Resilience thinking in urban settlements · Thinking across spatial scales Global city systems...
Transcript of Resilience thinking in urban settlements · Thinking across spatial scales Global city systems...
Resilience thinking in
urban settlements
Claire Mortimer
Is 21st Century change
different from the past?
Change Ahead
Years
Natu
ral R
eso
urc
es
0
Margin for action
30
Non linier effects
Cascading impacts
Structural changes required
Time running out
= uncertainty and shocks
E.g. Declining Oil availability
….. the world has never faced a problem like this. Without
massive mitigation more than a decade before the fact,
the problem will be pervasive and will not be temporary.
Previous energy transitions were gradual and
evolutionary. Oil peaking will be abrupt and
revolutionary.
Hirsch Report 2005
B. Increased inter-dependencies
Global trade = > efficiency < self sufficiency
C. Urbanisation is a global force of change
Urban population increased almost ten-fold over 20th century
Over 50% people now urban dwellers
Almost 180,000 people added to the world urban population each day.
Can concepts of resilience help?
1. Engineering resilience
Speed of return to a single equilibrium
Disturbance
Strengths for urban• Built environment resistant
to shocks
Limitations for urban• Doesn’t desribe
communities, economies,
ecologies
• Built environment needs to
be adaptive over longer
time frames
2. Socio-ecological resilience
Gunderson and Hollings 2002
Resilience Alliance accessed 2010
Socio-ecological resilience cont.
• GENERAL resilience – diversity (functional / response
(flexibility, keeping your options open), modularity, the
tightness of feedbacks
• SPECIFIED resilience – of what, to what; emphasis on
appreciating specific threats, managing for specific
variables and specific disturbances
Strengths for urban ?
1. The city as a dynamic system
2. Need for both stability and adaptability
3. Stretching out timescales
4. Interdependencies across spatial scales
5. Enhancing ecosystem services
City as a dynamic system
..a city, however perfect its initial shape, is never
complete, never at rest. Thousands of witting
and unwitting acts every day alter its lines in
ways that are perceptible only over a certain
stretch of time.
Kostof, 1991
Species
Biosphere
Community
Family
Individual
ClimaxForest
Biome
SuccessionPatches
Fungi
Mammals
Birds
Insects
Infrastructure(and Open Space)
Place
Buildings
Management Systems
Design /Procurement
Built Environment
Days Years Decades Centuries MillenniaMillennia Centuries Decades YearsDays
Balancing stability and adaptability
Moffat and Kohler (2008)
PresentPast Future
100 100010 1030 30- Years -
Stretching our thinking in timescales
Source; Moffatt 2009
PresentPast
100 1030
Stretching our thinking back
1. What were the critical
events, processes
shaped today's
settlement?
2. What is the long term
behavior of the urban
system (stocks and
flows)?
3. What’s therefore the
settlement current
trajectory?
Present Future
10010 30
Stretching our thinking forward
1. What are the forces
of change coming
up and when?
2. What might the
combined impact of
those forces be?
3. Settlement
vulnerabilities?
Settlement
resources?
4. Systemic solutions,
treating the systems
or mal-adaptations?
Coastal
inundation
Aging
population
Oil $600
US barrel
Thinking across spatial scales
Global city
systems
City/region
Community
Household
..and thinking across domains
Global city
systems
Scales
DomainsBuilt Ecological Social Economic
Enhancing ecosystem services
Adapted from McGranahan, 2007, p. 22)
Limitations for urban
1. Urban systems too complex?
2. Insights into how humans
behave, and social change
occurs
3. Community resilience
Strengths for urban
• What are the social and
institutional factors which
enables some
people/communities
recognise and minimise
potential risk?
• How might communities
respond in times of crisis
and shock?
•
Resilience can only be understood by integrating
factors at individual, community and institutional
levels of analysis Paton 2008
1. Often excludes ecological considerations
2. 21st Century change – persistent and
pervasive and cascading
3. These require structural changes to
cities and settlements
Limitations for urban
‘Change at the margins’ versus
‘Openness and adaptability’ Handmer and Dovers1996
• Stabilising effects of institutions and social
structures (sociological institutionalism)
• Public institutions poorly equipped for
uncertainty (Handmer and Dovers1996)
• Strong belief in technology solutions
• ‘Lock-in’ in technology trajectories (Arthur 1994)
• Resilience at odds with economic efficiency
Complexity of sustainability transitions
Mal-adaptation/Adaptation
Oil based urban
regime
Transitioned regime20 yrs Bio fuels
investment
20 yrs transition in
transport/food production
systems
Forced regime
Global
food, water
and energy
crisis
Is urban resilience any different from
urban sustainability?
• Just an alternative (more politically salient) word for
sustainability?
• Strongly linked to the narrative of exponential and
uncertain change
• Component of urban sustainability
• Focuses on question; is it possible to design urban
systems that mitigate threats, and that are inherently
more capable of responding to surprise, shocks and
system change?
Focuses on the question;
Is it possible to design urban systems that
are inherently more capable of responding
to surprise and shocks and adapting to
significant change?