Knowledge Systems for Urban Resilience
Location: Japanese Room, Level 4, Melbourne School of Design.
The Urban Resilience to Extremes Sustainability Research Network (Urban Resilience SRN) aims to understand how urban infrastructures are resilient or vulnerable to extreme climate and weather related events and collaborate with practitioners to advance more resilient policy and planning. This presentation will focus on the institutional challenges climate change poses for cities looking to increase the resilience of their communities and infrastructure systems. Those challenges require that organisations rethink their knowledge systems - the sets of institutional processes for generating, processing, communicating, and applying knowledge to decisions and action. These concepts and standards have driven infrastructure planning and design for over a century but increasingly need updating to a more dynamic way of knowing and designing for urban resilience.
Thaddeus Miller is an Assistant Professor at the School for the Future of Innovation in Society and The Polytechnic School at Arizona State University. His research explores how sustainability is interpreted, contested, materialized and settled in science and technology policy and infrastructure design. He is on the Executive Management Team for the National Science Foundation funded Urban Resilience to Extremes Sustainability Research Network, and co-PI of the NSF-funded STIR Cities project. His recent book, Reconstructing Sustainability Science: Knowledge and Action for a Sustainable Future, part of the Earthscan Routledge Science in Society Series, examines how scientists can navigate epistemic and normative tensions to link knowledge to social action.