Understanding$Risk$in$Natural$and$Manmade$
Systems$$Kate$Orff,$SCAPE$Studio$and$$Columbia$GSAPP$
Alexandros$Washburn,$Stevens$InsMtute$of$Technology$Ellen$Neises,$PennDesign$Alex$Felson,$Yale$University$
DECUSACENOAA HRFDEP NYNJ BAYKEEPERSNY HARBOR FOUNDATION
GOSRNYC DPRNY ORRNY RISING FEMA USACE
SI FISHERMAN’S CONSERVATION ASSOCIATION DOE PUBLIC SCHOOLS PRIVATE SCHOOLS PARK USERSTOTTENVILLE CIVIC ASSOCIATION RESIDENTS
LACK OF BASELINE KNOWLEDGE // HIDDEN KNOWLEDGE
THE MUD FLATS
SEAL’S HEADHORSE FLAT
THE BOGS
THE TRIANGLE
tredding arealive oysters
hard bottom
surf fishing
diverse habitat areaactive clamming areas
historically productive areas
MAPPING HARD CLAMS
DATA COLLECTION - EXISTING KNOWLEDGE
UNDERWATER REGULATION
500’
1000’
1500’
1500’
2000’
2000’
1000’
500’
200’
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FEMA HAZARD ZONES
VE ZONE
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0.2% ANNUAL STORM
A ZONE
LIMIT OF MODERATE WAVE ACTION (LiMWA) (pFIRM 2013)
REPRESENTATIVE TRANSECT REACH BOUNDARY
COASTAL EROSION HAZARD AREA (CEHA)
LIVING BREAKWATERSSHORELINE (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
89
6
1512 16
13
1411
18
17
20
19
10
5
21
3
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22
232
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ResilienceByDesignUniversity19FEB2016
STEVENSINSTITUTEOFTECHNOLOGYCOASTALRESILIENCEANDURBANEXCELLENCE
resilience and quality of life can best be achieved in coastal cities by combining three disciplines: Hydrodynamics: Understanding the force of the waterUrban Design: Understanding the force of the city Complex Systems: Modeling complexity, measuring resultsS 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
FIG.2.StevensNorthwestAtlanFcPredicFon(SNAP)modeldomain,showingtheNewYorkHarborObservingandPredicFonSystem(NYHOPS)modelnestedwithinit.TheNewJerseyWaterfrontInundaFonModelisitselfnestedwithinNYHOPS.
Street-ScaleModelingofStormSurgeInunda;onalongtheNewJerseyHudsonRiverWaterfront
ALANF.BLUMBERG,NICKITASGEORGAS,LARRYYIN,THOMASO.HERRINGTON,ANDPHILIPM.ORTONStevensInsFtuteofTechnology,Hoboken,NewJersey
1486JOURNALOFATMOSPHERICANDOCEANICTECHNOLOGYVOLUME32
ThecomparisonofthemodelresultstotheobservaFonsshowsexcellentagreement.Thisisduetothe• robustfloodinganddryingphysicsofsECOM• highresoluFonandaccuratedigitalterrain• fineresoluFonusedinthemodel• high-fidelityforcingfuncFonsbroughttothisstudy.“Thecloseagreementfoundinthispaperprovidesahighconfidenceintheuseofthemodelforoverlandinunda7onpredic7on.”
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
Basic concepts of applied systems theoryA 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
Basic concepts of applied systems theoryA 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 flowsStocks decouple inflows and outflows
Feedback = change in stock that affects flowsNegative feedback is balancing - keeps stock level or within a rangePositive 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
– Interboro Team, description of parts and connections of physical systems linked to flood ecologies and infrastructure, 2013
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
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
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
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 adaptionranked 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
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
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
– 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
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
Rank order of intervention types / loci in terms of potential for leverage:
12 Numbers
11 Buffers
#10 Physical systems + intersections9 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
Risk = P x EProbability 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
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
Theory of Succession (Clements, 1916)
1. Nudation or disturbance2. Migration of propagules (seed rain)3. Establishment of individuals (pioneers)4. Competition5. 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 SuccessionOpen, nested systemsLoopy not linear, cycling feedbackDiscontinuous, punctuated changeNon-equilibrium systems efficiently cultivating, not dissipating, energyMultiple steady / unsteady statesInherent uncertaintyEmergent, 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
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
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
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
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
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
Enumerate the risk domains and transform them into negotiation domains or design domains:
1 make sure all interests are risk-informed2 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 offs3 apply design as a form of negotiation, create upside benefits where there is now only riskOur 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
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
ECOLOGY-DRIVEN DESIGN
ALEX FELSON, YALE UNIVERSITY
Understanding risk in natural and constructed ecosystems
alexander(j.(felson,([email protected](associate(professor(director,(joint(degree(and(the(urban(ecology(&(design(lab(yale(school(of(architecture(and(forestry(&(environmental(studies(
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CLAIM TE EDGE, CONNECT THE REBUILD BY DESIGN: RESILIENT BRIDGEPORT WB
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green roof.
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sand filter
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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 overf low Into Bridgeport waterways after heavy rains.
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FREQUENCY OF HYPOXIA IN BOTIOM WATERS
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