect raw data. She says that for her dissertation project she coupled participant observation and in-depth interviewing with a dynamic simulation model of the role social networks might have on migration patterns within the city of Danville, Ill. Like many American communities, Danville has been affected by a major decline in manufacturing jobs. The population loss has more recently been mitigated by an influx of inner-city residents displaced from housing projects by gentrification processes in major cities like Chicago.

“I talked with city and government officials, as well as focused on local neighborhood associations,” she says, explaining that she was particularly interested in the activities of a block club in a neighborhood of many first-time homebuyers that included a mix of people from different racial, ethnic and economic backgrounds. “What I wanted to focus on was whether social networks, such as friends and family members, influenced where people chose to live, and whether the deterioration of those networks facilitated further out-migration from the community,” she says.

The results of that research were “strongly suggestive of the power of social networks” to influence where people put down roots, she says.

At UB, Metcalf continues to work on the NSF-funded project and teaches undergraduate courses on human geography and urban systems geography. She says she is looking forward to teaching a course on dynamic systems modeling next year, which will contain a variety of methods and examples from her own work. Her varied experience also includes time spent teaching high school. Metcalf helped teach ninth-graders physical and human geography as part of another NSF-funded program at UIUC, and spent a month overseas in 2001 teaching fifth through 10th graders in Rajgarh, India, a small village in the northwest region of the country, with Cross-Cultural Solutions, an international volunteer program.

“I think [academics teaching high school] is a wonderful thing, especially in communities like Buffalo or Champaign, where you’ve got the university right there—there is a need to let some of that knowledge spill over,” Metcalf says. “It helped for ninth graders in the classroom to be able to see and learn about what graduate students in geography were doing,” she adds. “A lot of people consider geography as just about coloring different states and learning the names of rivers.”

A native of Jacksonville, Ill., Metcalf lives in Eggertsville with her 16-month-old daughter, Alex. Although they’ve been spending a lot of time indoors lately because of the cold weather, Metcalf says they explored the city quite a bit after they first moved to Buffalo during the summer.

“I’m very happy to be in Buffalo,” Metcalf adds, noting that she already feels very much “relocated and rooted” in the city. “It’s significant for me to think that this will be the place that my daughter will grow up considering as her hometown.”