Infrastructure Complexity welcomes submissions to the new thematic series on Urban resilience – managing black swans and extreme events.
Hurricane Katrina (2005) devastated New Orleans thereby revealing inherent vulnerabilities that resided in the socio/political/ecological/technical infrastructure (system) of the city and the nation. The event highlighted the ‘…city’s fragile physical environment, aging infrastructure, and declining economic and social structure’ (Comfort, 2006:1). Comfort (2006:2) asks the question ‘…Was the damage in New Orleans due to Hurricane Katrina, or was it some combination of human and technical factors that failed under the stress of the hurricane?’ Similarly, events such as Hurricane Sandy (2012) and the Alberta Floods (2013) resulted in devastating effects to the New York City region and the Province of Alberta respectively.
These events challenge our notions of resilient infrastructures and highlight the ‘wickedness’ of the problem not so much in the magnitude of the storm but on the sensitivity and vulnerability of the complex social-ecological system. The case study of Hurricane Katrina as described by Comfort (2006:7) highlights ‘…serious failures in policy, planning, and practice at all four levels of government—municipal, parish, state, and federal—in reference to a city exposed to known hazards’. Interconnectedness is a fundamental trait of systems and urban centers. The hallmark of system thinking is that it focuses on the connections and relationships, more than the components themselves. As a process, systems thinking recognizes the requirement to assess the system within its environment and context (Senge, 2006). Engineers, planners, ecologists and social scientists have taken advantage of systems thinking to better understand complex systems from ecosystems to organizational systems to urban and community systems. This includes understanding how systems respond to external perturbations, stemming from a natural hazard or economic recession, and what are the critical structural and functional elements that are necessary for resilience and sustainability.
The aim of this special topic is to probe the question: How can systems thinking enable us to design, build, and renovate urban centers (structurally and functionally) to be more resilient? In social–ecological systems theory, resilience is the capacity of the system to continually change and adapt and yet remain within critical thresholds.
Potential topics include, but are not limited to:
- Coping with uncertainty
- Socio-ecological, socio-technical disasters
- Climate change
- Black swans
- Vulnerability analysis
- Policy, governance, performance evaluation, indicators and the resilience agenda
- Wicked problems and the urban domain
Submission instructions:
Before submitting your manuscript, please ensure you have carefully read the Instructions for Authors for Infrastructure Complexity. The complete manuscript should be submitted through the Infrastructure Complexity submission system. To ensure that you submit to the correct thematic series please select the appropriate section in the drop-down menu upon submission. In addition, indicate within your cover letter that you wish your manuscript to be considered as part of the Thematic Series on Urban resilience – managing black swans and extreme events. All submissions will undergo rigorous peer review and accepted articles will be published within the journal as a collection.
Lead guest editor:
Anthony Masys, York University, Canada
Submissions will also benefit from the usual benefits of open access publication:
- Rapid publication: Online submission, electronic peer review and production make the process of publishing your article simple and efficient
- High visibility and international readership in your field: Open access publication ensures high visibility and maximum exposure for your work - anyone with online access can read your article
- No space constraints: Publishing online means unlimited space for figures, extensive data and video footage
- Authors retain copyright, licensing the article under a Creative Commons license: articles can be freely redistributed and reused as long as the article is correctly attributed
For editorial enquiries please contact editorial@infrastructure-complexity.com
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