Integrating Urban Resilience Systems – The SETS Approach

The concept of resilience has been evolving as a way to address the current and future challenges cities face from a changing climate. Social, ecological, and technological domains with different but intersecting perspectives underlie the concept of resilience. Understanding how to accommodate these perspectives is critical to maintaining or even re-envisioning urban environments that can persist through extreme weather events and longer-term shifts in climate, while maintaining quality of life and ensuring equal access to the benefits or the protection from harm for all segments of the population. In two earlier webinars, Arizona State University lead discussions of pair of systems to frame urban resilience. In reality the systems operate independently so all three, social, ecological and technological, need to be addressed together to select actions that improve resiliency and minimize unintended consequences. In this third session in the series, ASU faculty and other leaders examine the SETS approach to do this. The concept of resilience has been evolving as a way to address the current and future challenges cities face from a changing climate. Social, ecological, and technological domains with different but intersecting perspectives underlie the concept of resilience. Understanding how to accommodate these perspectives is critical to maintaining or even re-envisioning urban environments that can persist through extreme weather events and longer-term shifts in climate, while maintaining quality of life and ensuring equal access to the benefits or the protection from harm for all segments of the population.