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Urban Studies and Planning Commons

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Full-Text Articles in Urban Studies and Planning

From Fail-Safe To Safe-To-Fail: Sustainability And Resilience In The New Urban World, Jack F. Ahern Apr 2011

From Fail-Safe To Safe-To-Fail: Sustainability And Resilience In The New Urban World, Jack F. Ahern

Landscape Architecture & Regional Planning Studio and Student Research and Creative Activity

Abstract: The extent to which the 21st Century world will be "sustainable" depends in large part on the sustainability of cities. Early ideas on implementing sustainability focused on concepts of achieving stability, practicing effective management and the control of change and growth-- a "fail-safe" mentality. More recent thinking about change, disturbance, uncertainty, and adaptability is fundamental to the emerging science of resilience, the capacity of systems to reorganize and recover from change and disturbance without changing to other states-- in other words, systems that are "safe to fail." While the concept of resilience is intellectually intriguing, it remains largely unpracticed …


'Learning By Doing': Adaptive Planning As A Strategy To Address Uncertainty In Planning, Sadahisa Kato, Jack F. Ahern Jul 2008

'Learning By Doing': Adaptive Planning As A Strategy To Address Uncertainty In Planning, Sadahisa Kato, Jack F. Ahern

Landscape Architecture & Regional Planning Studio and Student Research and Creative Activity

Adaptive management, an established method in natural resource and ecosystem management, has not been widely applied to landscape planning due to the lack of an operational method that addresses the role of uncertainty and standardized monitoring protocols and methods. A review of adaptive management literature and practices reveals several key concepts and principles for adaptive planning: (1) management actions are best understood and practiced as experiments; (2) several plans/experiments can be implemented simultaneously; (3) monitoring of management actions are key; and (4) adaptive management can be understood as 'learning by doing'. The paper identifies various uncertainties in landscape planning as …