Risk plays an increasingly large role in shaping our cities. Risks on a global scale, such as terror threats and climate change, challenge cities to prepare and become resilient. At the same time, spatial decisions are often more driven by risks on a project scale, such as political calculations or the ability to obtain finance.
The panel will focus on understanding the complex roles of risk, and look at different ways in which systems theory helps us understand risk in our cities and landscapes. For instance, it is now understood that for a city to become resilient one has to look at physical, social, organizational aspects, understand the interdependencies between these aspects, and look at the ability to ‘learn’ and adapt. [We think our cities as complex adaptive systems, systems of many components, at different levels of organization, that interact in non-linear ways to adapt to changing environments – add or not? MB] What does this understanding of cities and landscape mean for the role of designers? Can design thinking be a form of systems thinking?
15. HIDDEN KNOWLEDGE
THE MUD FLATS
SEAL’S HEAD
HORSE FLAT
THE BOGS
THE TRIANGLE
tredding area
live oysters
hard bottom
surf fishing
diverse habitat area
active clamming
areas
historically
productive areas
MAPPING HARD CLAMS
DATA COLLECTION - EXISTING KNOWLEDGE
19. UNDERWATER REGULATION
500’
1000’
1500’
1500’
2000’
2000’
1000’
500’
200’
200’
FEMA HAZARD ZONES
VE ZONE
LiMWA ZONE
0.2% ANNUAL STORM
A ZONE
LIMIT OF MODERATE WAVE ACTION (LiMWA) (pFIRM 2013)
REPRESENTATIVE TRANSECT
REACH BOUNDARY
COASTAL EROSION HAZARD AREA (CEHA)
LIVING BREAKWATERS
SHORELINE (FEMA pFIRM)
EDGE OF FEDERAL CHANNEL (USACE COORDS)
FEDERAL NAVIGATION CHANNEL (NOAA)
NYC PARCEL BOUNDARIES (NYC DCP)
SI PARCELS (MapPLUTO 15v1)
CONFERENCE HOUSE PARK PROPERTY BOUNDARY (NYCDPR)
MEAN LOW WATER (MLW) -2.62’
STATEN ISLAND BUILDING FOOTPRINTS
7
8
9
6
15
12
16
13
14
11
18
17
20
19
10
5
21
3
4
22
23
2
1
A
B
C
D
I
K
E
F
G
H
J
SHORELINE REACHES
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
CONFERENCE HOUSE PARK WEST
CONFERENCE HOUSE PARK EAST
BRIGHTON ST TO YETMAN ST
YETMAN ST TO LORETTO ST
SURF AVE.
HYBRID OAK WOODS PARK
JOLINE LN
TRICIA WAY
BEDELL AVE TO PAGE AVE
BUTLER MANOR WOODS
MOUNT LORETTO
40. resilience and quality of life can best be
achieved in coastal cities by combining
three disciplines:
Hydrodynamics: Understanding the
force of the water
Urban Design: Understanding the force
of the city
Complex Systems: Modeling complexity,
measuring results
S T E V E N S I N S T I T U T E O F T E C H N O L O G Y
CRUX
56. Systems thinking is about simplification, not computation
(two different ways to think about modeling). Systems thinking allows us to achieve “the
simplicity needed to make a problem tractable to understanding and intervention.”
EXAMPLE: Brundtland Commission’s definition of sustainability: “meets the needs of the
present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”
Definition is just flexible enough to allow for agreement, and to accommodate all the
technical, social and ecological complexity of making cities and countries sustainable. (A
focus on Natural Capital rather than Human Capital would offer a stronger form of
Sustainability, but it would be very hard to define functional integrity and resource
sufficiency, and harder still to sustain commitment to a definition.)
– Mark Alan Hughes, Kleinman Center for Energy Policy, PennDesign, on systems and Brundtland World Commission on Environment and
Development, details in Our Common Future, 1987
57. Basic concepts of applied systems theory
A system is an interconnected set of elements that produces something.
It has Parts, Connections, and Functions. Connections are more important than Parts.
Functions can be hard to understand.
To look for potential for change in a system, for ways to intervene, we also look at:
Stocks and flows
Feedback loops
Leverage points
– Donella Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer, 2008 and Mark Brown, systems diagram of a city and support region
58. Basic concepts of applied systems theory
A system is an interconnected set of elements that produces something.
It has Parts, Connections, and Functions. Connections are more important than Parts.
Functions can be hard to understand.
To look for potential for change in a system, for ways to intervene, we also look for:
Stocks and flows
Feedback loops
Leverage points
– Donella Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer, 2008
Stocks register flows over time; often complex chains
Stocks change more slowly than flows
Stocks decouple inflows and outflows
Feedback = change in stock that affects flows
Negative feedback is balancing - keeps stock level or within a range
Positive feedback is compounding - rate of change in stock increases
System dynamics that provide leverage for people who understand them:
buffers, delays, rules and goals, paradigms
59. – Interboro Team, description of parts and connections of physical systems linked to flood ecologies and infrastructure, 2013
60. one systems thinking approach to resilient urban hydrology:
every lot receives and partitions water
many lots = one city
goal is to simulate in developed landscapes,
via surrogates, the pre-development hydrologic conditions
get water to plants to cool the city
de-engineer and distribute water management
--ideas from Franco Montalto, Department of Civil Engineering, Drexel University
61. one systems thinking approach to defining broad classes of options for increasing
coastal resilience:
1 move to higher ground and reprogram interface areas
2 build a protective barrier between development and water
3 create storage for fresh and salt water
4 attenuate wave energy and reduce fragility of urban elements
(design for safe failure and perception of risk)
5 improve readiness for evacuation + emergency management
6 combine above in site-specific layered protection
62. one systems thinking approach to general principles for resilience design of complex
systems and environments:
1 multi-functionality,
2 redundancy and modularization,
3 bio and social diversity,
4 multi-scalar networks and connectivity,
5 adaptive planning and design
– Jack Ahern, “From Fail-Safe to Safe-to-Fail: Sustainability and Resilience in the New Urban World," 2011
63. We can use systems thinking to
look at connections between
cities, global regions, climate
change, sustainability and
adaptation.
EXAMPLE: 742 members of the
World Economic Forum ranked
global risks in terms of likelihood
and impact. Failure of climate
change mitigation and adaption
ranked highest in impact.
Many other risks were ecological
and infrastructural in nature, all
were perceived to be growing.
All were deeply interconnected in
urban systems.
– World Economic Forum, Global Risks Report 2016;
link to systems thinking from Mark Alan Hughes
64. Systems thinking helps us
consider the complexity of
interconnections, in this case, the
close ties between infrastructure
and urban planning failures,
ecological collapse and other risks
connected with failure to adapt to
climate change.
World Economic Forum members
were asked to named the risks
they believed to be most
connected. The size of the
diamond and number of links
represents the aggregate strength
of perceived interconnectedness.
– World Economic Forum, Global Risks Report 2016
65.
66. Despite the intelligence of the City of New York’s plan, some systems thinkers will note:
• Most New Yorkers cannot rely on delivery of big infrastructure projects in time to
protect them.
• We lack a stable long-term consensus of the people that these nature-based and
engineered infrastructures are needed and worth the money.
• Available resources are a tiny fraction of the money required to protect the whole city.
• The Army Corps of Engineers, state regulators and city resilience leaders are aware
that standard practices will not produce these “full build out” results.
• We have no history of public / private partnership on this scale, and no high-capacity
delivery authorities in place.
• Many of the planners involved recognize that community is often the level at which
the particulars of site potential and common purpose can be articulated, and this
articulation is needed to stimulate action on the part of individual property owners,
community leaders and government for collective provision of layered infrastructure.
• A 7-mile seawall like that proposed on Staten Island will take 12 years to study and
build, will be basic in its implementation, and 2 earlier seawalls in that location failed.
>> We need deep systems thinking to design infrastructure
67. – PA Consulting, Systems map of counterinsurgency dynamics in Afghanistan
We can use systems thinking the way the military does to find the best places to attack a system
68. Rank order of intervention types / loci in terms of potential for leverage:
12 Numbers
11 Buffers
10 Physical systems + intersections
9 Time, delays + rates of system change
8 Balancing (cancelling) feedback loops
7 Reinforcing (driving, multiplying) feedback loops
6 Access to information
5 Rules and incentives
4 Self-organization (population evolution)
3 Goals, purpose, function (populations in balance)
2 Paradigms (mind sets, model of the system)
1 Transcending paradigms
– Donella Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer, 2008
69. Rank order of intervention types / loci in terms of potential for leverage:
12 Numbers
11 Buffers
#10 Physical systems + intersections
9 Time, delays + rates of system change
8 Balancing (cancelling) feedback loops
7 Reinforcing (driving, multiplying) feedback loops
6 Access to information
5 Rules and incentives
4 Self-organization (population evolution)
3 Goals, purpose, function (populations in balance)
2 Paradigms (mind sets, model of the system)
1 Transcending paradigms
– Donella Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer, 2008
70. Risk = P x E
Probability x magnitude of the consequences of the Event
In p x E problems—extreme events—we can reduce P or reduce E to manage risk, or we
can reduce fragility, or we can increase the probability of upside, learning and evolution.
Bill Joy, creator of Unix and Java:
“If you can’t solve a problem, make it bigger.”
Problems seem intractable because they “lack a big enough design space to create the
needed degrees of freedom.”
–Bill Joy as quoted in Amory Lovins, Reinventing Fire, 2011
71. In the Brundtland Commission example, the focus on future generations’ needs--
unknown in the present and unfolding over time--shifts the focus to adaptive capacity,
and the potential of unstable systems to create richer future iterations.
5 characteristics of complex adaptive systems:
1 diverse agents able to learn from new information
2 interaction among agents is often non-linear
3 agents exhibit patterns of self-organization
4 complex adaptive systems display emergent properties
5 complex adaptive systems co-evolve with their environments (system reaction to
stimuli alter the environment)
– John Holland, Signals and Boundaries, 2012
72. Theory of Succession (Clements, 1916)
1. Nudation or disturbance
2. Migration of propagules (seed rain)
3. Establishment of individuals (pioneers)
4. Competition
5. Reaction (pioneers stage the site: relay floristis)
6. Stabilization (climax community reproduces
itself indefinitely)
Gleason, Odum and others amend Clements but
traditional theory is causal, linear—an equilibrium
system.
C.S. Holling’s Emergent Theory of Succession
Open, nested systems
Loopy not linear, cycling feedback
Discontinuous, punctuated change
Non-equilibrium systems efficiently cultivating,
not dissipating, energy
Multiple steady / unsteady states
Inherent uncertainty
Emergent, adaptive properties
C.S. Holling, “The Resilience of Terrestrial Ecosystems:
Local Surprise and Global Change” in Sustainable
Development of the Biosphere, Cambridge University
Press, 1986: 292-320
73. Post-traumatic growth
Organisms (including us) gain from volatility, randomness, stressors, errors, disorder, and
uncertainty. The environment benefits from creative destruction.
Modernity = human domination of the large scale environment, stifling of volatility
We make social, political and economic systems vulnerable to “Black Swans” by over-
stabilizing them. Volatility is information, artificial stabilization removes visible
information, and massive blow ups catch everyone off guard.
Heuristics are better than models. We know they are expedient, imperfect,
approximate—simplicity is more reliable.
Scientists computing risk of harm are over confident, and no one else understands the
models and their assumptions. While fragility is quite measurable, risk associated with
rare events are not.
When you are fragile, you need to know a lot more than when you are anti-fragile (when
you are built to gain from turbulence).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder, 2014
74. Holland, Holling and Taleb agree:
There’s a lot to be gained in terms of quality, vitality, resilience or antifragility of ecosystems
and individuals if we don’t try to over-control for risk and reduce variability.
Principles of Evolution and Markets:
1 If species vary and replicate, populations evolve.
2 There will be winners and losers.
(To make sure that radical redistribution of property value is not the primary means
of initiating new ecologies, we can use systems theory to suggest other points of
leverage.)
3 “Optionality” is a replacement for intelligence (Taleb’s language.)
Small may be “ugly” but it is less fragile. We need a wider variety of examples of coastal
infrastructure to create sufficient fodder for evolutionary refinement.
>> Prototyping approach to design of coastal infrastructure
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder, 2014
75. INTRO - SYSTEMS THINKING
•introduction to what the ecology and
infrastructure panel is covering
•systems theory in brief - simplifying complexity,
looking for leverage
•qualities that systems theorists and designers
share
•interconnectedness of ecology, infrastructure,
and other systems
•notes from some major systems texts
•example: prototyping to introduce more
variation, promote evolution
•example: new placements in Hunts Point
Lifelines: regulatory innovation and multiples;
jobs, economic participation and food
distribution as resiliency infrastructure, design
as a tool of negotiation
Precast concrete elements placed in the East River Waterfront Esplanade designed by Ken Smith Landscape Architecture
76. Designers—like systems thinkers—are generalists and integrators.
We are comfortable with indeterminacy and complexity. We are good at mining the particular,
making exchanges between domains (“new placements”), and creating integrated solutions.
1 We have the right constitution for wicked systems problems, but not the patience or know-
how to master the science and shepherd projects through what Michael Berkowitz calls “the
valley of death.”
2 Government agencies working on and financing most risk problems have no idea what design
can offer. We lack power in current institutional arrangements.
“There is no area of contemporary life where design… is not a significant factor in shaping
human experience… However, a persistent problem… is that discussions between designers
and members of the scientific community tend to leave little room for reflection on the
broader nature of design… Instead of yielding productive integrations, the result is often
confusion and breakdown of communication, with a lack of intelligent practice to carry
innovative ideas into objective, concrete embodiment.”
--Richard Buchanan, “Wicked Problems in Design Thinking, 1992
77. model of the system
(different from computational models of risk)
Parameters we are trying to optimize are not yet defined
(similar to agriculture system design where we have
unintentionally optimized cheap food) —the model of the system
needs re-imagining
78. Enumerate the risk domains and transform them into negotiation
domains or design domains:
1 make sure all interests are risk-informed
2 bring risk-informed interests together to negotiate under what
conditions they could support a debated enterprise, recognizing
that almost all resilience endeavors involve Risk / Risk trade offs
3 apply design as a form of negotiation, create upside benefits
where there is now only risk
Our challenge is to develop and show property owners, regulators,
planners and the public the population of tolerable trade-offs in a
way that facilitates identification of the subset of potentially
mutually acceptable options.
--Mark Hughes, Kleinman Center for Energy Policy , PennDesign
79.
80. INTRO - SYSTEMS THINKING
•introduction to what the ecology and
infrastructure panel is covering
•systems theory in brief - simplifying complexity,
looking for leverage
•qualities that systems theorists and designers
share
•interconnectedness of ecology, infrastructure,
and other systems
•notes from some major systems texts
•example: prototyping to introduce more
variation, promote evolution
•example: new placements in Hunts Point
Lifelines: regulatory innovation and multiples;
jobs, economic participation and food
distribution as resiliency infrastructure, design
as a tool of negotiation
85. ECOLOGY-DRIVEN DESIGN
ALEX FELSON, YALE UNIVERSITY
Understanding risk in natural and constructed ecosystems
alexander(j.(felson,(alexander.felson@yale.edu(
associate(professor(
director,(joint(degree(and(the(urban(ecology(&(design(lab(
yale(school(of(architecture(and(forestry(&(environmental(studies(
93. ROUTE 8
(MAIN ST
E. MAIN ST
NORTH AVE
I-95
MODELED STORM SURGE
POTENTIAL FEMA 100-YEAR
FLOOD ZONE COMMERCIAL
BUILDINGS INDUSTRIAL
BUILDINGS
LEGEN
D
LONG ISLAND SOUND
RBD(Resilient(Bridgeport,(WB(Yale(Arcadis(
98. Green Infrastructure in Bridgeport
(
(
Bridgeport's Sewage and Stormwater Challenges
A lmost 86% of Bridgeport's land area Is covered with Impermeable
surfaces. 370 million gallons of mixed sewage overflows directly Into
Bridgeport's waterways, on average, every year.
outflow pipes that empty combined
sewage overflow Into Bridgeport
waterways after heavy rains.
Managing(complexity(and(
addressing(mulAple(systems(
Minimize(risks(that(individual(systems(fail,(as(
well(as(avoid(potenAal(cascading(effects(within(
one(system(or(across(a(hierarchy(of(systems.(
FREQUENCY OF
HYPOXIA IN BOTIOM
WATERS
