As climate disasters mount, there is an urgent need to develop novel, transformative strategies to reduce vulnerability and enhance urban resilience. This research explores how new climate realities impact future urban systems and shared, local stakeholder visions of future resilience, sustainability, and justice.

Key methods and analyses include: 1) participatory future scenario development and analysis; 2) spatial modeling of future urban biophysical systems, social structures, and technological infrastructure; 3) multi-criteria assessment of co-produced scenarios and resilience outcomes; 4) comparative analysis across different scales and cities; and 5) visualizations through interactive communication tools.

Co-produced envisioned urban futures, developed from this research, serve as complements and alternatives to existing approaches to forecasts of social, ecological, and technological change. A primary goal of this research will be to produce a) a general framework that can be applied in diverse urban contexts, b) develop and model a suite of future scenarios explicitly featuring social-ecological-technological systems characteristics of future cities that will be made available to the research-practice community, and c) promote transformative pathways to guide new urban policy and planning for resilience in the face of future events.

Affiliated institutions:

• Arizona State University
• UREx SRN

Funders: National Science Foundation