Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Interdependent Infrastructure As Linked Social, Ecological, And Technological Systems (Setss) To Address Lock-In And Enhance Resilience, Samuel A. Markolf, Mikhail Chester, Daniel A. Eisenberg, David Iwaniec, Cliff I. Davidson, Rae Zimmerman, Thaddeus R. Miller, Benjamin Ruddell, Heejun Chang

Geography Faculty Publications and Presentations

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 that lock-in today’s infrastructure systems to vulnerable future design, management, and …

Utrecht, Bike Capital Of The World, Martijn Rietbergen

PSU Transportation Seminars

Utrecht is a bustling, bicycle-friendly city in the Netherlands. Every day, between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m., over 125,000 cyclists ride to their work, school, university, public transport, shops or home through the city centre.

The municipality wants to make cycling even more attractive for these and other cyclists. Consequently, the bicycle is given precedence in the mobility policy of the municipality of Utrecht. We want to be the most bike-friendly city in the world. We want to keep our growing city livable, accessible and economically strong, and we are convinced that the bicycle can and should play a major …