Sensemaking for entangled urban social, ecological, and technological systems in the Anthropocene

Our urban systems and their underlying sub-systems are designed to deliver only a narrow set of human-centered services, with little or no accounting or understanding of how actions undercut the resilience of social-ecological-technological systems (SETS). Embracing a SETS resilience perspective cre...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:npj Urban Sustainability 2023-06, Vol.3 (1), p.39-10, Article 39
Main Authors: Chester, Mikhail V., Miller, Thaddeus R., Muñoz-Erickson, Tischa A., Helmrich, Alysha M., Iwaniec, David M., McPhearson, Timon, Cook, Elizabeth M., Grimm, Nancy B., Markolf, Samuel A.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
4014/2801
4014/4005
Adaptation
Anthropocene
cities
Complexity
Decision making
Earth and Environmental Science
Ecosystems
Environment
Infrastructure
Knowledge
Perspective
Resilience
Society
Sustainable Development
towns
Urban Ecology
Urban Geography
Urbanism
Urbanism (inc. megacities
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Summary:Our urban systems and their underlying sub-systems are designed to deliver only a narrow set of human-centered services, with little or no accounting or understanding of how actions undercut the resilience of social-ecological-technological systems (SETS). Embracing a SETS resilience perspective creates opportunities for novel approaches to adaptation and transformation in complex environments. We: i) frame urban systems through a perspective shift from control to entanglement, ii) position SETS thinking as novel sensemaking to create repertoires of responses commensurate with environmental complexity (i.e., requisite complexity), and iii) describe modes of SETS sensemaking for urban system structures and functions as basic tenets to build requisite complexity. SETS sensemaking is an undertaking to reflexively bring sustained adaptation, anticipatory futures, loose-fit design, and co-governance into organizational decision-making and to help reimagine institutional structures and processes as entangled SETS.
ISSN:2661-8001
2661-8001
DOI:10.1038/s42949-023-00120-1