GCR: Social, Ecological, and Technological Infrastructure Systems for Urban Resilience

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The objective of this Growing Convergence Research project is to explore how social, ecological, and technological systems (SETS) interact to generate vulnerability or resilience to extreme weather events and how urban SETS dynamics might be guided along more resilient and sustainable trajectories. This project is motivated by the challenge of minimizing the impacts of extreme events, such as hurricanes and the accompanying storm surges, extreme heat, and flash flooding brought on by heavy rain events, on cities. The research team will develop convergence a) by bridging across the social, ecological, and technological domains; b) integrating socio-ecological-systems (SES), socio-technological systems (STS), and engineering theories of resilience into a common definition of resilience in which adaptive capacity is central; and c) working together with practitioners and community members to collaboratively envision resilient urban futures and articulating needs for implementing system-oriented solutions. Utilizing Atlanta, New York, Phoenix, and San Juan as study cities, this project will: a) apply and integrate simulations of power, water, transportation, and building systems to assess vulnerabilities to extreme events for future infrastructure scenarios in each city; b) model projections of heat and flood exposure combined with land use/land cover (LULC) change scenarios to assess future extreme event risk for future infrastructure scenarios in each city; c) analyze governance networks that address resiliency and associated actor agency, including visions, mental models of system vulnerabilities, institutional structures, and decision-making processes that are essential to navigate transformational changes in future scenarios; d) employ participatory visioning to co-develop future scenarios of resilient SETS infrastructures and explore with practitioners responses to future extreme event scenarios and social-ecological-technological changes; e) develop a researcher-practitioner transdisciplinary process to explore how resilience solutions might be implemented in diverse urban systems; and f) synthesize outcomes of future simulations and scenarios in an online interactive researcher-practitioner visualization platform as a potential decision-support tool.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.