The Anthropocene represents an age of compounded challenges of global urban growth and climate change that threaten the earth system’s sustainability. Cities are especially vulnerable to extreme events like floods, drought, and heat because of their location and concentration of people and infrastructure. Resilience has been widely adopted by both academic and practice communities as a means for envisioning urban transformation and dealing with the uncertainty of future climate conditions. Yet, as the toll from extreme events continues to mount, there is an urgent need for convergent systems science and transformative frameworks that enhance the resilience of cities. Recent extreme events such as Hurricanes Harvey (2017), Maria (2017), and Sandy (2012) highlight these weaknesses and expose the fundamental interdependencies within urban social, ecological, and technological systems (SETS).
Most approaches to improving resilience are siloed, with efforts focused on one or two domains. Yet extreme events often cause cascading impacts. Solutions that address only one system domain are unlikely to prove to be resilient in the future. Decision-makers, designers, engineers, and ecosystem managers need solutions, decision-support tools, and data visualizations that converge across disciplines and knowledge systems. A new urban systems science is emerging that is key to understanding how to protect cities and urban regions from the most severe impacts of climate-driven extreme events. It accounts for the interdependencies among social, ecological, and technological infrastructure components of urban systems. Our Big Idea is that the convergence of cutting-edge social, ecological, and technological approaches—explicitly integrated into the process of envisioning resilient urban futures—will allow for transformative change in cities that increases resilience to extreme events.
Results/Conclusions
We present advances in developing a convergent urban systems science capable of providing cities with the knowledge and methods for building integrated SETS resilience strategies to extreme events, supported by cutting-edge modeling, simulation, and visualization of urban systems. We present a SETS approach to modeling climate risk and resilience scenarios from the UREx SRN project in 9 US and Latin Cities that incorporate multiple types of “big data" and data visualization for decision-support for resilience visioning and planning.
The development of a convergent SETS framework is an intellectual frontier for transdisciplinary research on nature-based solutions, human well-being and resilience. It builds on urban systems theory by directly integrating research on social, ecological, and technological resilience to extreme events into a complex systems framework; one that is immediately positioned to support on-the-ground stakeholders and decision makers.