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Mitigating Risks of Event Avalanches Caused by Climate Change – Lessons for Sustainable Urban Design

This paper originally presented to the Complex Systems Society, and subsequently published by Springer, reports on the author’s own computational experiments to determine the propagation characteristics of densely and sparsely connected networks. It subsequently interprets the results of the experiments in the context of urban environments, investigating the implications for urban design.

Work considers the development of human society where technological, economic and financial systems, coupled with population growth, have resulted in high interconnectivity between individual and corporate entities. These entities form networks of co-dependent agents, which operate under critical connectivity. Thus the increased frequency of extreme events, (heat waves, droughts, floods and hurricanes) can easily set off ‘event avalanches’ that propagate throughout these networks. This work looks into the event propagation characteristics of production and consumption networks and how these characteristics can be designed and managed so as to prevent such extreme events from becoming event avalanches that sweep through the network and result in considerable human and material costs.

The work is highly original and relevant for informing the urban design process on measures for dealing with extreme events, eg dealing with natural disaster events caused by climate change, and events caused by human conflict. The approaches developed can help to pre-empt network-wide damaging events by changing the connectivity of an urban system from undesirable densely -connected to desirable sparsely-connected, and by designing local facilities that enable the change of connectivity.

Work is a consolidation of the author’s research into emergent, bottom up, modeling methods, systems approaches, complexity and their application to urban design, aspects not previously explored in the field of urban design.