A New Approach

I would like to share the results of my research, thinking and writing with the U. S. Resilience System in the hopes that its viewers can incorporate some of it into their own work.  I also hope to receive feedback so I can improve my ideas.

My background is in city and regional planning.  More recently it has expanded to include futures research.  I believe that the much-needed resilience many of us are seeking can best be achieved if we are working on immediate plans and actions plus long-range plans and actions at the same time.  Immediate or short-term actions are seldom sufficient by themselves.

Resilience to the wide variety of critical problems and uncertainties we expect to face this century requires systemic changes in our country and world.  It requires changes in the way we think, act, organize and communicate, and in what and where we build.  We slowly build our man-made environment to fit our needs and then our man-made environment shapes and controls us for many decades - even after our needs have changed. 

City and regional planners, and all others who participate in the development process (government leaders, engineers, architects, investors, etc.), must be thinking more wisely about what we are building.  We must jump out in front of the process rather than just go along with past/current trends.  We must be building for a rapidly changing, uncertain future.  We must admit that our predictive abilities are wholly unreliable.

My research, thinking and writing focuses on the need to plan and build structural adaptivity into our man-made environment.  Structural adaptivity is the only logical approach to resilience in the face of a rapidly changing, uncertain future.  By structural I am meaning our patterns of urban and regional development, our major transportation systems, our major infrastructure facilities and systems, our open space, our densities of development, and so forth.  By adaptivity I am meaning the capacity to grow, shrink, move, change, or replace over relatively short time periods. 

I have written some text on how I believe structural adaptivity could be applied through city and regional planning and a host of development-related guidance activities.  I would like to post much of this on this site.

William Schnaufer