Co-producing new knowledge systems for resilient and just coastal cities: A social-ecological-technological systems framework for data visualization

Abstract

With increasing frequency and severity, coastal cities are facing the effects of extreme weather events, such as sea-level rise, storm surges, hurricanes, and various types of flooding. Recent urban resilience scholarship suggests that responding to the cascading complexities of climate change requires an understanding of cities as social-ecological-technological systems, or SETS. Advances in data visualization, sensors, and analytics are making it possible for urban planners to gain more comprehensive views of cities. Yet, addressing climate complexity requires more than deploying the latest technologies; it requires transforming the institutional knowledge systems upon which cities rely for preparation and response in a climate-changed future. While debates in the theory and practice of knowledge co-production offer a rich contextual starting point, there are few practical examples of what it means to co-produce new knowledge systems capable of steering urban resilience planning in fundamentally new directions. This paper helps address this gap by offering a case study approach to co-producing new knowledge systems for SETS data visualization in three US coastal cities. Through a series of innovation spaces – dialogues, labs, and webinars – with residents, data experts, and other city stakeholders from multiple sectors, we show how to apply a knowledge systems approach to better understand, represent, and support cities as SETS. To illustrate what a redesigned knowledge system for urban resilience planning entails, we document the key steps and activities that led to a new prototype SETS platform that works with a wider range of ways of knowing – including community-based expertise, interdisciplinary research contributions, and various municipal actors' know-how – to build anticipatory capacity for visualizing and navigating the complex dynamics of a climate-changed future. Our findings point to new roles for activity-based learning, conflict, and SETS visualization technologies in connecting, amplifying, and reorganizing the knowledge assets of community perspectives previously ignored. We conclude with a new understanding of how innovation towards coastal city resilience resides within the co-production process for (re)designing knowledge systems to make them more robust and responsive to cross-sector and cross-city learning.