 Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Circular Metabolism podcast. I'm your host, Aristide from Metabolism of Cities. In this podcast, we interview thinkers, researchers, policymakers, and practitioners to better understand the metabolism of our cities and how to reduce their environmental impact in a socially just and context-specific way. In this new episode, I want to explore a concept that has been extremely popular over the last decade or so in the fields of research, practice, and policy, especially in urban areas. And I think it was even more present during this current pandemic, of course. However, as we will discover later in this episode, there is a lot of fuzziness around this topic, but there are a lot of stakes. So we need a clear definition, and we need to better define it in order to better implement it. The concept that I'm referring to is urban resilience. And to talk about it, I'm very lucky to have Sara Miro, which is, I hope I'm pronouncing your last name correctly. Sara Miro, yeah, you're right. Who has wrote many articles on the topic, and she is an assistant professor at the Arizona State University, which has actually a lot of great researchers over there, and is an interdisciplinary social ecological system scientist that works at the intersection between urban geography and planning. And you really work on trying to understand what is urban resilience and making cities more resilient. And we have many outward shocks, such as climate change, social change, or social challenges, and environmental challenges. And so what is, I think, very interesting is that you work both on the theory side, but also on the practical side of how to implement urban resilience. And I hope we're going to discuss with some concrete examples as well. So with all that being said, Sara, thanks a lot for taking the time for this episode. And yeah, could you perhaps give a short intro of who you are or what you're doing in your research terms? So yeah, as you mentioned, I'm an assistant professor in the School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning at Arizona State University. I'm also affiliated, so I'm a senior sustainability scientist in the Global Institute of Sustainability and Innovation at ASU. And I also am an affiliate and member of the Urban Climate Research Center as well, and then do work with a lot of different folks. Yeah, I'm really a very interdisciplinary scholar. My PhD is from an interdisciplinary school as well as actually my master's was also an interdisciplinary program. But I do generally work at the intersections of urban planning and geography, I would say, is where I most closely align myself. And yeah, my work really is focused on how we can make cities more resilient, particularly in the face of climate change, but also other hazards and how we can do this in a way that's also still sustainable and also just. So trying to think about how we can manage those different goals and where there are potentially trade-offs between them. So in general, I would say my research to date has mostly focused on sort of three areas. So first of those, and I'm guessing what we'll talk a lot about today is conceptualizations of urban resilience, really in sort of theory, but also in practice. I also do work on really on planning for urban resilience in a changing climate, and particularly thinking about it, how we plan for urban resilience to sort of specific hazards as well. And then finally, thinking about green infrastructure as one increasingly popular strategy for enhancing social ecological resilience and how we can plan this again in a way that is maybe more strategic and also tries to think about how we can sort of maximize different social and ecological benefits. I'd also do it in a way that is just right. Yeah, there's always this last sentence, which of course we're going to discuss it later makes a huge difference because if we don't add it, then well, anyhow. What is interesting is that I think you're not an urban planner from by training, right? So you did political sciences and international development studies, right? So how did you really arrive to this topic or resilience, urban planning, and all of that? Yeah, that's a great question of so I yeah. So in my bachelor's, I really didn't know anything about urban planning was not really exposed to it. I did my undergraduate in political science and history, also like a minor in anthropology. So I was really thinking a lot about different social sciences and really interested in those. I was already interested in environmental issues and particularly the connections between environmental issues, natural resources, and politics and governance. So I was thinking about those things, but not really particularly in an urban context. And actually where I really got exposed to urban planning and started to think about it, as well as geography actually, was in my master's. So I did my master's in international development studies at the University of Amsterdam. And that was a department that was the Department of Geography, Urban Planning, and International Development. And so in many ways, that was really where I was first introduced these ideas. I went into the master's actually thinking that I would focus on development studies and not necessarily specifically focused on sustainable development. But as I took more classes, I became increasingly focused on that and decided that was really what I was most interested in. And actually, that was also where I was first exposed to the concept of resilience. So two of my professors in the program had basically gave an elective that was on resilience. And they were trying to think about what urban resilience would mean from a governance perspective. And this was back in 2009. So this is pretty early in the urban resilience world, I would say, when the urban resilience agenda was just sort of starting to take off, but it's really not very big at that point. And so yeah, it really resonated with me. And I thought it was a really interesting perspective and theory and approach. And so I actually did my master's thesis research thinking about renewable energy policies in Thailand and thinking about how they would relate to resilience, taking sort of theorized characteristics of resilience and trying to apply those thinking about these policies and how they affected both the physical system and governance. And I think in some ways, that's what I've been trying to do kind of since then is thinking about, OK, how do we combine thinking about physical infrastructure in cities as well as a social infrastructure and governance and how do those relate with each other and how do we ultimately work to enhance resilience of both? And I think that's one of the things that's really interesting about resilience as an agenda is an approach that it really is applied to both. We think we apply resilience thinking to physical infrastructure, but we also apply it to ecosystems as well. So ecological infrastructure, physical infrastructure, built infrastructure, and then governance and how we really manage these ecological or physical systems and then how they're all connected. Yeah, super interesting. Well, of course, I'm also asking because it's very similar. I arrived to urban metabolism in a very similar fashion. There is no, let's say, bachelor in that topic or there's no masters in that topic. So you kind of arrive from different directions. And I'm always curious, what is the baggage of a person behind it, right? I mean, it tells a lot when you understand, like, oh, OK, that's interesting that that person kind of has this twist on urban resilience. So perhaps you doing anthropology might have a very severe implications on you being so interested into the just element, right? Or to international development while focusing on the entire word and the hinterland ramifications and all of that. So yeah, I'm generally quite interested to know what does that bring to the conversation, and especially in these also hybrid topics or interdisciplinary topics such as resilience. Because as you said, I can imagine this is a very, well, there is no one discipline really to approach resilience, is there? No, absolutely not, right? I think actually, I think that's one of the, in many ways, one of the biggest selling points of resilience is that it really, I do think it really does act in this way sort of as a boundary object, bringing together different disciplines, different agendas, right? I mean, the fact that you have people who are really focused on, you know, say terrorism, right? And dealing with that in a city planning for that, talking with urban ecologists or reading each other's papers, right, that I think that's really interesting and unique. And I think it does open up opportunities for discussion and potentially even new ways of new policies and different planning approaches that maybe wouldn't otherwise be there. So I do think that interdisciplinary aspect is really important. And that was something that when I went to do my PhD, that was what I was really interested in that, right? I, one of the reasons I ended up going to the University of Michigan into the, you know, interdisciplinary environmental school there was because I liked that fact that I could draw on different disciplines, I could have different, you know, take different courses and everyone there was really open to interdisciplinary. And that's actually another thing that I really like about Arizona State University is that that is something that is really, you know, woven through the entire university fabric is an emphasis on interdisciplinarity and collaboration. And I just think when we talk about these issues of urban resilience or urban sustainability, you have to be thinking in interdisciplinary ways. You know, obviously we need people who really dig in deep to a particular topic and issue, but we also need people who think across systems and, you know, are making those linkages. And I think we end up, a lot of our problems are because we, you know, have very siloed thinking sometimes, right? And so I think we have to break some of those boundaries down. Yeah, yeah, of course. So perhaps for the people who are listening and watching, so urban resilience, let's go through it. So whenever I hear resilience, the definition I have in mind and I don't know where I've heard it or read it, but it's, you know, the capacity to absorb an external shock, let's say, or an external event or to come back to the initial state or something like that after a shock. But I wrote, I read the, sorry, your paper on the definitions on urban resilience. And of course there are just so many others and so you kind of scrutinized all of the definitions that exists from the Seminole paper of Hollings and we'll get back to that because unfortunately I haven't read it yet. So I'm curious to know what was there until I think 2014 or 2015. So perhaps can you share a bit this experience of scrutinizing these definitions and what do they tell us or how do they help us understand what is urban resilience? Yeah, no. So yeah, so for this paper we really reviewed, right? We did sort of a systematic literature review of the literature at the time which was a lot smaller than it is today. Yeah, of course. But in 2015 of urban resilience and we then pulled out these definitions and we also looked more broadly and what we found was that there were these sort of what we called theoretical or conceptual tensions, right? In the resilience literature and we looked specifically at whether the 25 different definitions that we found in the literature, how they sort of fell along these tensions, right? And so the six tensions were first, how they were thinking about what a city is and what we found for example that many of the studies of urban resilience actually never define what they mean by urban, right? And we know that this is an incredibly contested concept and lots of people have theorized what is urban, what's not what is the city, right? Is it, for example, a network of flows, right? Or is it a system that has boundaries? How is it connected again to the hinterlands? All of these different aspects, what is it made up of? And yeah, and just a lot of the definitions didn't really specify, right? In the broader resilience literature there's a lot of focus on this idea of complex adaptive systems. It's really coming more from the social ecological or ecological resilience literature. And yeah, I mean, there was often a mention, discussion that cities are examples of or maybe even prototypical example of the complex adaptive system, right? But yeah, how was this discussed and elaborated? So that was one tension. And we actually tried to, with creating a new definition, tried to specifically take a stand on each of these tensions, right? So for example, we tried to develop a conceptual sort of schematic of what would be the different systems and elements of a city that you would need to think of if you say wanted to develop a really comprehensive resilience plan or set of policies. And so we sort of said, well, cities, we think are complex, again, complex adaptive systems, they include social, ecological and technical components, right? And we sort of divided these into governance networks, increasingly really globalized material and energy resource flow. So again, recognizing that it's kind of artificial to just put a boundary around a city and say, you're gonna focus on the resilience of that city, right? Because they are inherently connected through flows of information, resources, people across around the world. There is also urban infrastructure, which we included ecological infrastructure as part of that. And then there's of course really important social and economic dynamics and things like equity and justice, but also capital fit into that. So that was our attempt to try to make some sense of that. And obviously, you could organize those in lots of different ways. But the point is that you would need to again, to really think comprehensively about urban resilience, you would need to take all of those into account and you need to recognize that they're changing and that they really are across, they're going across different scales, which is another I think important sort of point from that you draw from the ecological, socially ecological resilience. So, okay, so that was just one tension, right? There's five others. So we had the second was this idea of whether these systems have a particular equilibrium or whether they have multiple equilibriums. And so then is resilience about returning to that previous equilibrium after some kind of disruption? Because at its core resilience is usually about dealing with change, dealing with disruption, right? Stresses or shocks, that's really what it is about. And I think it's recognizing that those changes and those disruptions are probably to some extent inevitable and that we need to be prepared for change and for disruption and we need to really foster our sort of inherent capacity to deal with that, right? So that to me is really the fundamental point of resilience and yeah. Which can be seen as, I imagine you can also act to change something preemptively or react to it because it's something external. So I can imagine that this equilibrium is both a good thing and a bad thing. Yeah, yeah. And I think so the idea here. So this idea that of resilience and there are different, these different, this gets at some of these different definitions, right? There are still I think a lot of people who are thinking about resilience really as just bouncing back to the previous state, right? So thinking about this, that there is an equilibrium currently and we wanna return to that as quickly as possible, right? What I sometimes call the like bounce back resilience. Then there's others which is coming, and that's more what some people also call engineering resilience, right? That idea of bouncing back or resisting change in the first place. Then there's more of the ecological, this is the traditional hauling kind of definition of resilience which said that, hey, actually there are multiple equilibrium states, equilibria states that systems can be in and it's about maintaining key functions and characteristics in the face of resilience. So it's about how much disruption can it take before it moves into this fundamentally different, also equilibrium state, so multiple equilibrium. And then there's this idea of a sort of socially ecological resilience, sometimes called evolutionary resilience, which says that there's actually no equilibrium, right? And that systems are constantly changing and it's just really about your ability to adapt and learn as a result while keeping those really key functions that you need. And sort of we take the position that resilience, that urban resilience should be more towards this non-equilibrium perspective, because cities are just so dynamic. And that therefore, yeah, but if you take this idea that resilience is sort of not an equilibrium, then you do have to recognize that it's going to incorporate, that it's gonna have sort of this, that you're gonna need to have change in the system, right? That it's not gonna be always about staying the same. And so that's another one of these tensions is about the sort of pathway towards resilience, right? So some would say that resilience is all about, again, like persisting in the same way. That's that idea of bouncing back, right? Or even resistance. Others argue that resilience incorporates that actually achieving or working towards urban resilience incorporates different amounts of change, right? So it could be that it allows for sort of small changes, more incremental things, more of a transitions in there, or it could incorporate transformation, right? And so this is this idea that resilience, and I think we're increasingly seeing more push to shift towards more of this, to allow transformation, right? And to recognize that if resilience is going to be a positive goal for our cities, right? Something that we want to work towards if it's gonna be normative, and that we have seen, what we found was that in the urban resilience literature, no one was really suggesting that urban resilience could be a negative thing, right? In the ecological resilience literature, there's definitely recognition that resilience, you can have positive and negative resilience, right? You can have very resilient, but very say unsustainable or undesirable states. And when it comes to thinking though, holistically about cities, most people seem to think that that they want their city to be resilient, right? To persist over time kind of thing. And so if that's the case, if resilience is gonna be this normative goal, then we have to, I would argue, have to have, build in an amount of sort of allow for transformation and allow for change. Because otherwise it really becomes this very conservative small C, right? Not like political conservative goal, right? Where it's really just about, yeah, about resisting change. And so I think what we argue is that different systems within that, the broader city, right? Different elements will have to be actually changed in order to achieve sort of more overall resilience, right? So you might have to, you might have some elements of the city that you really just want to enhance the robustness of, you want them to persist, right? You want a building, for example, to be able to withstand hurricane force winds, right? So there might be elements where you are really, just focusing on strengthening. There might be other aspects of urban systems that you really wanna fundamentally transform and change. And that those, that you have to really think about that and you have to incorporate those different sort of, what we call pathways within broader resilience goals. So that's another aspect and then I think, oh, sorry, go ahead. Yeah, just for that, because I'm thinking it strikes me when, during this whole pandemic, we urge to go back to normal as soon as possible, right? But of course, going back to normal, there are some good things and some bad things about it. Of course, we arrive to this pandemic because of being normal, let's say, because of destroying habitat and all of that. So of course, there's not everything that we would need to go back to normal. So what are the facets and what is still good and bad? So there is indeed something normative about it, right? I mean, we cannot just say that resilience is per se something good. So it's, well, I guess it begs the question to dissect which systems are good and which systems are bad and what is good and what is bad, but we'll get back to that in the different questions that you had at the end, yeah. Yeah, no, I mean, well, that exactly, I think that really bridges to that's what we, that exact issue is what we argue is why you need to really think carefully about the, what we call the five Ws of resilience, right? The questions of urban resilience for whom, at what spatial scale, temporal scale, so when and where and then why, right? Like what are those underlying goals and motivations? And yeah, I mean, we, so we try to come up with a sort of broad definition that can be used by different disciplines that does take a position on these conceptual tensions, right? But that is still broad enough that it could serve as this sort of boundary object, but we recognize that when it would actually come to like applying this definition in practice, again, developing a say resilience plan or policies, you would have to think through those five W questions because exactly that that they're, yeah, they're really critical and they have to be negotiated, right? And those are inherently gonna be political contested and that they're also gonna be inherent trade-offs related to how you answer and decide, what things should be changed, right? Versus what should be more robust. But I think going back though to this idea, I feel like there is this really big tension that keeps coming up in my work between those who are really thinking about resilience just as this idea of bouncing back versus this idea that resilience actually could be about bouncing forward, right? So taking these disruptions, these changes, and improving, right? And I think one of the things that is a little concerning is that, I think in theory, in, I guess, academic literature, I think there's a more recognition of this bounce forward and I think that's really the way the literature is moving. But in practice, I think we do still, in policy discourse, we do still see a lot of this idea of bouncing back, right? I mean, I was actually just looking at some survey results as part of a project that I'm doing where we had asked different organizations in cities who are working on flood resilience planning to what their definition of resilience is and there were a number of them. I mean, they varied, right? So some people were definitely talking about improving changing systems, thinking about different aspects of city, but others were just really talking about resilience is about bouncing backwards, about building higher sea walls. And yeah, I think that this is something that has come up in a lot of the work that I'm doing is that we do still see a lot of focus on this idea of bouncing back. And I think that is problematic if resilience is going to be this sort of organizing principle or a major goal for cities, right? Because then it becomes this kind of, yeah, this not very transformative goal. And I think that is problematic because I think all of us probably agree that our cities as they currently are not completely sustainable, they're not completely just and that there are changes and I think pretty fundamental transformations that are needed to actually get us there, right? Not to mention that we then throw in future climate change and things like that and how that's gonna change our cities and we'll have to just have to make changes. And again, so that's why I think that this idea of this more bounce forward resilience is what we need to have if we're gonna use resilience in this normative way. Yeah, I totally feel what you say because I've seen it in my everyday work as well which is end of pipe solutions rather than addressing the root of the issue. And this is whenever we talk about complex issues, right? Whenever there is a systemic challenge, it's extremely hard to, well, to already, well, you mentioned how hard and how fuzzy the topic was inside of academia. So we can only imagine how difficult it is when applied to policy practice and all of that. And so that's, in a sense, some of these disciplines exist for a long time yet they're still so young because they still don't manage to pass to the threshold of getting applied or speaking the right words to the cities in order to get to the complex part of it, right? To get to the, okay, we need to plan now for 50 years time. We don't have the, we mentioned it before, right? Cities are open systems. The administrative boundaries do not make sense when we talk about resilience. The administrative boundaries do not make sense when we talk about climate mitigation and all of that. Yet we need to act here to either protect us from something that comes from elsewhere or to, you know, better the entire planet in a way. So how do we go from this fuzzy concept which I think a lot of people are attracted to it because it's a metaphor, it speaks to us. There is an image, you know, this bouncing back or forward. We can visually see it, right? But how do we then implement anything, right? Or how do we help cities along this journey? Yeah, I mean, well, I think that the, you know where the rubber really hits the road, right? And resilience is in negotiating these 5W questions, right? And so sort of what we argue is that you're always going to be answering those. So remind these 5W, sorry. Remind these 5W, so it's... It's urban resilience for whom, what, when, where and why, right? So thinking about who's defining the resilience agenda, who you're trying to actually assist, right? Who's included, who's not. Then the what is like, what are you trying to be resilient to, right? Like are you witch hazards or threats? Are you considering, right? You know, what aspects, what's included in the urban systems, right? So how are you bounding that in some way, right? So what are you trying to make resilience to? Resilient to what? The who or sorry, who, what, when is of course about what sort of spatial or sorry, what sort of temporal scales are you thinking about, right? Are you planning for 10 years down the line, five years or 50 years, 100 years, right? That makes a huge difference. Then where, of course, again, the sort of spatial elements of how you bound your system and then why is this really getting at these fundamental motivations for resilience, right? What are those normative goals? And I think, you know, all of these, again, how you answer them, there's going to be trade-offs to that and so in some of the work we've actually tried to like show that, right? So like using an example, say, of a green infrastructure planning policy, say a city has and if your goal is to increase access to green space, you might put green infrastructure, say, in very different places than you would if your goal is reducing flooding, right? Stormwater management. So again, these different responses have different outcomes. There's trade-offs between them that you need to do. So you're always going to be answering these. The question is, I think, how transparent are you being about it, right? And who gets to participate in those negotiations? And so what we've sort of argued for is that that should be, yeah, that should be out in the open. You should be clear about those choices and what try to think through at least some of the trade-offs related to that because I think we often don't, right? We just sort of, yeah, forge ahead and develop some resilience policy and don't necessarily think through all of, who that's gonna affect and how and what those answers, what the implications are for them. So that's really what I think that gets to. I also think that, thinking about, okay, well, how do you actually apply resilience to? I think another important thing is that it's not just about, say, physical systems, right? But it is also about governance. And I mean, maybe that's my bias coming back, going back to my political science bachelors. But I do think in all the work I've done talking with city folks, looking at examples, I think that often it's not as much of a technical issue as much as it is a governance challenge, right? And so I think that you just can't, I think you can't overestimate how important that is. And so more practically, I mean, let's imagine, so flood, I guess, is the easiest one we can always think of when it comes to city planning. I can imagine also, you know, planting trees or making some urban agriculture for local, let's say, food sufficiency. How do we know that these really make your city more resilient? You know, there is also some, I'm an optimist and I believe that we should do it. And I agree that it's probably the right way forward. But of course, it's hard knowing the myriad of, you know, changes that are facing, that we're gonna face and we don't know what we don't know. So there's how do we know that we're increasing resilience or I guess we can't, but is there like a priority list? Is there like, how do we advance in this, you know, because at the end of the day, of course they want to, once they have answered these questions, they do not necessarily tell you what are the actions, right, what is the next step? Yeah, I mean, I think measuring resilience, right, is very challenging. And I think that the, you know, maybe even, like especially if we're thinking holistically about like we're gonna measure a city's resilience, I sort of feel like it's almost impossible. But I think what we have started to do instead, and I think this is, you know, I think this makes sense is to try to figure out what are the characteristics of more resilient systems. So are there sort of general characteristics of systems that make that support resilience in general, right? And so things like diversity, right? And there is a lot of research that shows that increasing diversity, whether we're talking about, you know, physical infrastructure, things like electricity systems or we're talking about ecosystems or we're talking about governance, right? Having a diversity of factors participating or inclusive governance that all of those tend to have sort of better outcomes, right? So diversity seems to be a characteristic that generally supports resilience. And, you know, we can try to, we can sort of start to think about how we might measure diversity of a particular part of a city, right? Or a certain urban system. Redundancy, right, is another characteristic that there's, you know, quite a bit of work showing that having some functional redundancy is really important to resilience, right? That if you have a very overly optimized system that that actually can potentially make it brittle. And so, yeah, so we need to think about how making sure that we have that. And again, we can potentially measure that. So I think that's where I see the most potential for really trying to measure resilience is in thinking about these characteristics and trying to assess those and foster those in particular systems. Right, so we can never have a resilient city. We can only plan for a more resilient city, more or less. I mean, I think that, yeah, I think that's true. I mean, I think it's probably impossible to be for everything to be resilient to everything, right? To make a city, to have all aspects of a city that is resilient to every possible disruption thing as is, yes, impossible. But I think we can work on actively fostering our resilience. And so, yeah, so if you tell me what is the resilient city, I would not have an answer for you, right? Because I don't think that sort of definitive endpoint exists. But I think we can start to think of where are some examples of what might enhance resilience in different cities. I'm wondering, did you follow a bit? Probably you did. I didn't too much because it's not something I know too much. But this whole initiative that unfortunately ended this 100 resilient cities back in the day, that was a big thing, right? Was it Bloomberg that funded this thing? And then there were many chief resilient officers all around the planet. So what was that about? And was it interesting? Yeah, so I have followed it. So it was the Rockefeller Foundation who initiated it. And so I think Bloomberg has also contributed towards thinking about resilience, certainly in climate change as well. But yeah, the Rockefeller Foundation and the 100 resilient cities program really was one of the bigger drivers, I think globally, of this urban resilience agenda, right? I think you also can't, I think it probably was the biggest driver. And although it has now sort of ended, I think it really did push cities worldwide, right? Because what it did was it, cities around the world applied to be part of this network. And then they received resources, financial, but also different support, right? And technical support, help, et cetera, access to different consultants and things. To the main thing was hiring a chief resilience officer as you mentioned in the city. And that the Rockefeller Foundation really wanted, the program wanted those to be a sort of high level position who would really work. I mean, they actually specifically recognized that they wanted to transform urban governments, right? Which I think is a great goal, but a very lofty one, right? And I wasn't on the inside, so I can't say exactly how they feel that worked out. But I have actually, well, I've looked at a number of these plans that came out of it. So they also had to develop, so they hired chief resilience officer and they had to develop a resilience strategy, essentially a plan in each of the cities. And I've done a number of analyses on these plans, these strategies, because I think they do provide a really kind of nice convenience sample to look at how cities are thinking about resilience, right? How are they defining it? What policies are they prioritizing, right? How do they compare if this is gonna be a new push that cities are gonna be developing these resilience plans instead of maybe climate adaptation plans? Like how do those differ, right? So we had one study that I worked on with Sierra Woodruff who's at Texas A&M looked specifically at, as well as other colleagues looked specifically, she was the lead author on this, compared specifically resilience, these resilience strategies to climate adaptation plans in cities and looked at sort of this really well, the conclusion was that there were really strengths and weaknesses to these different approaches. Like the resilience plans were different in some significant ways, but not clearly better or worse than the climate adaptation plans for cities were developing. And then I also did a project where we actually interviewed a number of these chief resilience officers in the 100 Resilience Cities as well as, and sort of asked them how they were organizing their resilience efforts and how they were thinking about resilience as well there. And yeah, and there were a lot of interesting, well, a lot of interesting thoughts out of that in terms of pros and cons to how they were organizing their work and where these chief resilience officers actually worked. Like were they in the mayor's office versus were they embedded within public works department or some other sort of city department thinking about those sort of institutional design elements and organizational factors. And then also looking specifically to another project where we looked specifically at the resilience plans and looked at how they were addressing social equity or in many cases weren't. And again, there we found like a huge amount of variation in terms of at one extreme we had like the city of Boston, Massachusetts in the US which had made their sort of entire resilience strategy was focused on racial equity and social justice. And then you had sort of another extreme say the city of Boulder, Colorado their resilience plan didn't even really discuss social equity or justice at all. So a lot of variation in terms of there and thinking about well, what would it mean to have to plan for social equity in the context of urban resilience planning. So yeah, lots of different things I think I think it was a really interesting program. I think it really advanced discussions about resilience. I think one thing that's interesting with yeah, was this idea that they did I think really sort of espoused this more bounce forward thinking about resilience. So they really did want to transform as I said, governance. They wanted to think about resilience as actually adapting and improving as a result of potential disruptions. But I think it's still very much I think there's a lot of questions about to what extent it really did transform the way cities are governing. Also, of course this program did end. And I think once the funding dried up for that for cities and things, I think there's a lot of questions about to what extent I'd be interested to look a few years down the line to see how many of these resilience officer positions still exist, whether those resilience strategies have actually been the plans have actually been implemented, et cetera, right? Yeah, it's a fascinating example to especially I imagine for you to have this sample of cities to have this international experiments because of course you have different cities around the globe. So you have different contexts to see how this works. Do you know if there was like a resemblance or did the Rockefeller Foundation kind of pushed towards a harmonization or one way of resilience or not because you said that you had many variations but I'm curious is that because the context was different. So the urban administration where that person was parachuted, landed and therefore the context kind of beg the difference or was it the person themselves? So I don't know if that officer was trained in resilience. Did they come from abroad or how did they know resilience? Because of course often is like who knows how to explain this topic. It's so complex that you need someone that already is fluent in resiliency to be able to work with them, right? Yeah, I think that's a great question. And from what I've seen, I think it really varied, right? So some cities created the results, chose their higher to chief resilience officer who had worked in the city locally. I would say a lot of the cities actually chose someone who was really embedded locally, right? And had a lot of knowledge of the city. And I think that's really important, right? I think that would be at least as important as the actual, as knowledge of resilience, right? And so I think probably I'm guessing that there was some potentially in some cities some tension between opportunities to choose someone who maybe was really knowledgeable about resilience but who didn't necessarily know the particular context of the city. And from what I've seen, I think more often they chose people locally, which again, I think makes sense because every city is unique. And I think in terms of, again, I wasn't specifically involved in developing a strategy in a city, but just from looking at them, I think there is definitely the Rockefeller Foundation or the 100 resilience program definitely gave guidance because there are clear commonalities across the plans. There are certain elements that are included, say in the strategy. So I definitely think there was guidelines and guidance on that. And so you do see, so if each of these cities were just to develop completely their own plan in isolation, I would guess that they would be more different than they were, but the plans did vary a lot too. And so I think that there was, it was obviously probably I'm guessing sort of a compromise between those elements, right? And I think the other thing too that's interesting about the 100 resilience cities program and this is sort of a, this goes beyond just this program is that there is a lot of work that's looked at the role of these kind of city networks, right? These international, whether we're talking about 100 resilience cities or the C40 program or all the work that Ickley has done, right? The cities learn a lot from each other. And I think, regardless, even if, again, it's hard to know how much of the similarities were because the cities were looking at other city strategies and learning from them. And they definitely encouraged that. And actively, my sense is that that was a part of the goal of the program as well, right? And that makes sense because we know from other research that these city networks can be helpful and that city officials say that they really do learn from their peers and that that's something that that can be a really important resource. And so making that as easy as possible, I think it's a good thing, right? And connecting these different officials. So yeah, I think there's probably some of that as well in the network and hard to determine how much of that is is just because there was this network and they were learning from each other versus how much was actually the program saying you need to include these elements and define resilience in this way, et cetera. Yeah, I'm wondering especially, well, whether they manage or how do you manage to deal with this trade off elements because you mentioned that this was something very important in the 5Ws, but I can imagine this is also when cities come together and discuss resilience, they all have different contextual challenges, yet some must remain, right? So they all have like grids of flows or they all have social structures or they all have some type of nature inside of their city. So there are some common elements, but then of course is what do you do with them and how do you approach it? So how do we, do you know of any ways or how, when you discuss with cities or if you had to do it, how do you trade off between all of these like super difficult challenges that are all equally important and all like, if you mess it up, then you can screw a city up more or less? Yeah, that is, I mean, I think that is a great question and maybe the ultimate question that cities are having to face, right, with resilience. So I think you're never going to completely escape that, right? You have conflicting priorities. You have limited resources and that is a fundamental challenge, right? And cities are always going to be facing this, I think, but so what do you do about it? Well, I think one thing you wanna do is, again, is try to identify those, right? So that's an important first step is figuring out, okay, where do these trade-offs exist? And I think we often don't do that, where are there conflicting priorities and try to avoid unnecessary conflicts, right? So like just for example, right? Cities have, on the one hand, many cities are facing a, you know, housing affordability crisis, housing shortages, right? And so they need more housing. They need more affordable housing. On the other hand, cities, let's say coastal cities, right? Are facing sea level rise and honestly, probably need to be thinking seriously about managed retreat, right? And moving away from, you know, future sea level rise, you know, areas. But that means if you're a coastal city, you have limited land, you know, you have these two goals and it's challenging, right? Because, you know, you might wanna be taking whatever land you have and building more housing on it, right? But then you also kind of need to be moving away from those. So a very obvious thing it would seem is that you shouldn't be building new housing at least in, say, flood prone areas, right? But the reality is that cities still are in many places, right? And so I think, you know, part of it is about making sure that your different policies and plans are aligned, right? And that's something that I've been working on thinking about for flooding and also moving forward, I'll be thinking about this for heat as well as, okay, how can, you know, you have to think about all of the different, you know, different policies that a city has in different plans and are they actually aligned or are they working at cross purposes? And like, so we were actually analyzing the, what we call the sort of network of plans in a city and looking at- Climate adaptation and let's say transportation and all of that, you mean as network of plans? Yeah, so these would be really all of the different city, city scale, they could be regional scale, but also neighborhood scale, right? Plans that are collectively gonna shape urban development, right? So yes, so this is your comprehensive or your general plan, right? Your land use plans. This includes your hazard, in the U.S. we have hazard mitigation plans that include your climate adaptation plan any kind of infrastructure plans you have, right? Parks and recreation or open space plans. So often these are developed, right? In kind of in silos within cities, right? So you have different agencies, different departments who are developing these plans and they might not necessarily know what the other ones are doing in their plan. They might not actually necessarily be aligned and that's obviously, we see this, right? So we actually like analyze the policies in these plans, we try to map them out and you see that there are contradictions, right? Whereas for example, you might have a say like a downtown master plan or economic development plan or even comprehensive plan that's calling for new housing or new development in areas that the hazard mitigation plan is saying we should not be building in because this is a flood zone, right? And so, I think a first step is trying to get these aligned and trying to deal with that, right? So that's step one. I think another important element is trying to figure out if there are win-wins that you have, right? And so I think this is really why we see so much emphasis these days on green infrastructure or nature-based solutions, right? Is because there is a feeling and I think there is definitely some evidence for this that they can have multiple benefits, right? Multiple co-benefits. And so could you develop, say, a park that also can help to retain stormwater when you have a big storm event and that can also help to cool the city as we're facing unprecedented heat waves and extreme heat risks. And so, yeah, so how can you actually, where are there policies and developments that could actually achieve multiple goals, right? And that would be also flexible in, you know, future, different future climates. So thinking about, okay, are these really sort of robust strategies that are gonna hold up, you know, regardless of what ultimately kind of happens with our climate? So I think those are really important, but often again, one of the challenges there in terms of actually implementing those effectively and really, say, leveraging the opportunities for multiple benefits or those win-wins is that you actually have to have, say, different departments and things talking to each other, right? So you do have to break down the silos in governance. And because, for example, if we take like green infrastructure, right? You know, you have the parks, maybe parks and recreation department who is in charge of developing new parks, you know, for people to recreate in. And then you have like a stormwater utility whose job is to prevent, you know, flooding and to manage precipitation, right? And make sure that areas, the city doesn't flood. Those two departments, you know, might not necessarily be sharing their budgets or working, you know, be used to collaborating closely together, but in order to really, you know, maximize resources and, you know, I think leverage these, capitalize on these win-wins, they would need to do that. And so that just requires sort of new collaborations, trying to, again, break down these different silos. And that can be sometimes difficult. So that's where I would get, where I get to this idea of like everything's a governance challenge, right? Yeah, it hits home so hard. It's a, I'm facing similar stuff, like, you know, in circular economies, like, okay, we need to somehow make flows more circular within cities. Great. Where are we gonna put these productive activities that are gonna do so? Nowhere, because we want more residential areas. Great. So no recycling then, no repairing. Oh, but we still want it. Sure, but how do we do that then? It feels like this infinite loop. Perhaps a last question before I ask you the two usual questions over the end is, I can imagine that you have to become a very future-oriented person when you work with the resilience. You have to think about, or very creative person. You need to think through all of the, you know, what ifs or all of the scenario or all of the, you know, future states of what's gonna be a city in one century, right? Because as you said, these are complex adaptive systems, right? What we know today over city is not what was in the past. And it's definitely not what's gonna be in the future. So I can imagine it can be a lot of fun to imagine all of this. It can be also very daunting. Like I don't have a single clue about, you know, what the future pandemic is gonna be or what the future economic shock is gonna be or environmental. We just have a glimpse of what is happening. So I don't know, do you just sit and ponder about what are the future challenges or how, because of course there's the practical elements that you do now with cities because it's relatively short-term, but I can imagine in your free time, you also ponder about all of these other elements, right? Yeah, I mean, I think, yeah. I mean, yeah, definitely I think about it, right? And I mean, sometimes in the face of all of the challenges that we're facing, I can find it a bit depressing quite honestly to like go down that. I mean, when I think, so I grew up in South Florida, right? In Southeast Florida, Fort Lauderdale, Florida. And, you know, South Florida is facing a huge future climate challenge. And sometimes when I try to think about how that's gonna be resolved, right? Knowing everything we know about, you know, finance and governance and politics, it's, yeah, I really struggle with it and sometimes it's challenging, right? And I think there has been among the like climate change community, there's been more emphasis lately on like mental health and being sure to try to take care of yourself, right? That you can't advance climate issues if you are, yeah, if you're like just not in a good mental space and mental health space, but it can be difficult when you see all the inequities and you feel like there's just this huge looming disaster that we're not necessarily like taking effective measures against, right? So I think that that can be hard sometimes that I try but I try not to do that instead focus on where you see these, yeah, hopeful elements sort of bright spots, right? And I think like that's, you know, for example, the seeds of a good Anthropocene, I don't know if you've seen that, Elena Bennett and all other colleagues that work, I think it's important that we have those, right? These like good examples, positive examples. I know a lot of my colleagues who have been working on the urban resilience to extremes, research networks, the UREX, they've been doing a lot of work on future scenarios and planning those. And I think that's another area where, yeah, we have to think through different positive visions. If we don't have some vision of what we want the future to look like, how do we get there? So yeah, so I also try to think about those opportunities and how we could, what would a desirable future more resilient city look like? And yeah, what are some of the elements of all the, you know, I love, I think one of the reasons that I ended up really wanting to focus on cities is just because I've always loved them. I love going to them. I love traveling to different cities. I love how different they are. I just always feel energized when I'm in a new city exploring it, right? I love history and so I love that element and how it combines with, you know, what, how the, you see the legacies of history, but also how it, you know, combines with current characteristics. And so I think there's also, yeah, a lot of, I think you can look at different examples and kind of pull different pieces that are interesting from different cities and that you'd want to see in future cities and try to work towards that. So yeah, try to stay. I think I'm generally a fairly optimistic person. And so I try to be all those. Sometimes it feels a little daunting as well. Yeah, yeah. I feel you, it's the same here. It's the small wins are what make us, I can imagine, keep pushing. Yeah, I think I've become more and more okay with like incremental improvements while still keeping a transformative vision of where we want to go, right? Yeah, especially when, I mean, when we look at infrastructure, it's like decades, if not like half century projects and they transform all of that. So yeah, I mean, if every day of these 50 years we get thinking about this, it's a bit long. Yeah, so I wanted to, I generally finished with two main questions, which is what's next? So what are you focusing right now and what is your plan for the rest of the year or this year to come? And then some books and articles that you would like to recommend. Sure. So I think the sort of two big research projects that I'm focusing on right now focus really on flooding and extreme heat planning as I sort of, I've kind of alluded to pieces of them. And those of course do happen to be the sort of costliest flooding and deadliest weather and climate hazards in the US at least. And so with both of these, I'm really interested in how they're governed, right? Across cities and also trying to kind of develop new methods for analyzing the relationships between the different plans, right? The cities are developing. And so looking at the policies in these plans, again, so getting to this, some of this stuff that I was talking about earlier, right? Where you making sure that the plans are actually aligned, looking at where policies are targeting, are they sort of equitably distributed across cities? Are they targeting the areas that are most vulnerable, right? So how do we plan more strategically, right? And thinking about this again, and how we ultimately like break down kind of silos and how do we work towards more aligned planning efforts for both of these. So yeah, so I had this one project that's looking at flooding in four coastal cities in the US. We've been working on this for the last couple years. And so this was with Sierra Woodruff and Bryce Hannibal who are at Texas A&M as well as three PhD students at ASU and Texas A&M. And we've been like combining surveys of different organizations involved in flood planning, social network analysis from those surveys. So looking at like who's collaborating with who. And then we also have analyzed all of the different plans in the networks. And we're trying to really ultimately kind of question how resilience has been operationalized. And so two of those cities are 100 resilient cities members and then two of them specifically were not. And we're trying to understand like how they're thinking about resilience, whether this focus on resilience is really like increased collaboration. And then does this increase collaboration, do we actually see that like breaking down, does breaking down sort of silos actually lead to like more integrated plans that are hopefully gonna reduce vulnerability of flooding and sea level rise. So that's sort of one project. And so for example, one finding that we're coming out from that is that although like hazard, so in the U.S. we have these hazard mitigation plans that most communities are basically required to develop in order to be eligible for federal disaster, like mitigation or disaster grants, right? And then many cities are also developing these climate separate sort of climate change adaptation plans. And we find that they have sort of a common goal, right? Of reducing risk, flooding risks, but they are quite distinct and are usually very separated, developed by different people in the cities. They require sort of more integration. So just like one example. And then another project that I'll be working a lot on over the next year in the summer is perhaps not surprisingly, since moving to Arizona, I've started focusing a lot more on urban heat resilience planning. And so what we're finding, and so this work I'm working very closely with a researcher, Lad Keith at the University of Arizona. So it's a very Arizona strong team. And we're finding that there's lots of studies on urban heat modeling and design, but there really is not a lot that's actually focused on governance of heat. And compared with flooding, at least in the US, heat is really, there's just a lot, it's a lot less advanced in terms of how we actually manage this hazard. And so we're trying to help address that, right? So we did some surveys of different city planners across the US to try to understand like how they were thinking about heat, what they're actually doing, what strategies they're implementing. So for example, we found that urban forestry, like vegetation is the most common strategy that cities say they're using for heat. But then also like what kind of information do they use about heat and what sort of gaps there are in information sources for that, what kind of plans are they actually implementing heat strategies in? So are they doing it in hazard mitigation plans or in comprehensive plans, et cetera? And we're thinking about how could we look, what are our heat strategies across plans? And again, how are they sort of aligned, are they? And then we're also developing guidance. So we're actually working with the American Planning Association to try to develop, and we're gonna write some reports on heat planning to try to actually give practical guidance to cities on what are the strategies that they can implement? How should they be thinking about extreme heat? And yeah, because it's gonna be an increasing problem around the world moving forward. So those are some of the, I think the two biggest projects that I'll be working on over the next year for sure. Have pretty full on, I guess. So I'm looking forward to all of them. So before you go, some books or articles or videos or something that you would recommend people to read on this topic or any other topic? Yeah, sure. So speaking of thinking about future cities and resilience, I think I would recommend a new book. It's an open access springer book that was edited by a number of the Urban Resilience to Extremes SRN, so the UREx researchers. So it was led by Zoe Hamstead, who's at Buffalo, David Iwaniak, Georgia State, Timon McPherson, Marta Burbis, Elizabeth Cook, and Tisha Amunas Erickson were the editors of that. And many other collaborators, but it's really, so that project that's been going on for the last five years, it's just sort of coming to an end to the extent that a huge multi-year project ever really ends, research project. But it's really, I think, synthesizing a lot of the key insights from this work. As I said, they've been doing these planning scenarios with nine cities in the US and Latin America. And so a lot about Urban Resilience thinking in there and a number of some of, I think, the biggest thinkers in this topic are part of the book and contributors. So I would definitely check that out. And nicely- And how is it called? It's called Resilient Urban Futures. Resilient Urban Futures, cool. Yeah, and so if you search up Hamstead, Zoe Hamstead, she's the first editor for that, then you probably find it. Very cool. And then, well, I also have been, I mean, I would assume that your subscribers are probably into podcasts. So actually I've been really enjoying Lately America adapts. So it is a little bit more American focused, but I think it does cover a lot of different adaptation concepts and case studies. I think it's really quite a good podcast and a lot of good thinkers on this topic. We're participating in that, the only caveat being that it is a little bit US centric. And then I've also been enjoying the A Matter of Degrees podcast on Climate Change, but I think it's also very timely and interesting if you're interested in sort of climate policy more broadly. Very, very cool. I have plenty of things to read and to listen then, thanks a lot. Well, thanks again Sarah so much for taking the time and for sharing all of your knowledge and insights out of urban resilience. Yeah, thanks for having me. And thanks everyone as well to listening until the end. Please make sure to share this episode with friends and colleagues that might enjoy it as well and we'll see you in the next one. Cheers.