The new theme for research in BES emphasizes adaptive
processes as a key to understanding and working with urban sustainability. Because of its importance, the intellectual
theme for BES this year will be socio-ecological adaptive processes.
From Sanitary to Sustainable: The Guiding Idea
To review a bit, BES III takes the transformation from the
sanitary to the sustainable city as a major ongoing environmental shift that
has the potential to affect all aspects of the city-suburban-exurban system of
Baltimore. Sustainability is a socially
agreed upon set of goals that accounts for environmental, social, and economic
health of the total urban ecosystem. It
necessarily incorporates social values.
The Science Supporting Sustainability
But what scientific information is needed to advance
sustainability, and to evaluate the degree of success in achieving
sustainability? The concept of
resilience, which is both a powerful metaphor of change and adjustment is the
next link in the intellectual path to understanding and working with
sustainability. Resilience, as mentioned
earlier in this Web Log (http://besdirector.blogspot.com/2011/01/resilience-ecology-evolution-and.html)
is the ability of a system to experience internal and external shocks and still
adjust and persist in a dynamic form.
Resilience can have socially desirable and socially undesirable
outcomes, and that is judged against the three-pronged sustainability goals
chosen. The system of automobile based
transport in metropolitan America is resilient, but in some ways,
an environmentally unfortunate one.
Wetlands are a resilient aspect of coastal systems affected by hurricanes
and storm surges. Resilience per se is
neither good nor bad. Sustainability,
when the goals are well chosen, may admittedly involve trade offs, but at least
those trade offs must not neglect off hand such things as social equity and
ecological function.
Making Resilience Work
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| Figure 1: The Adaptive Cycle |
Resilience is on the one hand, a metaphorical conception,
and on the other a very general theoretical framework cast in the form of the “adaptive
cycle” (Figure 1). How does such a
general concept get translated into something that can be measured and
tracked? The answer is to use adaptive
processes to fill in the details of how systems develop, how they react to
stresses and disturbances, and how they periodically reorganize.
Resilience Depends on Adaptation
What are adaptive processes?
They are the structures, fluxes, and interactions that allow systems to
adjust to sudden or gradual changes.
Social and biogeophysical features can contribute to the adaptive
capacity of urban systems. The
literature suggests a number of general kinds of adaptive processes (Figure 2). It is these features which BES needs to
concentrate on in the coming year. How
do our ongoing, long-term measurements support the scheme of adaptive
processes? What kinds of trends can be
determined and can they be interpreted in terms of the resilience cycle and
socially described sustainability goals?
What new measurements or analyses might be required? Are there clear parallels between various social
and biophysical adaptive processes?
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| Figure 2. The determinants of adaptive capacity, shown as adaptive processes in social and biophysical realms. Of course the processes in the two realms interact. |
Toward Improved Understanding of Adaptive Processes
Over the coming year, discussion of adaptive processes
should suffuse all our activities and research discussions. Then, during our annual meeting in October,
we may be in a better position to evaluate the state of adaptive processes, and
to understand how they affect the transition from the sanitary to the
sustainable city. Addressing this issue
will undoubtedly take a long time. It’s
a good time to start.
