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Abstract Traditional infrastructure adaptation to extreme weather events (and now climate change) has typically been techno‐centric and heavily grounded in robustness—the capacity to prevent or minimize disruptions via a risk‐based approach that emphasizes control, armoring, and strengthening (e.g., raising the height of levees). However, climate and nonclimate challenges facing infrastructure are not purely technological. Ecological and social systems also warrant consideration to manage issues of overconfidence, inflexibility, interdependence, and resource utilization—among others. As a result, techno‐centric adaptation strategies can result in unwanted tradeoffs, unintended consequences, and underaddressed vulnerabilities. Techno‐centric strategies thatlock‐intoday's infrastructure systems to vulnerable future design, management, and regulatory practices may be particularly problematic by exacerbating these ecological and social issues rather than ameliorating them. Given these challenges, we develop a conceptual model and infrastructure adaptation case studies to argue the following: (1) infrastructure systems are not simply technological and should be understood as complex and interconnected social, ecological, and technological systems (SETSs); (2) infrastructure challenges, like lock‐in, stem from SETS interactions that are often overlooked and underappreciated; (3) framing infrastructure with aSETS lenscan help identify and prevent maladaptive issues like lock‐in; and (4) a SETS lens can also highlight effective infrastructure adaptation strategies that may not traditionally be considered. Ultimately, we find that treating infrastructure as SETS shows promise for increasing the adaptive capacity of infrastructure systems by highlighting how lock‐in and vulnerabilities evolve and how multidisciplinary strategies can be deployed to address these challenges by broadening the options for adaptation.
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The Eco-Techno Spectrum: Exploring Knowledge Systems’ Challenges in Green Infrastructure Management
Infrastructure crises are not only technical problems for engineers to solve—they also present social, ecological, financial, and political challenges. Addressing infrastructure problems thus requires a robust planning process that includes examination of the social and ecological systems supporting infrastructure, alongside technical systems. An integrative Social, Ecological, and Technological Systems (SETS) analysis of infrastructure solutions can complement the planning process by revealing potential trade-offs that are often overlooked in standard procedures. We explore the interconnected SETS of the infrastructure problem in the US through comparative case studies of green infrastructure (GI) development in Portland and Baltimore. Currently a popular infrastructure solution to a wide variety of urban ills, GI is the use and mimicry of ecological components (e.g., plants) to perform municipal services (e.g., stormwater management). We develop the ecological-technological spectrum—or ‘eco-techno spectrum’—as a framing tool to bridge all three SETS dimensions. The eco-techno spectrum becomes a platform to explore the institutional knowledge system dynamics of GI development where social dimensions are organized across ecological and technological aspects of GI, exposing how governance differs across specific forms of ecological and technological hybridity. In this study, we highlight the knowledge system challenges of urban planning institutions as a key consideration in the realization of innovative infrastructure crisis ‘fixes.’ Disconnected definition and measurement of GI emerge as two distinct challenges across the knowledge systems examined. By revealing and discussing these challenges, we can begin to recognize—and better plan for—gaps in municipal planning knowledge systems, promoting decisions that address the roots of infrastructure crises rather than treating only their symptoms.
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- PAR ID:
- 10251378
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Urban Planning
- Volume:
- 6
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 2183-7635
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 49 to 62
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.17645/up.v6i1.3491
