StoryMap Challenge winners focus on floods, transit
Ananya Peddibhotla, a first-year doctoral student in urban and environmental planning and policy, and senior Jesse Garcia are the graduate and undergraduate winners respectively of the 2024 UPPP StoryMap Challenge at UC Irvine.
A StoryMap is an interactive online website that allows users to integrate dynamic maps produced on the ArcGIS online platform with narrative text, images, multimedia and video. The StoryMap app provides an attractive and engaging platform for planning and policy education and outreach.
The UCI Department of Urban Planning and Public Policy (UPPP or UP3) invited students in its undergraduate and graduate majors to share their original StoryMaps on planning and policy issues. The department’s community of students, faculty, staff, policy makers and community partners then voted for the winners.
“Flood Vulnerability in Plaquemines Parish” is the name of the project by Peddibhotla, who intends to obtain her Ph.D. in 2028. The Plaquemines Parish has been hit by several hurricanes over the years, making the New Orleans-Metairie metropolitan statistical area of Louisiana physically, environmentally and socioeconomically vulnerable. Peddibhotla’s study frames these vulnerabilities and discusses possible ways to reduce them and foster community resiliency.
You can view the project here, although due to some subscriber-only content, one needs to create an ArcGIS Online account.
Garcia, who will receive a bachelor’s degree in urban studies later this month, entered “Pushing the Centerline.” The project explores the long-term promises of transit priority treatments in Southern California, where ridership fell dramatically before the COVID-19 pandemic and even more so afterward. Garcia’s study does find “hope for the future,” however.
All the 2024 UPPP StoryMap Challenge submissions can be viewed here.
And, this is where you will find past years’ winners.