Modeling Urban Futures: Data-Driven Scenarios of Climate Change and Vulnerability in Cities

Cities are complex systems where social, ecological, and technological processes are deeply coupled. This coupling complicates urban planning and land use development, as changing one facet of the urban fabric will likely impact the others. As cities grapple with climate change, there is a growing need to envision urban futures that not only address more frequent and intense severe weather events but also improve day-to-day livability. Here we examine climate risks as functions of the local land use with numerical models. These models leverage a wide array of data sources, from satellite imagery to tax assessments and land cover. We then present a machine-learning cellular automata approach to combine historical land use change with local coproduced urban future scenarios. The cellular automata model uses historical and ancillary data like existing road systems and natural features to develop a set of probabilistic land use change rules, which are then modified according to stakeholder priorities. The resulting land use scenarios are evaluated against historical flood hazards, showcasing how they perform against stakeholder expectations. Our work shows that coproduced scenarios, when grounded with historical and emerging data, can provide paths that increase resilience to weather hazards as well as enhancing ecosystem services provided to citizens.

How We Got Here: Producing Climate Inequity and Vulnerability to Urban Weather Extremes

This collected volume is intentionally future-oriented; it is authored by a team of interdisciplinary scientists and practitioners who collaborate to translate research findings into networked adaptive practices that we hope will protect urban communities against the impacts of extreme weather. While future-oriented, we cannot protect future generations against urban weather extremes without understanding the historical processes through which these existential and ethical crises came about. This chapter describes how economic and political institutions produced the climate crisis in ways that also constitute a humanitarian crisis, inscribing climate inequity into the urban built environment and institutions. It offers reflections on ways in which this history must be wrestled with in the context of equitable and resilient urban futures.

Assessing Future Resilience, Equity, and Sustainability in Scenario Planning

In the absence of strong international agreements, many municipal governments are leading efforts to build resilience to climate change in general and to extreme weather events in particular. However, it is notoriously difficult to guide and activate processes of change in complex adaptive systems such as cities. Participatory scenario planning with city professionals and members of civil society provides an opportunity to coproduce positive visions of the future. Yet, not all visions are created equal. In this chapter, we introduce the Resilience, Equity, and Sustainability Qualitative (RESQ) assessment tool that we have applied to compare positive scenario visions for cities in the USA and Latin America. We use the tool to examine the visions of the two desert cities in the UrbanResilience to Extreme Events Sustainability Research Network (UREx SRN), which are Hermosillo (Mexico) and Phoenix (United States).

Setting the Stage for Co-Production

Participatory scenario visioning aims to expose, integrate, and reconcile perspectives and expectations about a sustainable, resilient future from a variety of actors and stakeholders. This chapter considers the settings in which transdisciplinary participatory visioning takes place, highlighting lessons learned from the Urban Resilience to Extremes Sustainability Research Network (UREx SRN). It reflects on the benefits of engaging in the co-production process and the challenges that must be considered amid this process.

Anticipatory Resilience Bringing Back the Future into Urban Planning and Knowledge Systems

Anticipatory thinking is a critical component in urban planning practices and knowledge systems in an era of unpredictability and conflicting expectations of the future. This chapter introduces “anticipatory resilience” as a futures-oriented knowledge system that intentionally addresses uncertain climate conditions and explores alternative, desirable future states. It suggests a portfolio of tools suitable for building long-term foresight capacity in urban planning. Examples of knowledge systems interventions are presented to explore the trade-offs, constraints, possibilities, and desires of diverse future scenarios co-generated in settings with people that hold different perspectives, knowledge, and expectations.

Visualizing Urban Social–Ecological–Technological Systems

The Urban Systems Lab (USL) Dataviz Platform is an interactive web application to visualize Social, Ecological, and Technological Systems (SETS). This platform is being used to encourage participatory processes, produce new knowledge, and facilitate collaborative analysis within nine Urban Resilience to Weather-related Extremes (UREx) Sustainability Research Network cities. It allows seamless shifts across contexts, scales, and perspectives for analysis within the SETS framework. How is digital space conceptualized for urban analysis and interventions? What is the capacity for reciprocal relationships between digital and physical space? How do we visually understand urban systems and complex spatial relationships? This chapter provides a comprehensive overview of the application stack and the different representational categories embedded in the Dataviz Platform. Offering a common visual language to various stakeholders, we explore new ground as we believe it has the potential to change how we think about, plan, and design our cities. (“Map devices such as a frame, scale, orientation, projection, indexing and naming reveal artificial geographies that remain unavailable to human eyes.” (Corner,.Cosgrove (ed), Mappings, Reaktion Books, London, 1999)

Correction to: Modeling Urban Futures: Data-Driven Scenarios of Climate Change and Vulnerability in Cities

In the original version of the book, the chapter authors of Chapter 9 had missed to include their co-author Dr. Rocio Carrero to the author group unfortunately. The chapter has been updated now with Dr. Rocio Carrero's name and affiliation.

A Framework for Resilient Urban Futures

Resilient urban futures provides a social–ecological–technological systems (SETS) perspective on promoting and understanding resilience. This chapter introduces the concepts, research, and practice of urban resilience from the Urban Resilience to Extremes Sustainability Research Network (UREx SRN). It describes conceptual and methodological approaches to address how cities experience extreme weather events, adapt to climate resilience challenges, and can transform toward sustainable and equitable futures.

Social, Ecological, and Technological Strategies for Climate Adaptation

Resilient cities are able to persist, grow, and even transform while keeping their essential identities in the face of external forces like climatechange, which threatens lives, livelihoods, and the structures and processes of the urban environment (United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, How to make cities more resilient: a handbook for local government leaders. Switzerland, Geneva, 2017). Scenario development is a novel approach to visioning resilient futures for cities. As an instrument for synthesizing data and envisioning urban futures, scenarios combine diverse datasets such as biophysical models, stakeholder perspectives, and demographic information (Carpenter et al. Ecol Soc 20:10, 2015). As a tool to envision alternative futures, participatoryscenario development explores, identifies, and evaluates potential outcomes and tradeoffs associated with the management of social–ecological change, incorporating multiple stakeholder’s collaborative subjectivity (Galafassi et al. Ecol Soc 22:2, 2017). Understanding the current landscape of city planning and governance approaches is important in developing city-specific scenarios. In particular, assessing municipal planning strategies through the lens of interactive social–ecological–technological systems (SETS) provides useful insight into the dynamics and interrelationships of these coupled systems (da Silva et al. Sustain Dev 4(2):125–145, 2012). An assessment of existing municipal strategies can also be used to inform future adaptation scenarios and strategic plans addressing extreme weather events. With the scenario development process guiding stakeholders in generating goals and visions through participatory workshops, the content analysis of governance planning documents from the SETS perspective provides key insight on specific strategies that have been considered (or overlooked) in cities. In this chapter, we (a) demonstrate an approach to examine how cities define and prioritize climate adaptation strategies in their governance planning documents, (b) examine how governance strategies address current and future climate vulnerabilities as exemplified by nine cities in North and Latin America where we conducted a content analysis of municipal planning documents, and (c) suggest a codebook to explore the diverse SETS strategies proposed to address climate challenges—specifically related to extreme weather events such as heat, drought, and flooding.

A Vision for Resilient Urban Futures

A fundamental systems approach is essential to advancing our understanding of how to address critical challenges caused by the intersection of urbanization and climate change. The social–ecological–technological systems (SETS) conceptual framework brings forward a systems perspective that considers the reality of cities as complex systems and provides a baseline for developing a science of, and practice for, cities. Given the urgency of issues we collectively face to improve livability, justice, sustainability, and resilience in cities, bringing a systems approach to resilience planning and policymaking is critical, as is development of positive visions and scenarios that can provide more realistic and systemic solutions. We provide a vision for more resilient urban futures that learns from coproduced scenario development work in nine US and Latin American cities in the URExSRN. We find that developing an urban systems science that can provide actionable knowledge for decision-making is an emerging, and much needed, transdisciplinary research agenda. It will require true boundary-crossing to bring the knowledge, skills, tools, and ideas together in ways that can help achieve the normative goals and visions we have for our shared urban future.