For a team of civil, architectural and environmental engineering students, senior design is a chance to make an impact on the world. The team partnered with Anand Gopal and his team at the Zomia Center, a nonprofit that studies ungoverned and semi-governed spaces, to design a community center and football (soccer) fields in Manbij, Syria.
“Within five years of the civil war breaking out in 2011, the city was under the control of four different factions,” says team member Nicholas Paparo. “But since 2016, the Syrian Democratic
Forces have been able to stabilize the city with the help of the United States and other allies. Now is a good time to go in and figure out how to build the area back stronger than it was.”
To gain insight for their plan, the team met with stakeholders and used existing surveys filled out by residents of the area. It helped them identify important issues like considering how to accommodate for accessibility when there isn’t a guarantee of consistent electricity to run an elevator.
Beyond the humanitarian implications of the projects, the team says that it taught them to broaden the ways they used the skills they had learned in the classroom.
“Naturally, we did a lot structural engineering, but there was much more to it than that,” says team member Abigail Gard. “There was geotechnical engineering, transportation engineering, site engineering… we really tried to cover almost every single sub-sector of civil engineering in this project, which I also think, made it really interesting.”