About PolicySpace

“For most of us, design is invisible… Most of the time, we live our lives within these invisible systems, blissfully unaware of the artificial life, the intensely designed infrastructures that support them…Except when system fail – through accidents, disasters or crisis…Every accident provides a brief moment of awareness of real life, what is actually happening, and our dependence on the underlying systems of design.”
_BRUCE MAU

The research and expertise represented here targets the current paradigm where the centrality of disease and medicine in the management of a healthier global community receives much attention, especially with regard to transmissible or vaccine preventable diseases. In fact, between 2006 and 2007 alone, 35 billion dollars targeted global health research and delivery (Science Magazine, 2007). However, the role of disease management extends well beyond issues of individual human health to encompass larger institutional, behavioral and geopolitical questions of community investment, cooperation, influence and place as a means and an emblem of effective health care delivery. John D. Sterman has defined policy resistance as the tendency for interventions to be defeated by the system’s own response to the intervention itself. Health policy design, then, given its history of disease management as a function of nations bounded by borders is hardly effective in a world that is hardly static and highly mobile.

So when we experience global population mobility, displacement from reliable social networks, a disease epidemic or environmental disaster what happens to the health of the public under these conditions of flux and stress? And what other systems absorb the shocks where health policy seems unresponsive? And how might feedback from these resilient systems inform and further transform global health frameworks for more effective implementation?

A healthier health commons, viewed here as a Common Pool Resource (CPR) system, is the goal of this project. The U.S.-Mexico border provides one backdrop for critical analysis of community dynamics and resilient grassroots systems amplified by unique conditions of international mobility, social/political uncertainty, and economic disparity. This collaborative and interdisciplinary work develops an innovative integration of mathematical modeling, systems network investigation, and institutional mapping to present a foundational analysis to begin to understand a shifting paradigm in global disease management more characteristic of a world of porous borders.

Member Profiles

Collaborators
Darla V. Lindberg, Architecture
Timothy Reluga, Biology and Mathematics
Rachel Smith, Communications
Mary Poss, Biology
Jill Findeis, Economics
Jing Li, Postdoc, Mathematics

Other Contributors
Shedra Amy Snipes, Biobehavioral Health
Marcel Salathe, Biology

Research Assistants
Danielle Rivera, Architecture
David Mosemann, Architecture
Zachary Jones, Architecture

3D Modelers
Kyle Schillaci
Matthew Underwood
David Mosemann

Support
Scott Tucker, website design
Barb Cutler, grants staff

Research + Design Project Websites

Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics | www.cidd.psu.edu
Penn State Architecture Department | www.arch.psu.edu
545architect | www.545architect.com