Open Space Innovation in Earthquake Affected Cities

Abstract

Engineering resilience, one would think, should have a stranglehold on urban design.The environment of the city -the makeup of the entire field of the city including its landscape, its infrastructure and its buildings -is the componentry of the urban system that needs to 'bounce back' quickly and efficiently to facilitate recovery after a disturbance.It is the focus of engineers, planners and city makers as they piece together recovery.Yet a city's contextual interrelationships are often the result of its non-linear processes [7].The nested but discontinuous scales of the building plot, the street block, the neighbourhood and the region [8] demonstrate that a city's morphology is structured like an ecological system.Furthermore, systems-based urbanist theories share ecological sciences' resilience concepts of diversity, modularity, variability and innovation.[9] Hence, we can examine a city's recovery after disturbance in terms of its ecological resilience, in which the agents of adaptation would be urban designers, institutions / government and, more often, community driven by a changing social, cultural, political, economic and environmental contexts.After a disturbance in nature, competitive forces are at large, creating tensions between the pre-existing trying to re-establish; the aspirants who want to do better; and competition who invite innovation and change, often through experimentation.Does the same happen in a city?How do the agents of adaptation in a city -the government, the urban designers, the community -know how, where and at what scale they can innovate?What is innovation in urban design? InnovationInnovation, whose etymology comes from the Latin word meaning to change, is bilateral.It entails something 'new', and it entails systematic implementation.The 'new' may be new needs, but it may also be 'old' needs that are met in 'new' ways.It can entail 'new' products, 'new' processes, 'new' values, or 'new' technologies.It differs from invention which refers more specifically to ideation: innovation is a change to a system.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 14 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.