Using desirable urban states to understand key linkages between resilience subsystems

Abstract

Interdisciplinary research is called for to model integrated urban resilience across separate urban subsystems (infrastructure, governance, resources, socio-economic), and for chartering pathways toward an urban ‘desirable state’. A core challenge is to determine the linkages between the subsystems. In this work, we demonstrate a novel approach by first constructing profiles of a desirable state, based on human shared values obtained empirically, and then use those to identify linkages naturally occurring between associated subsystems. We demonstrate the approach in two contrasting cities, Shanghai and Vienna, using WeValue InSitu methods to crystallize shared values and explore perspectives of urban disruption. The Desirable States of both cities provide elements with intrinsic strong linkages between urban subsystems, which can be represented with system dynamics mapping. These results reveal that this values-based approach contributes to modeling and studies of integrated urban resilience, for theory building and for applications.