Knowledge Systems, Forest Management, and Urban Infrastructure Resilience

• In Event: Greening Infrastructure Studies

Abstract

Increasingly, cities and regions are focused on strategies for improving their long-term resilience to climate change. This entails, among other important tasks, understanding and developing effective responses to evolving, long-term risks from extreme events to diverse infrastructural systems, including especially energy systems and their complex linkages to other infrastructures. In this paper, we argue that the challenge of increasing urban and regional infrastructure resilience is, in significant part, a problem of knowledge systems, defined as the social and institutional practices through which diverse organizations create, evaluate, communicate, and apply knowledge. In particular, we suggest that key knowledge capacities for organizations pursuing resilience are their abilities to monitor and observe, anticipate changes in, develop adaptive strategies for, and learn from experiences regarding socio-eco-technical systems, i.e., complex infrastructure assemblages and their networked relationships to ecological contexts on which social systems and services depend. We illustrate this through a case study of forest management in Arizona, where the resilience of energy and water infrastructure services are tightly connected. In particular, a complex threat, the pathological combination of chronic droughts and the engineering resilience perspective—bouncing back to a steady state, ‘thickness’—jeopardizes urban resilience while intensifying risks of wildfires, turbid water resources, and electricity outage. This paper investigates how the knowledge recognition of climate change, the anticipation of wildfire risks, and learning experience from the Four Forest Restoration Initiative (4FRI) in Northern Arizona have adapted institutions for forest management from dense to healthy (or thin) forests, which contributes to urban resilience.

Author

• Changdeok Gim, Arizona State University