A year ago we were awarded a grant to study The Interdependent Criticality of Built, Social and Information Infrastructures in Community Resilience.

Our RIPs Type 1 project frames community resilience as an interdependence between built, social, and information infrastructures. Our research program trials participatory methods that leverage, describe, and quantify this interdependence to study, model, and improve resilient community infrastructures. The goals of our team’s work are to develop the conceptual framework and methodological approaches for linking these interdependent infrastructures for resilience creation. Specific objectives identified in the original proposal are:

to trial innovative, inclusive, and adaptive processes through which community stakeholders—including individual residents, emergency responders, business owners, planners, political leaders and experts —feel ownership of decisions and outcomes
to develop and pilot advanced engineering probabilistic models of interdependent built infrastructures that incorporate data from empirical survey of damage, social media, and sensors.
to build a multi-disciplinary and collaborative team with a shared vision of the scholarship needed to enhance resilience infrastructures.

Our team proposed to explore this framework against the backdrop of Boulder, Colorado and surrounding communities. We focused our work in Boulder for a couple of reasons. First, shortly before our work began, Boulder was selected for participation in the Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities Centennial Challenge, a network of cities striving to improve resilience. In addition, in 2013, widespread flooding occurred, affecting most of the northern part of the Colorado Front Range and the Colorado plains, killing four people, isolating communities, and significantly damaging buildings and infrastructure. Boulder continues to respond and rebuild from this disaster.

We have included a list of some of the things we are working on below. Please feel free to contact Abbie Liel, or another member of the team, if you'd like more information. In particular, check out the Soden et al. paper for a summary or our early field work as a team, which involved participatory observations of Boulder's Flood Anniversary week in 2014.

Journal Articles

Arneson et al., “Expert Knowledge in the Creation of Resiliency Networks”. Submission expected December, 2015.

Denis et al. “Flood Vulnerability Models for Residential Buildings Based on the 2013 Colorado Floods”, Submission expected October, 2015.

Sprain, “Reimaging Flood Risk: Discourse Analysis of a Stakeholder Interaction During a Participatory Game.” Submission expected January, 2016.

Conference Papers and Presentations

Soden, R., L. Palen, C. Chase, E. Arneson, D. Deniz, L. Sprain, B. Goldstein, A. Liel, S. Dashti and A. Javernick-Will. “The Polyvocality of Resilience: Discovering a Research Agenda through Interdisciplinary Investigation & Community Engagement.” 12th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management, ISCRAM 2015, Kristiansand, Norway, May 24-27, 2015. Robert Soden was recognized as a finalist for ISCRAM student paper award for this paper.

Chase, C. “Bridging Divided Frames: Environmental Disaster and Everyday Stress in Resilience Thinking”, Conference on Communication and Environment, Boulder, Colorado, June 2015.

Goldstein, B., Sprain, L., and James, T. “The Practice and Possibilities of Collaborative Resilience Assessment.” Conference on Communication and Environment, Boulder, CO, June 2015.

Chase, C. “The Siloed City: 100 Resilient Ci?es as Communication Design Intervention.” National Communication Association Annual Conference, Urban Communication Foundation Pre-conference, Las Vegas, Nevada, to be presented November 2015

Sprain, L., Liel, A., Javernick-Will, A., Palen, L., Dashti, S., and Goldstein, B. “Reimagining critical infrastructure for community resilience: Interdependent build, information, and social dimensions of critical infrastructure.” Conference on Earth System Governance, Canberra, Australia, to be presented December 2015.

Goldstein, B., “Transformative learning networks”, Transformations 2015 Conference (organized by the Stockholm Resilience Center) in Stockholm, Sweden, October 5-7, 2015.

Sprain, L., Goldstein, B., and Chase, C. “The Communicative Dimensions of Resilience: A Multiscalar Investigation.” Aspen Conference on Engaged Scholarship, Aspen, CO, July 2015.

Arneson, E., D. Deniz, A. Javernick-Will, A. Liel, and S. Dashti. (submitted). “Information Deficits and Post-Disaster Recovery”. ASCE 2016 Constructioon Research Congress (CRC), San Juan, Puerto Rico, May 31-June 2, 2016.

Soden, R., and Palen, L. (submitted). “Infrastructure in the Wild: What Mapping in Post-Earthquake Nepal Reveals about Infrastructural Emergence.” Submitted to the ACM 2016 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.