A Knowledge Exchange Playbook to Build Resilience

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Description

In the face of profound shock and change, individuals, organizations, and communities are seeking new ways to prepare for an uncertain future, their only certainty being that the present trajectory of change will intensify. Pandemics, wildfires, heat waves, hurricanes, flooding,

In the face of profound shock and change, individuals, organizations, and communities are seeking new ways to prepare for an uncertain future, their only certainty being that the present trajectory of change will intensify. Pandemics, wildfires, heat waves, hurricanes, flooding, social unrest, economic strife, and a rapidly changing climate system comprise a resounding wake up call: we must reinvent our institutions to think about and act with a resilient mindset. The purpose of the playbook is to support these efforts and build stronger, adaptive, and resilient communities.

Date Created
2021
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The Autonomous Revolution

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Description

The autonomous vehicle revolution started nearly a century ago with inventor Francis Houdina, who is credited with the first operational prototype of an unmanned motor vehicle. Almost 100 years later, autonomous vehicle technology is now on the brink of changing

The autonomous vehicle revolution started nearly a century ago with inventor Francis Houdina, who is credited with the first operational prototype of an unmanned motor vehicle. Almost 100 years later, autonomous vehicle technology is now on the brink of changing the world and will undoubtedly revolutionize the way transportation takes place. With this in mind, it is incredibly important to analyze and work through how the changes associated with the implementation of autonomous vehicles is going to affect the world legally. At the present time, there are no exceptions for the laws that are currently in place for non-autonomous vehicles, which means there is a significant amount of room for interpretation at times of autonomous vehicle error. First it is important to look at the history of automobiles and of autonomous technology. Starting with inventor Francis Houdina and automaker Mercedes Benz. Second, the ways in which autonomous technology has evolved over the last century. Companies such as Tesla and Waymo have been trailblazers of the industry. Third, looking at the way the world and different governments have or have not handled the incoming world of autonomous vehicles. Examining legislature formed by leading autonomous countries like Germany. Fourth, autonomous vehicles can now be found around the world in the hands of the public and in testing situations under manufacturer supervision. As a result of the widespread use of autonomous vehicles, there are now countless incidents of autonomous technology failure. The data and the outcomes of these accidents provide significant insight on the future legal necessities surrounding autonomous vehicles. Fifth, based on the history, technology, pre existing automobile legal framework and autonomous accidents, recommendations will be made on how to correctly govern autonomous vehicles and their owners. Autonomous vehicles will disrupt the world, but with the proper legal framework and regulations they will only continue to better the world we live in, improving efficiency, safety, and so much more.

Date Created
2020-05
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Institutionalizing Urban Resilience: Coordination Strategies within 19 North American City Governments

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City governments are increasingly interested in the concept of urban resilience. While theoretical debates continue to develop and critique the value of ‘urban resilience,’ a growing number of cities are organizing policies and projects around the concept. Building urban resilience

City governments are increasingly interested in the concept of urban resilience. While theoretical debates continue to develop and critique the value of ‘urban resilience,’ a growing number of cities are organizing policies and projects around the concept. Building urban resilience is viewed as a key concern for cities facing, in particular, climatic threats –although other urban challenges and equity concerns are increasingly prioritized. Support from city leadership and large funding opportunities, such as the Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities program, have encouraged some leading cities to create and manage city-wide resilience strategies. Yet pioneering cities have few guideposts to institutionalize resilience. This research evolved out of conversations with city officials in Portland, OR who were interested to learn how other cities were organizing resilience work. We explore how urban resilience is being structured and coordinated in 19 North American cities, focusing on emerging definitions, organizational structures, internal and external coordination efforts, and practitioners’ insights. We situate our findings on emerging governance approaches and lessons learned within the current urban resilience literature on governance by reviewing 40 academic papers and identifying 6 recurrent factors for effective governance. Additionally, we conducted 19 semi-structured interviews with North American resilience practitioners to describe emerging organization trends and share lessons from practice. Based off our interviews, we propose 5 key findings for structuring resilience work in cities effectively. These include: establishing a clear, contextual definition and scope, bringing communities into the process, championing the agreed-upon vision, balancing a centralized and dispersed approach, and recognizing tradeoffs in organizational placement. This research provides practitioners with insights to help facilitate resilience work within their cities and contributed to the scholarly debate on moving resilience theory toward implementation.

Date Created
2019-04-25
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Safe-to-fail infrastructure for resilient cities under non-stationary climate

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Motivated by the need for cities to prepare and be resilient to unpredictable future weather conditions, this dissertation advances a novel infrastructure development theory of “safe-to-fail” to increase the adaptive capacity of cities to climate change. Current infrastructure development is

Motivated by the need for cities to prepare and be resilient to unpredictable future weather conditions, this dissertation advances a novel infrastructure development theory of “safe-to-fail” to increase the adaptive capacity of cities to climate change. Current infrastructure development is primarily reliant on identifying probable risks to engineered systems and making infrastructure reliable to maintain its function up to a designed system capacity. However, alterations happening in the earth system (e.g., atmosphere, oceans, land, and ice) and in human systems (e.g., greenhouse gas emission, population, land-use, technology, and natural resource use) are increasing the uncertainties in weather predictions and risk calculations and making it difficult for engineered infrastructure to maintain intended design thresholds in non-stationary future. This dissertation presents a new way to develop safe-to-fail infrastructure that departs from the current practice of risk calculation and is able to manage failure consequences when unpredicted risks overwhelm engineered systems.

This dissertation 1) defines infrastructure failure, refines existing safe-to-fail theory, and compares decision considerations for safe-to-fail vs. fail-safe infrastructure development under non-stationary climate; 2) suggests an approach to integrate the estimation of infrastructure failure impacts with extreme weather risks; 3) provides a decision tool to implement resilience strategies into safe-to-fail infrastructure development; and, 4) recognizes diverse perspectives for adopting safe-to-fail theory into practice in various decision contexts.

Overall, this dissertation advances safe-to-fail theory to help guide climate adaptation decisions that consider infrastructure failure and their consequences. The results of this dissertation demonstrate an emerging need for stakeholders, including policy makers, planners, engineers, and community members, to understand an impending “infrastructure trolley problem”, where the adaptive capacity of some regions is improved at the expense of others. Safe-to-fail further engages stakeholders to bring their knowledge into the prioritization of various failure costs based on their institutional, regional, financial, and social capacity to withstand failures. This approach connects to sustainability, where city practitioners deliberately think of and include the future cost of social, environmental and economic attributes in planning and decision-making.

Date Created
2018
Agent

How Cities Think: Knowledge Co-Production for Urban Sustainability and Resilience

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Understanding and transforming how cities think is a crucial part of developing effective knowledge infrastructures for the Anthropocene. In this article, we review knowledge co-production as a popular approach in environmental and sustainability science communities to the generation of useable

Understanding and transforming how cities think is a crucial part of developing effective knowledge infrastructures for the Anthropocene. In this article, we review knowledge co-production as a popular approach in environmental and sustainability science communities to the generation of useable knowledge for sustainability and resilience. We present knowledge systems analysis as a conceptual and empirical framework for understanding existing co-production processes as preconditions to the design of new knowledge infrastructures in cities. Knowledge systems are the organizational practices and routines that make, validate, communicate, and apply knowledge. The knowledge systems analysis framework examines both the workings of these practices and routines and their interplay with the visions, values, social relations, and power dynamics embedded in the governance of building sustainable cities. The framework can be useful in uncovering hidden relations and highlighting the societal foundations that shape what is (and what is not) known by cities and how cities can co-produce new knowledge with meaningful sustainability and resilience actions and transformations. We highlight key innovations and design philosophies that we think can advance research and practice on knowledge co-production for urban sustainability and resilience.

Date Created
2017-06-10
Agent

Selling smartness: visions and politics of the smart city

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There is much at stake with the smart city. This urban governance movement is

predicated on infusing information-and-communication technology into nearly all aspects of the built environment, while at the same time transforming how cities are planned and managed. The smart

There is much at stake with the smart city. This urban governance movement is

predicated on infusing information-and-communication technology into nearly all aspects of the built environment, while at the same time transforming how cities are planned and managed. The smart city movement is global in scale with initiatives being rolled out all over the planet, driven by proponents with deep pockets of wealth and influence, and a lucrative opportunity with market projections in the billions or trillions of dollars (over the next five to ten years). However, the smart city label can be nebulous and amorphous, seemingly subsuming unrelated technologies, practices, and policies as necessary. Yet, even with this ambiguity, or perhaps because of it, the smart city vision is still able to colonize urban landscapes and capture the political imaginations of decision makers. In order to know just what the smart city entails I work to bring analytic clarity to the actions, visions, and values of this movement.

In short, the arc of this project moves from diving into the "smart city" discourses; to picking apart the ideologies at its heart; to engaging with the dual logics—control and accumulation—that drive the smart city; and finally to imagining what an alternative techno- politics might look like and how we might achieve it. My goal is that by analyzing the techno- politics of the smart city we will be better equipped to understand these urban transformations— what logics drive them, what they herald, and what our role should be in how they develop.

Date Created
2016
Agent

Constructing sustainability: a study of emerging scientific research trajectories

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Description
The greatest challenge facing humanity in the twenty-first century is our ability to reconcile the capacity of natural systems to support continued improvement in human welfare around the globe. Over the last decade, the scientific community has attempted to formulate

The greatest challenge facing humanity in the twenty-first century is our ability to reconcile the capacity of natural systems to support continued improvement in human welfare around the globe. Over the last decade, the scientific community has attempted to formulate research agendas in response to what they view as the problems of sustainability. Perhaps the most prominent and wide-ranging of these efforts has been sustainability science, an interdisciplinary, problem-driven field that seeks to address fundamental questions on human-environment interactions. This project examines how sustainability scientists grapple with and bound the deeply social, political and normative dimensions of both characterizing and pursuing sustainability. Based on in-depth interviews with leading researchers and a content analysis of the relevant literature, this project first addresses three core questions: (1) how sustainability scientists define and bound sustainability; (2) how and why various research agendas are being constructed to address these notions of sustainability; (3) and how scientists see their research contributing to societal efforts to move towards sustainability. Based on these results, the project explores the tensions between scientific efforts to study and inform sustainability and social action. It discusses the implications of transforming sustainability into the subject of scientific analysis with a focus on the power of science to constrain discourse and the institutional and epistemological contexts that link knowledge to societal outcomes. Following this analysis, sustainability science is repositioned, borrowing Herbert Simon's concept, as a "science of design." Sustainability science has thus far been too focused on understanding the "problem-space"--addressing fundamental questions about coupled human-natural systems. A new set objectives and design principles are proposed that would move the field toward a more solutions-oriented approach and the enrichment of public reasoning and deliberation. Four new research streams that would situate sustainability science as a science of design are then discussed: creating desirable futures, socio-technical change, sustainability values, and social learning. The results serve as a foundation for a sustainability science that is evaluated on its ability to frame sustainability problems and solutions in ways that make them amenable to democratic and pragmatic social action.
Date Created
2011
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