Future Options Redundancy Planning: Designing Multiple Pathways to Resilience in Urban and Landscape Systems Facing Complex Change

Abstract

Urban systems include complex interactions and interdependencies with adjoining landscapes and regions. The pressures of change are complex, constant, and increasing. Declining biodiversity, ecosystem function, social institutions, and climate change underwrite serious sustainability challenges across urban, peri-urban, and ‘natural’ landscapes. Urban and other human ‘development’ often results in environmental damage that drives the need for ecological regeneration and restoration. Integration of interdisciplinary urban sciences and landscape sciences can guide the design of regenerative pathways and nature-positive sustainability. Social perceptions, however, tend to promote a cast-back view that favors the old ‘locked-in’ policy that attempts to restore ‘what was’ the former environment or ecosystem. Often, however, these are no longer suitable to the circumstances and future pressures of change. If urban design and planning disciplines are to help society anticipate change, we need to move from primarily deterministic approaches to those that probabilistically explore trajectories to future landscapes. Urban science and landscape design can now provide future regenerative capacity for resilient and continuous adaptation. Ongoing sustainability requires urban and landscape designs that provide ongoing anticipatory, restorative, nature-positive capacity in the context of future change and pressures. Complexity, connectivity, and redundancy are important system attributes of social-ecological systems creating adaptive capabilities. A diversity of plausible future social-ecological system responses provide several response options and redundancy, with multiple pathways to alternative sustainable futures, enhancing our adaptive capacity. A diversity of feasible responses increases the likelihood of sustaining ecological processes under changing conditions. We propose Future Options Redundancy (FOR) plans as a useful tool for nature-positive design. FOR plans are a variety of possible pathways and alternative futures defined using the characteristics of a social-ecological landscape context. Foresight design capabilities recognize in advance, the accumulating circumstances, along with policy and design opportunities for social-ecological system transformation options in urban-landscape spaces, that are nature-positive—the mark of a sustainable regenerative society.