Outcomes of an Urban Sustainability Research Network

From 2011 through 2017, the National Science Foundation (NSF) supported a collaborative research project on "Urban Sustainability: Research Coordination and Synthesis for a Transformative Future."  This project was jointly organized and directed by the Baltimore Ecosystem Study LTER and the Central Arizona Phoenix LTER.  Prof. Daniel L. Childers and I were Co-Directors of the project. 

The text here is the "plain language" public outcomes report as submitted to the Research.gov website.  We hope it gives you some sense of how BES and its partners are helping to promote the understanding and application of the popular and important idea of sustainability.  The report is divided into the two sections required by the National Science Foundation -- Intellectual Merit and Broader Impacts.

Intellectual Merit

The Urban Sustainability Research Coordination Network (RCN) was designed to improve the understanding of urban sustainability and to better position ecologists to interact with policy makers and managers concerned with sustainability in cities, suburbs, and urban regions.  It was important to focus on urban areas because sustainability research and practice had mainly focused on natural resources, rural systems, or conservation.  Because urban systems are becoming ever more important in the United States and around the world, improving the understanding of urban sustainability is a crucial need.  Intentionally limited to working with existing data, the Urban Sustainability RCN had four main objectives: 1) to improve the availability of knowledge about the sustainability of urban systems; 2) to generate conceptual frameworks that unify the crucial disciplines needed to understand and facilitate urban sustainability; 3) to identify research needs to enhance the future understanding and application of urban sustainability; and 4) to build a diverse network of sustainability researchers and practitioners. 

This RCN began with 37 participants from the United States and 4 other countries.  The Network grew to engage 80 researchers, educators, and practitioners from 50 cities in 20 countries.  This extensive network brought together a large amount of data, broad experience with cities of different sizes and types, and the insights of various cultural and professional backgrounds.  The large size of the Network helped to spread the insights of the intellectual integration very widely around the nation and globe.  The growth of the Network also reflected the widespread interest in the topic.

The RCN convened three meetings of the entire group over the course of the grant, plus smaller thematically oriented meetings.  The themes evolved during the project based on the "all hands" meetings, and the activities of the working groups.  Ultimately, the RCN addressed these themes: 1) conceptual models for urban sustainability; 2) the influence of different formal and informal governance structures on urban sustainability; 3) the role of interdisciplinary insights and contributions of the humanities to improved urban sustainability;  4) how ecologically informed urban design can improve sustainability through attention to adaptive resilience; 5) how urban metabolism, that is, the control of nutrient and energy flow, contributes to  sustainability; and 6) the use of scenario planning as a tool to improve sustainable urban futures.  

The RCN increased understanding of the social, economic, and environmental triggers that have led cities to crisis and transition, including discriminating the different scales on which the triggers act.  This information has been especially useful to reinforcing partnerships with urban sustainability officers.  The RCN also employed the idea that urban areas are complex systems, in which triggers affect the adaptive mechanisms that lead toward or away from sustainability.   Finally, the RCN employed the interactions between water resources and energy resources to understand important trade-offs that can affect the ability of cities to transition to sustainability.

Broader Impacts

Several specific outcomes illustrate the practical success of this RCN.  One is its serving as a seed bed for the Urban Resilience to Extremes Sustainability Research Network (UREx SRN).  This multi-institutional program of research and application, headquartered at Arizona State University, uses several of the conceptual advances generated by our RCN as the stimulus for new data collection.   A second major project that emerged from this RCN was funded by Future Earth to investigate sustainability from the perspective of urban phosphorus dynamics.  Phosphorus is a significant limiting nutrient in ecosystems and a can be a serious pollutant of surface waters.  A third outcome is cementing interactions with the Research Center for Eco-Environmental Sciences of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, to help develop sustainability research in the context of the rapid urbanization now underway in China and elsewhere in developing countries.  Interchanges with Network members in South Africa and in Latin America ensure that the insights and needs of very different kinds of urban change have been accounted for in our concepts and in our communication with urban design, planning, and management practitioners.  An additional important outcome of the RCN was better linking engineering and urban design perspectives with the important biological basis of sustainability in urban systems. 

The RCN trained several students and early career scientists.  A total of 20 post-doctoral associates participated as full members of the RCN.  The RCN employed Post-doctoral associate Meredith Garten for 2.5 years. She is now a faculty member at Ohio University.  Chris Sanchez, Laboratory Manager for PI Childers, assisted with logistics for the RCN after Dr. Gartin’s departure; he is now a doctoral student at Arizona State University.  Nicholas Weller, also a doctoral student with Childers, won an NSF EASPI grant to assist with field work on the urban sustainability pilot project funded by the CAS in Beijing in Summer 2016.  The interactions with many sustainability practitioners are ongoing.  So the network established by this RCN project, continues to advance the conceptual understanding and pathways for application of sustainability.

Publications

Some of the key or recent publications produced by the members and working groups of the RCN are these:

Books

Grove, M., M.L. Cadenasso, S.T.A. Pickett, G. Machlis, and W.R. Burch, Jr (2015). The Baltimore School of Urban Ecology: Space, Scale, and Time for the Study of Cities  Yale University Press.  New Haven.  ISBN: 978-0-300-10113-3

Steiner, F. R., G. F. Thompson, and A. Carbonell, editors. (2016). Nature and cities: the ecological imperative in urban design and planning  The Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.  Cambridge, MA. 

Book Chapters

Cadenasso, M.L. and S.T.A. Pickett (2018). Situating sustainability from an ecological science perspective: Ecosystem services, resilience, and environmental justice. Situating Sustainability: Sciences/Humanities/Societies, Scales and Social Justice.  Sze, Julie, Editor.  New York University Press.  New York.  ISBN: 9781479870349, in press.

McPhearson, T. and K. Wijsman (2017). Transitioning complex urban systems: The importance of urban ecology for sustainability in New York City. P 65, in Urban Sustainability Transitions  Frantzeskaki, N, V. Castan Broto, L Coenen, and D. Loorbach.  Springer.  New York.  ISBN: 978-1-315-22838-9.

Steiner, F.R. (2016). Preface/Vorwort. Energy x Change: München und Austin: regionale Zentren nachhaltiger Entwicklung/Munich and Austin regional centers of sustainable innovation  Petra Liedl.  Beuth Verlag GmbH.  Berlin.  pg 8.

Steiner, FR, and D Pieranunzi (2016). Sites v2. Ecological Urbanism Revised ed. Mohsen Mostafari and Gareth Doherty.  Lars Müller Publishers.  Zürich.  pg. 514.

Papers in Journals

Bois, P, D.L. Childers, T. Corlouer, J. Laurent, A. Massicot, C. Sanchez, and A. Wanko. (2017). Confirming a plant-mediated "biological tide" in an aridland constructed treatment wetland.  Ecosphere. 8 (3),  e01756. 

Bunn, D., B. Büscher, M.L. Cadenasso, D.L. Childers, M. McHale, S.T.A. Pickett, L. Rivers, L. Swemmer. Golden Wildebeest Days: South Africa’s Wild Life Economy from Apartheid to Neolibralism.  Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, submitted.   

Childers, Daniel, M.L. Cadenasso, J.Morgan Grove, Victoria Marshall, Brian McGrath, S.T.A. Pickett (2015). An Ecology for Cities: A Transformational Nexus of Design and Ecology to Advance Climate Change Resilience and Urban Sustainability.  Sustainability. 7  3774. DOI: 10.3390/su7043774

Grimm, N.B., S.T.A. Pickett, R.L. Hale, and M.L. Cadenasso (2016). Does the Ecological Concept of Disturbance Have Utility in Urban Social-Ecological-Technological Systems?.  Ecosystem Health and Sustainability. 3 (1),  e01255. DOI: 10.1002/ehs2.1255

Groffman, P.M., M.L. Cadenasso, J. Cavender-Bares, D.L. Childers, N.B. Grimm, J.M. Grove, S.E. Hobbie, L.R. Hutyra, G.D. Jenerette, T. McPhearson, D.E. Pataki, S.T.A. Pickett, R.V. Pouyat, E. Rosi-Marshall, and B.L. Ruddell (2017). Moving toward a new urban system science.  Ecosystems. 20. DOI: 10.1007/s10021-016-0053-4

Hersperger, A.M., C Ioja, F. Steiner, and C.A. Tudor. (2015). Comprehensive consideration of conflicts in the land-use planning process: a conceptual contribution.  Carpathian Journal of Earth and Environmental Sciences. 10 (4). 

McHale, Melissa R., Scott M. Beck, Steward T.A. Pickett, Daniel L. Childers, Mary L. Cadenasso, Louie Rivers III, Louise Swemmer, Liesel Ebersohn, Wayne Twine, David Bunn (). Democratization of ecosystem services – A radically revised framework for assessing nature’s benefits.  Ecosystem Health and Sustainability, under revision.

McHale, Melissa R., Steward TA Pickett, Olga Barbosa, David N Bunn, Mary L Cadenasso, Dan L Childers, Meredith Gartin, George Hess, David M Iwaniec, Timon McPhearson, M Nils Peterson, Alexandria K Poole, Louie Rivers III, Shade T Shutters, and Weiqi Zhou (2015). A New Global Urban Realm: Complex, Connected, Diffuse, and Diverse Socio-Ecological Systems.  Sustainability. 7  5211. DOI: 10.3390/su70566

McPhearson, Timon, S.T.A. Pickett, N. Grimm, J. Niemelä, M. Alberti, T. Elmqvist, C. Weber, J. Breuste, D. Haase, and S. Qureshi (2016). Advancing Urban Ecology Towards a Science of Cities.  BioScience.   DOI: 10.1093/biosci/biw002

Metson, G.S., S.M. Powers, R. Hale, J. Sayles, G. Oberg, G.K, MacDonald, Y. Yuwayyama, N. Springer, A. Weatherley, K. Hondula, K. Jones, R.B. Chowdhury, A.H.W. Beusen, A.F. Bouwman. Socio-environmental assessment of phosphorus flows in the urban sanitation shain of diverse cities.  Regional Environmental Change, under review

Muñoz-Erickson, T.A., C. Miller, and T. Miller. (2017). How cities think: knowledge co-production for urban sustainability and resilience.  Forests. 8 (6) DOI: 10.3390/f8060203

Muñoz-Erickson, T.A., Lindsay K. Campbell, Daniel L. Childers, J. Morgan Grove, David M. Iwaniec, Steward T. A. Pickett, Michele Romolini, Erika S. Svendsen. (2016). Demystifying governance and its role in transitions in urban social-ecological systems.  Ecosphere. 7 (11),  e01564. DOI: 10.1002/ecs2.1564

Pickett, S.T.A. and Weiqi Zhou (2015). Global Urbanization as a Shifting Context for Applying Ecological Science toward the Sustainable City.  Ecosystem Health and Sustainability. 1  art5. DOI: 10.1890/EHS14-0014.1

Pickett, S.T.A., M.L. Cadenasso, Emma J. Rosi-Marshall, Kenneth T. Belt, Peter M. Groffman, J. Morgan Grove, Elena G. Irwin, Sujay S. Kaushal, Shannon L. LaDeau, Charles H. Nilon, Christopher M. Swan, Paige S. Warren. (2017). Dynamic Heterogeneity: A Framework to Promote Integration and Hypothesis Generation in Urban Systems..  Urban Ecosystems. 20 (1), DOI: 10.1007/s11252-016-0574-9

Pickett, S.T.A., M.L. Cadenasso (2017). How many principles of urban ecology are there?  Landscape Ecology.   DOI: 10.1007/s10980-017-0492-0

Pickett, S.T.A., M.L. Cadenasso, Daniel Childers, Mark McDonnell, Weiqi Zhou (2016). Evolution and future of urban ecological science: Ecology in, of, and for the city.  Ecosystem Health and Sustainability.  DOI: 10.1002/ehs2.1229

Pieranunzi, D., F.R. Steiner, and S. Rieff (2017). Advancing green infrastructure and ecosystem services through SITES.  Landscape Architecture Frontiers. 5 (1), 22. DOI: 10.15302/J-LAF-20170103

Romolini, M., R.P. Bixler, and J.M. Grove. (2016). A social-ecological framework for urban strewarship network research to promote sustainable and resilient cities.  Sustainability. 8:956. DOI: 10.3390/su8090956

Sanchez, CA; Childers, DL; Turnbull, L; Upham, RF; Weller, N (2016). Aridland constructed treatment wetlands II: Plant mediation of surface hydrology enhances nitrogen removal.  Ecological Engineering. 97  658. DOI: 10.1016/j.ecoleng.2016.01.002

Shutters, S.T. (2016). Interdependent Preferences and Prospects for Global Sustainability.  International Journal of Sustainability Policy and Practice. 12 (3),  DOI: 10.18848/2325-1166/CGP

Steiner, F.R. (2016). Opportunities for Urban Ecology in Community and Regional Planning.  Journal of Urban Ecology. 2 (1), DOI: 10.1093/jue/juv004

Steiner, F.R. (2016). The application of ecological knowledge requires a pursuit of wisdom.  Landscape and Urban Planning. 155:108.

Steiner, FR, AW Shearer (2016). Geodesign-Changing the World, Changing Design.  Landscape and Urban Planning. 156:1.

 
Zhou, Weiqi, S.T.A. Pickett, and M.L. Cadenasso (2017). Shifting concepts of urban spatial heterogeneity and their implications for sustainability.  Landscape Ecology. 32 (1),  DOI: 10.1007/s10980-016-0432-4

Steward T.A. Pickett, Director Emeritus

What Does Collapse Tell Us About Resilience?

The adaptve cycle is key to understanding resilience as an integrated ecological and social construct.  The cycle is introduced elsewhere in this Web Log (http://besdirector.blogspot.com/2011/01/resilience-ecology-evolution-and.html) as well as briefly defined in the BES Urban Lexicon (http://besurbanlexicon.blogspot.com/search/label/Adaptive%20Cycle).  One of the key aspects of the cycle is the movement of systems in a conceptual space defined by the accumulation of capital in the structure of the system, and the increasing complexity of the system at the same time (Figure 1).

Fig. 1. Capital and complexity as two axes of the
adaptive cycle of resilience. r-K contrasts
trace out the blue trajectory.

Ecological Foundation of Increasing Complexity

As an ecologist, I find these these increases easy to understand, since they parallel changes that have long been understood from ecological succession.  One of these shifts is based on resource capture.  Dominance of the plant community shifts from species that specialize in the capture of resources that are freely available in the environment, to dominance by species that specialize in conserving the resources they have already captured.  Think of fast growing, high resource-demanding colonizing species or weeds, compared to slow growing, resource hoarding trees that get by on modest fluxes of nutrients and light.  This kind of contrast is labeled in both plants and animals as r versus K strategies. 

The biological contrast in complexity emerges from the similar successional differences.  For example, later successional communities typically have a larger number of canopy layers, as well as greater spatial heterogeneity.  These patterns result from the growth of long-lived canopy-forming plants, insertion of lower layers dominated by shade-tolerant species, and the emergence of species that spread clonally.  The massive, long-lived, and spatially extensive structures are good at storing and allocating assimilated resources. 

However, the slow growth rates and massive structures associated with dominance in late successional comminities also make those systems vulnerable to external disturbances, such as wind, fire, or disease outbreak.  The same species that manage assimilated resources have evolved structures and processes that ill suit them to deal with environments where resources are freely available.  This is what sets up the adaptive cycle of r-K shift with subsequent release and reorganization.

In social systems, accumulation of capital or wealth is a familiar trajectory.  Settlements are often initiated in sites where resources or the opportunity to concentrate resources is high.  In such situations the external resources, be they rich soil for crops, industrially valuable minerals, or fossil fuels for example, are initially untapped.  As the settlement accumulates more residents and built structure, it assimilates more resources.  Furthermore, urbanization is associated with increasing capacity to assimilate and process more resources.  All this is expressed as wealth embodied in the system.

Driving Complexity in Social Systems

But what strategic contrast might explain the shift in the social complexity of the system?  Joseph Tainter's (1988, 2006) analysis of the collapse of social systems exposes the sources of social complexity.  The built structure of settlements clearly becomes more complex.  In addition to raw density of structures, often the height and heterogeneity of structures increases.  Infrastructure to move people, goods, resources, and wastes is developed.  Specialization of jobs and lifestyles emerges, and the demographic differentiation of the population typically increases as residents are drawn from other settlements or different rural areas.  Of great importance is the elaboration of increasingly layered, spatially extensive administrative and governance structures.  Specialized knowledge and training echo the increasing administrative compelxity.   

This suite of differences, along with many others, consolidate into fixed, self-perpetuating structures that are initially adaptive.  As an already complex society attempts to solve its problems it can only add additional layers or kinds of organizational complexity.  Yet, each new innovation involves a cost that necessarily produces less return on the investment.  Thus, according to Tainter, the growth of complexity in societies will trace out a curve of decreasing marginal return over time.  Once marginal return declines to lower levels, the society is poised to disintegrate because the fixed investment leaves the society vulnerable to such things as resource depletion, invasion, internal unrest, or simply voluntary migration to a less burdensome region.  Environment and resources play a role, but the lens through which the crisis comes into focus is through the economics of marginal return on investment.

Tainter’s model explains the social component of the “front loop” of the adaptive cycle in social-ecological systems.  Many analyses in the literature have focused on the inertia and rigidity that result from high levels of social complexity (Biggs et al. 2010).  What Tainter exposes is the mechanism for the increase in social complexity.  Social complexity results from the accumulation of incremental solutions to the problems that society identifies.  Such complexity may interact with external and internal shocks of either social or biophysical origin to either cause collapse or to generate adaptive reorganization.

References

Biggs, R., F. R. Westley, and S. R. Carpenter. 2010. Navigating the back loop: fostering social innovation and transformation in ecosystem management. Ecology and Society 15:Article 9.

Tainter, J. A. 1988. The collapse of complex societies. Cambridge University Press, New York.

Tainter, J. A. 2006. Social complexity and sustainability. Ecological Complexity 3:91-103.

A Poster Introducing BES III

BES at the All Scientists' Meeting

Every three years, the participants in the Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) Network meet to share and compare results, and to plan for the future.  this effort, involving more than one thousand researchers, educators, artists, and other collaborators in LTER, is called an All Scientists' Meeting. The details of this large meeting can be found on the website of the LTER Network: http://www.lternet.edu/node/49531

Members of BES will be presenting posters, plenary talks, and workshops.  We'll report on some of the highlights after the meeting is done.

An Overview of BES for the ASM

Each LTER site is required to present a poster at the meeting.  The posters measure no larger than 4 x 4 feet, but in order to make them legible to readers viewing the posters some 3 to 4 feet distant, remarkably little text can be included.  It is a challenge to choose a breadth of research and education, and keep the poster legible and clear.  I hope that I have managed to do that with this year's poster.

The poster starts in the middle column, providing a point-by-point abstract of the nature of Phase III of BES.    It indicates that BES III builds on the integrative concepts that have motivated our research, education, and community engagement since 1997.  However, due to the increasing concern with issues of sustainability in the Baltimore region, and the capacity of this coastal metropolis to adapt to the effects of climate change, we chose to focus on that shifting policy environment as a way to move BES forward.  As mentioned in earlier posts, we adopt the idea that Baltimore metro is aiming to move from the existing sanitary to an envisioned sustainable city.  

The new guiding question for BES flows from the sustainability focus, and employs a resilience framework that relies on adaptive processes in both the social and the biophysical aspects of the interacting urban system.  Follow the arrows in the poster to build your understanding as you move through it.

The new guiding question and its subquestions then flow out into nine examples of conceptual or empirical work in BES III. 

Trees, Vegetation: Patchiness, Change, and Function

Four examples are groupse in the left hand panel.  These results  focus on the status and change of trees, tree canopy, and the vegetated components of the urban land cover complex.  The results are these:

1. Total forest cover has remained the same from 1914 to 2005, but the size of individual forest patches has decreased markedly.  Fragmentation is evident in this survey of the Gwynns Falls Watershed.  The work is published by Zhou et al. (2011).

2. Nowak and Greenfield (2012) showed that 17 of 20 US cities had less tree canopy over two times separated by about 5 years in the recent past.  Baltimore was among the decreasers.  Only Syracuse, NY had an increase in tree canopy.  This result is perhaps surprising given the policies and programs that many cities have put in place to increase their tree canopy coverage.

3. The heat island is one of urban ecology's most robust generalizations.  However, what kind of heterogeneity is there at fine to medium scales in the heat stress experienced within cities, and who suffers as a result?  Huang et al. (2011) show that in the Gwynns Falls Watershed, which encompasses patches that represent both old and new suburbs,  dense old residential areas, commercial, transportation corridors, agriculture, and parks, among others, that neighborhoods with less social-economic wherewithal were more susceptible to the hotspots in the heat island. 

4. There is controversy concerning the relationship of trees to crime.  A statistical analysis was conducted by Austin Troy and colleagues (2012).  They discovered that tree canopy was almost always associated with less crime in Baltimore City and Baltimore County.  They determined that other variables did not confound the general relationship.  However, the exceptional neighborhoods, where trees were in fact associated with higher crime, were those in which volunteer tree vegetation was present on abandoned industrial parcels adjacent to residential areas.

The Urban Stream Dis/Continuum: Patterns and Processes

1 - 2. The results clustered in the right hand panel of the poster focus on streams.  Kaushal and Belt (2012) have proposed a conceptual refinement to the stream continuum concept to apply this widely used comparative tool to urban systems.  They emphasize the role of engineering, and the effects of enhanced connections in hydrological flow paths, along with the effects of disruptions in hydrological flows.  Some of these connections and disconnections are intentional, while others are incidental to the way water is routed.  They present data to show that stream contamination depends on where in this complex dis/continuum a sampling station is located.

3. Detention basins are designed to control the flow of stormwater and reduce the loading of copious rains into storm sewers while continuing to avoid street and structure flooding.  Neil Bettez and Peter Groffman (submitted for publication) have shown that although several kinds of detention structures were engineered to control stormwater, in fact, they are also adaptive for reducing the amount of nitrate in stormwater.  They thus can contribute to improving the water quality downstream.  Some of these engineered structures facilitate enough biological processing of nitrate that they do better than natural riparian zones in the area.

Social and Educational Processes

The bottom center panel contains two examples.  Both deal with information sharing and exchange.

1. Bess Caplan and Alan Berkowitz present a learning progression, to help understand how students ability to use scientific thinking and explanation might develop.  What students bring to the classroom, and their experience with scale, unseen forces, and the use of models beyond simple narratives are all part of the progression.  This concept is helping teachers to improve students' ability to learn scientific concepts and to prepare better for scientific citizenship.

2. Michele Romolini, a doctoral student at the University of Vermont, presents one of her analyses of stewardship organizations in Baltimore.  Dividing the organizations into non-governmental and governmental ones, helps understand the marshaling and sharing of information.  In addition, understanding which organizations are clustered around key institutions that act as information sources, and which are relatively isolated from such nodes, helps ensure the most equitable distribution of environmentally crucial information.

The poster places these results and concepts into a graphical form.  This will be on display throughout the All Scientists Meeting in Colorado during the week of 9 - 13 September 2012.  We hope it gives a little flavor of where BES is going in its third phase, motivated by the pressure of cities to become more sustainable.

Publications

Huang, G., W. Zhou, & M.L. Cadenasso. 2011.  Is everyone hot in the city?: Spatial pattern of land surface temperatures, land cover, and neighborhood socioeconomic characteristics in Baltimore, City, MD.  Jour. Environ. Manage. 92:1753-1759.

Kaushal, S.S. & K.T. Belt. 2012. The urban watershed continuum: evolving spatial and temporal dimensions. Urban Ecosystems 15:409-435

Nowak, D.J. and E.J. Greenfield. 2012. Tree and impervious cover change in U.S. cities. Urban Forestry and Urban Greening. 11:21-30.

Troy, A. J.M. Grove & J. O’Neil-Dunne. 2012. The Relationship between Tree Canopy and Crime Rates across an Urban-Rural Gradient in the Greater Baltimore Region, Lands.  Urban Plann. 106: 262-270.

Zhou, W., G. Huang, S.T.A. Pickett, & M.L. Cadenasso.  2011.  90 years of forest cover change in the urbanizing Gwynns Falls watershed, Baltimore, Maryland: spatial and temporal dynamics.  Landscape Ecology 26:645-659

Interest in Urban Resilience: A Burgeoning Frontier

Resilience is becoming an increasingly important concept in contemporary ecological science.  Since the introduction of the resilience cycle, an open ended, ecological concept has guided the understanding of this important process (http://besdirector.blogspot.com/2011/01/resilience-ecology-evolution-and.html).  Resilience has been a major stimulus for research in socio-ecological systems.  It has been useful in understanding fisheries, and landscapes in which people manage both economic and subsistence resources, for example.  However, most research and thinking about resilience have focused on systems outside of urban areas.

How the resilience concept can be applied in urban areas is a new theoretical and empirical frontier.  This frontier was a major focus within the 2011 Resilience Conference, held from March 11-16 in Tempe, Arizona.  The conference was entitled “Resilience, Innovation, and Sustainability: Navigating the Complexities of Global Change.  This conference brought together several hundred researchers, educators, and policy experts to explore the status and future of resilience research and application.  The conference program, videos and slides from plenary presentations, and some abstracts appear at http://www.resilience2011.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=22&Itemid=26

The Stockholm Resilience Center sponsored a one day workshop prior to the meeting, at which BES was well represented.  Along with researchers from the Resilience Center, the workshop included members of the Central Arizona Phoenix (CAP) LTER, and many representatives of the newly minted Urban Long-Term Ecological Research (ULTRA)-Exploratory projects.  In this workshop the question was how does the concept of resilience as it applies to urban areas relate to the perceived need for adaptive transformation of urban areas, as socio-ecological systems, in response to global changes.

Important concepts and variables, which will prove useful to BES as we put into operation the research themes of BES III, were raised and discussed at the workshop.  The organizers of the workshop, led by Thomas Elmqvist of the Stockholm Resilience Center, Urban Theme, proposed several key topics for evaluation, quoted here (with slight change in footnote numbering):

“Social-ecological resilience: the amount of disturbance a social-ecological system can absorb and still remain within the same state or domain of attraction, and the degree to which the system can build and increase its capacity for learning, adaptation and transformation. Important variables:  (i) enabling high rates of innovations, (ii) maintaining diversity (both social and ecological), (iii) maintaining modularity, (iv) restoring lost ecological functions, (v) tightening feedback loops, (vi) building social capital and address equity, and (vii) building overlap in governance (cf.[i]).

“Social-ecological transformations: long-term, non-linear fundamental change in the ecological, economic, social and infrastructural domains of a social-ecological system. Important variables: (i) access and response to information at different scales, (ii) learn continually, (iii) participate in knowledge networks, (iv) use and restore ecosystems in innovative ways  to reduce vulnerability, (v) engage multiple stakeholders, to benefit from embedded arenas for innovation, (vi) retain and, preferably, increase institutional flexibility (cf.[ii]).”

A further opportunity to interact and share ideas with others concerned with urban resilience was a Panel presentation and discussion, held during the 2011 Resilience Conference proper.  This panel, entitled “Urban transitions – on urban resilience and human-dominated ecosystems,” included presentations by Steward T.A. Pickett – “On Urban Resilience and Transformations – lessons from urban research in North America,” and Henrik Ernstson – “On Urban Resilience and Transformations – lessons from urban research in Europe.”  Pickett’s talk placed the guiding transformation of BES III, that from the sanitary to the sustainable city, in the context of other actual and potential transformations.  The framing document for the panel, authored by Thomas Elmqvist, contrasted resilience in cities with resilience of cities, entailing a contrast of within urban areas to a concern with resilience across broader systems of cities.  In addition, a recurrent issue that arose in discussing improved resilience of cities was the problem that maladaptive infrastructure or governance structures may be “locked in.”  

Morgan Grove, along with several coauthors including Jarlath O’Neil-Dunne, represented BES in the Panel on “An ‘All Lands, All Owners’ Approach: Urban Sustainability, Governance Theory, and Poly-Centric Networks.”  He spoke on the topic of “Causes and consequences of urban stewardship footprints over time: a socio-spatial approach.”  

These activities are just one indication of the excitement of applying resilience to urban systems.  The BES III research theme – from sanitary to sustainable city – is firmly placed on this new frontier of understanding and applying the concept of resilience.  Resilience serves as a crucial set of mechanisms by which sustainability can be achieved, and brings the values motivating sustainability into the realm of testable and measurable variables.

---

[i] Walker B and Salt D. 2006. Resilience Thinking. Island Press.

Ernstson H, S van der Leeuw, CL Redman, DJ Meffert, G Davis, C Alfsen, and T Elmqvist. 2010. Urban Transitions: On Urban Resilience and Human-Dominated Ecosystems. AMBIO Published On-line (DOI: 10.1007/s13280-010-0081-9) 

[ii] Loorbach, D. 2007. Transition Management: New Mode of Governance for Sustainable Development. International Books, Utrecht.

Resilience: Ecology, Evolution, and Engineering

The concept of resilience is key to BES III. This powerful concept is ideal for understanding and working with complex, human ecosystems. However, it is the object of some confusion because there are two contrasting ways to frame and theorize the concept.

Originally, engineering and physical systems were the source of the concept as applied in ecology. Under the equilibrium paradigm predominant at the time, resilience was conceived of as the ability of a system to absorb a shock or deformation and to return to its original, or equilibrium, state. A rubber band is a perfect example of such a system. The loose, floppy form can be stretched repeatedly, and still return to its general band-like shape.

Engineering or equilibrium resilience is the concept used to describe this dynamic. This sort of resilience can be called engineering resilience because it characterizes built structures and infrastructure. Key to this idea is that there is an acceptable, desired, or equilibrium state of the system. Of course, extreme deformation or perhaps consistent strong deformation over time can lead to system failure. The band breaks when stretched too far, or after years of material degradation while encircling a thick wad of forgotten papers in a hot attic.

Equilibrium or engineering resilience may be of value when it is possible to identify a desirable state that is expected to persist over some specified time or at a particular spatial scale. But for many purposes, it is best considered a special case of the concept of resilience. A more inclusive concept suitable to systems that are not at equilibrium, or which are undergoing periodic or constant change is ecological or evolutionary resilience.

Ecological resilience does not ask whether a complex system returns to a previous or equilibrium state. Rather, it asks about the changes that a system can experience and still persist in the same dynamic form. Resilience is about the ability to receive shocks and still stay in the game. Systems that can adapt to change are said to be resilient. This then is an evolutionary kind of concept since adaptation is a central feature. This is in contrast to engineering resilience which is concerned with stability or permanence. So, ecological and evolutionary resilience are concerned with adaptive capacity and adjustment to change, not to return to a stable point. Rather than asking about the ability of a rubber band to return to its unstressed state, evolution asks about the rubber band becoming something else that is better adapted to the new conditions. It is of course silly to think about a simple, physical-chemical system such as a rubber band changing in such a radical way, but evolution, adaptation, learning, and adjustment are familiar capacities of biological and social systems. In other words, they are complex systems that can adapt. Resilience in the more evolutionary sense is the idea that points toward the question of how -- and how well -- a particular system can adapt to changing conditions or sudden shocks that come at unexpected times.

Changing concepts of resilience are relevant to the BES III main theme of Sanitary to Sustainable City. The sanitary city identifies a desired state, and seeks to keep structures or processes at that level. Given that societal and regulatory decisions identify legal or desirable targets for some features people must manage, a classical or engineering definition provides guidance about how to measure success. However, under changing environmental conditions, including social, economic, and environmental alterations, it may be more appropriate to ask about the capacity of the system to adjust to those changes. Recognizing that feedbacks among social, economic, and environmental factors and processes are an unavoidable part of urban ecosystems, this suggests that we learn how to go beyond the engineering resilience concept and understand and use the contemporary concept of ecological or evolutionary resilience.

Here are some references about this contrast and the nature of ecological resilience that are relevant to socio-ecological systems.

Gunderson, L. H. 2000. Ecological resilience - in theory and application. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 31:425-439.

Holling, C. S. 1996. Engineering resilience versus ecological resilience. Pages 31-44 in P. C. Schulze, editor. Engineering within ecological constraints. National Academies of Engineering, Washington, DC.