Visions of resilience: lessons from applying a digital democracy tool in New York’s Jamaica Bay watershed

Abstract

Resilience to extreme weather events and other sudden changes is an issue facing many communities in the early 21 st century. Planning to respond to disasters is particularly complicated in densely inhabited, multi-jurisdictional urban social-ecological systems like the watershed of Jamaica Bay, a large urbanized estuary on the south side of New York City. This area contains parklands managed by New York City, the National Park Service, and other agencies, four sewage treatment plants, three former landfills, and urban and suburban communities, all of which were heavily impacted by Hurricane Sandy in 2012. Here successful resilience planning and response requires participation from a wide variety of government and civil society players each with different types of knowledge, value systems, and expectations about what resilience means. To investigate how "visions" of future resilience differed among several communities living in or concerned with Jamaica Bay, New York, we deployed a free, Internet-based modeling framework called Visionmaker that enabled interactive scenario creation and testing. Through a series of standardized workshops, we recruited participants from a variety of different communities of practice (i.e. researchers, land managers, educators, nongovernmental organization staff, and community board members) to design "visions of resilience". Visions spanned terrestrial and marine environments and contained natural and built ecosystems. Most users favored increasing resilience through expanding salt marsh and green infrastructure while, for the most part, keeping the built city landscape of streets and buildings intact. We compare and contrast these visions and discuss the implications for future resilience planning in coastal cities.

Using virtual simulations of future extreme weather events to communicate climate change risk

“…At the same time, an emerging body of literature examines the potential for visualisation as a risk communication tool that can reduce the psychological distance between individuals and the impacts of climate change [23,24]. For example, studies have visualised the impacts of climate change using 2D interactive hazard maps [25][26][27], 3D maps and simulations [28,29], serious games [30][31][32], and augmented reality and virtual reality experiences [33][34][35][36][37].…”