Publications

Extreme weather-related events are showing how infrastructure disruptions in hinterlands can affect cities. This paper explores the risks to city infrastructure services including transportation, electricity, communication, fuel supply, water distribution, stormwater drainage, and food supply from hinterland hazards of fire, precipitation, post-fire debris flow, smoke, and flooding. There is a large and growing body of research that describes the vulnerabilities of infrastructures to climate hazards, yet this work has not systematically acknowledged the relationships and cross-governance challenges of protecting cities from remote disruptions. An evidence base is developed through a structured literature review that identifies city infrastructure vulnerabilities to hinterland hazards. Findings highlight diverse pathways from the initial hazard to the final impact on an infrastructure, demonstrating that impacts to hinterland infrastructure assets from hazards can cascade to city infrastructure. Beyond the value of describing the impact of hinterland hazards on urban infrastructure, the identified pathways can assist in informing cross-governance mitigation strategies. It may be the case that to protect cities, local governments invest in mitigating hazards in their hinterlands and supply chains.

Faced with destabilizing conditions in the Anthropocene, infrastructure resilience modeling remains challenged to confront increasingly complex conditions toward quickly and meaningfully advancing adaptation. Data gaps, increasingly interconnected systems, and accurate behavior estimation (across scales and as both gradual and cascading failure) remain challenges for infrastructure modelers. Yet novel approaches are emerging – largely independently – that, if brought together, offer significant opportunities for rapidly advancing how we understand vulnerabilities and surgically invest in resilience. Of particular promise are interdependency modeling, cascading failure modeling, and synthetic network generation. We describe a framework for integrating these three domains toward an integrated modeling framework to estimate infrastructure networks where no data exist, connect infrastructure to establish interdependencies, assess the vulnerabilities of these interconnected infrastructure to hazards, and simulate how failures may propagate across systems. We draw from the literature as an evidence base, provide a conceptual structure for implementation, and conclude by discussing the significance of such a framework and the critical tools it may provide to infrastructure researchers and managers

As infrastructure confront rapidly changing environments, there is an immediate need to provide the flexibility to pivot resources and how infrastructures are prioritized. Yet infrastructures are often categorized based on static criticality framings. We describe dynamic criticality as the flexibility and reprioritization of infrastructure and resources during disturbances. We find that the most important prerequisite for dynamic criticality is organizational adaptive capacity through resilience in goals, structures, sensemaking, and strategies. Dynamic capabilities are increasingly important in the Anthropocene, where accelerating conditions, uncertainty, and growing complexity are challenging infrastructures. We review sectors that deployed dynamic management approaches amidst changing disturbances: leadership and organizational change, defense, medicine, manufacturing, and disaster response. We use an inductive thematic analysis to identify key themes and competencies and analyze capabilities that describe dynamic criticality. These competencies drive adaptive capacity and open up the flexibility to pivot what is deemed critical, depending on the particulars of the hazard. We map these competencies to infrastructure systems and describe how infrastructure organizations may build adaptive capacity toward flexible priorities. 

Infrastructure – engineered systems that provide basic and critical services – are often viewed as rigid technologies and services. Many infrastructure services are critical to the functioning of society, during periods of stability and instability. The defining of critical infrastructure services drives how emergency resources are allocated and which technologies and processes are prioritized when disruptions occur. As the environments in which infrastructure operate become increasingly complex, instability will grow. As disruptions occur and their nature changes, there must be flexibility in which infrastructure services are deemed critical. A static framing of critical infrastructure is problematic against a backdrop of growing complexity. We hypothesize that there are contextually appropriate management methods necessary to inform proper responses from infrastructure managers as the environment shifts between stability and instability. Yet there remains a dearth of work on how infrastructure management should pivot priorities. We review domains that have shown capabilities to deploy dynamic management approaches in the face of changing disturbances: disaster Response, leadership and organizational change, manufacturing, medical triage, and military and defense. From these domains, we use a qualitative inductive coding approach to identify key themes and categories and analyze capabilities that describe the flexibility to pivot focus and resources with environmental change. We then describe how infrastructure can adopt dynamic management approaches according to environmental context and how the requisite complexity can inspire a dynamic framing for infrastructure managers which may aid in the avoidance of continued lock-in and service failures. 

Efficiency (i.e. optimized use of resources) and resilience principles (i.e. redundancy, diversity, etc.) are often at odds with one another. Despite being particularly acute within infrastructure systems, this tension appears to be under-explored. However, recent advances in ecological and social sciences provide some novel insights into navigating efficiency–resilience trade-offs. Overall, efficiency and resilience are both vital for a system’s longevity and striking a dynamic balance between the two appears to be crucial. Striking this balance in infrastructure systems can be catalyzed by the treatment of resilience as a public good, as well as incorporating exploratory models and stakeholder coproduction in the design and implementation process. Ultimately, the dynamic balance between efficiency and resilience can play a central role in our infrastructure’s ability to successfully operate in environments that increasingly fluctuate between stable and unstable conditions.

As the rehabilitation of infrastructure is outpaced by changes in the profile, frequency, and intensity of extreme weather events, infrastructure’s service disruptions and failures become increasingly likely. Safe-to-fail approaches for infrastructure planning and design improve the capacity of cities to adapt for uncertain climate futures by identifying social, ecological, and technological systems (SETS) capabilities to prepare for potential failure scenarios. In this paper, we argue for transforming infrastructure planning and design to effectively utilize safe-to-fail approaches by navigating the opportunities and trade-offs of SETS resilience capabilities. From a technological vantage point, traditional infrastructure planning approaches account for social and ecological domains as external design conditions rather than embedded system characteristics. Safe-to-fail approaches directly challenge the isolation of the technological domain by necessitating a recognition that SETS domains are interconnected and interdependent in infrastructure systems, as such risks and system capabilities for resilience must be managed cohesively.

As the rehabilitation of infrastructure is outpaced by changes in the profile, frequency, and intensity of extreme weather events, infrastructure’s service disruptions and failures become increasingly likely. Safe-to-fail approaches for infrastructure planning and design improve the capacity of cities to adapt for uncertain climate futures by identifying social, ecological, and technological systems (SETS) capabilities to prepare for potential failure scenarios. In this paper, we argue for transforming infrastructure planning and design to effectively utilize safe-to-fail approaches by navigating the opportunities and trade-offs of SETS resilience capabilities. From a technological vantage point, traditional infrastructure planning approaches account for social and ecological domains as external design conditions rather than embedded system characteristics. Safe-to-fail approaches directly challenge the isolation of the technological domain by necessitating a recognition that SETS domains are interconnected and interdependent in infrastructure systems, as such risks and system capabilities for resilience must be managed cohesively.

As the rehabilitation of infrastructure is outpaced by changes in the profile, frequency, and intensity of extreme weather events, infrastructure’s service disruptions and failures become increasingly likely. Safe-to-fail approaches for infrastructure planning and design improve the capacity of cities to adapt for uncertain climate futures by identifying social, ecological, and technological systems (SETS) capabilities to prepare for potential failure scenarios. In this paper, we argue for transforming infrastructure planning and design to effectively utilize safe-to-fail approaches by navigating the opportunities and trade-offs of SETS resilience capabilities. From a technological vantage point, traditional infrastructure planning approaches account for social and ecological domains as external design conditions rather than embedded system characteristics. Safe-to-fail approaches directly challenge the isolation of the technological domain by necessitating a recognition that SETS domains are interconnected and interdependent in infrastructure systems, as such risks and system capabilities for resilience must be managed cohesively.