TY - JOUR
T1 - Embedding built environments in social-ecological systems
T2 - Resilience-based design principles
AU - Anderies, John
N1 - Funding Information:
The author would like to thank Richard Lorch and three anonymous reviewers for very helpful comments on earlier versions of the manuscript. Financial support for this work from the US National Science Foundation, grant number GEO-1115054.
PY - 2014/3/4
Y1 - 2014/3/4
N2 - Globalization, the process by which local settlements and ecosystems are becoming linked in a global network, presents policy scientists and planners with difficult design challenges. Coping with either natural or built environments in isolation is extremely challenging in its own right (e.g. built environments at different scales: a single building, a collection of buildings, a neighbourhood or a city are in themselves very complex). In the Anthropocene era, where human activities shape the planetary system in which built and natural environments are becoming more tightly linked across scales, these complex systems need to be considered as elements in a global network, i.e. as a coupled social-ecological system (SES) at the global scale. In the context of this spiralling complexity, multi-scale and multilevel processes become more important and design/management problems become extraordinarily difficult. Preliminary ideas are explored for how research on this multilevel design problem might proceed. Specifically, based on combining insights from a collection of theories and models based on resilience and robustness concepts, the basic elements of a new approach are presented that recognizes the importance of self-organizing processes at multiple scales and emphasizes the use of feedbacks to link these processes across scales.
AB - Globalization, the process by which local settlements and ecosystems are becoming linked in a global network, presents policy scientists and planners with difficult design challenges. Coping with either natural or built environments in isolation is extremely challenging in its own right (e.g. built environments at different scales: a single building, a collection of buildings, a neighbourhood or a city are in themselves very complex). In the Anthropocene era, where human activities shape the planetary system in which built and natural environments are becoming more tightly linked across scales, these complex systems need to be considered as elements in a global network, i.e. as a coupled social-ecological system (SES) at the global scale. In the context of this spiralling complexity, multi-scale and multilevel processes become more important and design/management problems become extraordinarily difficult. Preliminary ideas are explored for how research on this multilevel design problem might proceed. Specifically, based on combining insights from a collection of theories and models based on resilience and robustness concepts, the basic elements of a new approach are presented that recognizes the importance of self-organizing processes at multiple scales and emphasizes the use of feedbacks to link these processes across scales.
KW - built environment
KW - design principles
KW - feedback
KW - fragility
KW - planning, resilience
KW - self-organizing
KW - social-ecological system
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U2 - 10.1080/09613218.2013.857455
DO - 10.1080/09613218.2013.857455
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84892948502
SN - 0961-3218
VL - 42
SP - 130
EP - 142
JO - Building Research and Information
JF - Building Research and Information
IS - 2
ER -