Re-Imagining Spaces and Places

Interdisciplinary Essays on the Relationship between Identity, Space, and Place

Stefano Rozzoni, Beitske Boonstra, Teresa Cutler-Broyles, Stefano Rozzoni, Beitske Boonstra, Teresa Cutler-Broyles

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781800717398
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

While 'space' and 'place' appear as key concepts in the study of culture, their complexity and mutability require ever-new frameworks when approaching them critically. Including chapters by authors from different fields, career stages, and geopolitical backgrounds, the contributors in this edited collection scrutinize the changing dynamics of space and place in relation to current political, social, and environmental urgencies across the globe.

With chapters investigating both real and imaginary spaces and places, the diversified discussions included in this collection provide a cohesive study for disclosing latent understandings of multiple phenomena characterizing the world in which we live. From the protests in Egyptian and Turkish squares, to the power-related narratives embedded in institutional buildings, from the development of the commercial arena in Victorian and Edwardian London, to the effects of current environmental concerns on the evaluation of urban and rural locations, the volume ultimately serves as a progressive connection of fields, minds, and outlooks through an innovative, pluralistic vision.

This interdisciplinary focus not only emphasizes the centrality of spaces and places when disentangling the complexities comprising our past and present, but also suggests a more pluralistic approach for exploring fundamental concepts in future spaces and places studies.

Chapter 1

How Public Participation Can Lead to the Placemaking of Space and Resilience of Place

Nakul Nitin Gote and Wolfgang Wende

Abstract

Chaotic growth and climate change have led to increased uncertainty in social-ecological systems, like urban areas, and have lowered their thresholds to withstand shocks, thus increasing their vulnerability. To reduce this effect, the concept of resilience is increasingly being applied in urban governance and planning. Public participation is seen as an attribute, which potentially increases the resilience of social-ecological systems.

What kind of public participation leads to resilience, and how, are questions which this chapter addresses. To answer these questions, this study focused on relevant literature regarding resilience and governance, and investigated the events related to the flooding of the Ramnadi river corridor in Pune, India. The governance structure within the Ramnadi river corridor was then analyzed using a causal loop diagram. By studying its nodes, linkages, and feedbacks, this chapter explores how public participation affects the resilience of the social-ecological system of the Ramnadi river corridor.

Public memory, a minimum sustained level of perpetual participation, and the presence of proactive institutions which can effectuate various levels and types of participation, have emerged as the qualities of public participation which increase the resilience of social-ecological systems. Based on the presence or absence of these qualities, a new typology of public participation is proposed here, namely the binary of continuous public participation versus event-based public participation. This distinction proves to be an effective indicator of whether an instantiation of public participation can lead to resilience. The applicability of this classification for designing interventions for placemaking has also been discussed.

Keywords: Causal loop diagram; flood resilience; governance; placemaking; social-ecological system; systems approach

Introduction

The concept of resilience has gained wide acceptance amongst the scientific community as well as among policymakers due to its clarity.¹ Resilience is a tool for sustainability (Anderies, Folke, Walker, & Ostrom, 2013). It provides a framework in which cross-scale interactions between systems can be studied, while the idea of sustainable development refers to the actions which are taken after considering these interactions. Thus, one can conclude that if sustainability is an end, resilience is a means for achieving it (Gote, 2019).

Public participation is increasingly being seen as a fundamental component of democracy. This is because, in modern democracies, the decisions are taken by bureaucrats who are not elected through adult franchise. Public participation creates a direct link between the public and the decision-making bureaucrats (Creighton, 2005). This research aims to examine the linkages between public participation and resilience in order to study what kind of public participation is beneficial for resilience.

Resilience

Resilience is a term used in medical science, materials engineering, psychology, and more recently in urban planning. By and large, the term implies a capacity to return to a previous state or recover after a deformation or disturbance. Holling (1973) pioneered the resilience concept in ecology by defining it as “a measure of a system's ability to absorb change and still persist by maintaining the concerned relationships within it” (PG). This understanding was a paradigm shift compared to the earlier, engineering-based definition of resilience which was primarily concerned with the ability of a system to return to a previous state (which Holling termed as “stability”). If a system is to survive change, it needs to adapt to changing environments. This process of incorporating change continuously gives rise to resilience (Holling, 1996).

As defined by Walker, Holling, Carpenter, and Kinzig (2004, p. 2), resilience is

…the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and reorganize while undergoing change so as to still retain essentially the same function, structure, identity, and feedbacks – in other words, stay in the same basin of attraction.

This definition can be applied to social-ecological systems as well. To make any measurements or comparisons while using the resilience concept in social-ecological systems, the questions “resilience of what” and “resilience to what” need to be answered (Carpenter, Walker, Anderies, & Abel, 2001).

Thus, in this chapter, the resilience “of” the community in the river corridor “to” flash floods in the river will be studied.² Another benefit of operating within the resilience framework is that it develops resilience thinking, which helps the researcher “nurture an enriched and integrated understanding of human-nature interactions and cross-scale dynamics” (Gordon, Torrens, & Fremier, 2014). This ensures that the forest is not missed for the trees, that is, the bigger picture is kept in mind.

Characteristics of Resilience

In order to apply resilience in a real-life context for usage as an evaluation criterion, it needs to be operationalized. To achieve this result, the works of various authors have been aggregated to determine distinct – but also common – characteristics of resilience (Table 1). Through this exercise, the aim is to obtain a full grasp of data in order to explain how certain interventions have affected, or may affect, these characteristics. This observation will facilitate the evaluation of governance interventions with resilience as the objective. It will also help evaluate whether public participation leads to resilience and if yes, then how.

Following is an elaboration of the four characteristics of resilience:

Adaptive Capacity

The third Assessment Report of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2001) defines “adaptive capacity” (AC) as

…the degree to which adjustments in practices, processes, or structures can moderate or offset the potential for damage or take advantage of opportunities created by a given change in climate.

AC can also be understood as the ability of a governance system to first alter processes and, if required, convert structural elements as responses to experienced or expected changes in the societal or natural environment (Pahl-Wostl, 2009). From these definitions, it is evident that AC is a broad and somewhat unclear concept. It describes paradigms crafted in political discourse and practice which are loaded with competing understandings of their mission and underlying principles (adapted from Fritsch, 2016). In order to conduct more effective research, it is important to clarify how this concept is intended here. This chapter understands AC as explained by Gain, Rouillard, and Benson (2013). They identify the following five features of AC:

(1)A manageable natural and social system with few foreseeable thresholds and surprises;

(2)Adequate supply of resources, technologies, infrastructure, knowledge, and skills that enables social actors to respond to evolving circumstances;

(3)An effective innovation and capacity-building system based on adaptive cycles and experimentation of local and scientific knowledge;

(4)A flexible decision-making system that enables local self-determination, while ensuring synergistic interventions and avoiding conflicting ones between scales;

(5)Accessible participatory mechanisms that support fair exchange between social actors and encourage the sharing of resources and power (p. 15–16).

These determinants have been used in this study to evaluate whether certain changes in the governance structure of the Ramnadi corridor have affected the AC of the corridor. As AC is a characteristic of resilience, these determinants will enable the researcher to link certain changes in the governance structure to resilience.

According to Carpenter et al. (2001), Turner et al. (2003) and Tompkins and Adger (2004), adaptive capacity is a component of resilience that reflects the learning aspect that a system demonstrates when disturbed. AC can be increased through various adaptation strategies including urban planning and zoning to avoid climate-related hazards, planning with an eye on demographic and consumption change in the long term, developing heavy infrastructure for adaptation (e.g., dams, water management facilities, rapid transit facilities), the use of new technology, and plans for natural areas and ecosystem conservation (Adger, 2003). Lebel et al. (2006) also use “enhanced adaptive capacity” as an indicator of increased resilience. However, Gallopín (2006) is of the view that the relation between AC and resilience is unclear, and that resilience is a subset of AC. For the purpose of the present study, the takeaway from this inquiry is that AC contributes to the resilience of social-ecological systems.

Self-Organization

Self-organization can be understood as a process of evolution where the effect of the environment is minimal, that is, where “the development of new, complex structures takes place primarily in and through the system itself” (Heyligen, 2009). Thus, such systems can organize and reorganize themselves. This property can be beneficial for resilience, as the capacity to organize and reorganize within the system posits the presence of internal feedback and responsiveness. Carpenter et al. (2001) view self-organization as a core property of a resilient system. Lebel et al. (2006) say that the capacity to self-organize increases a society's ability to manage resilience. Moreover, self-organizing systems are relatively insensitive to perturbations or errors and have a strong capacity to restore themselves (Heylighen, 2001). Self-organization in the form of community-based management is instrumental in reducing vulnerability to hazards (Berkes & Folke, 1998). Self-organization also promotes the formation of social memory, which is important for linking past experiences with existing and proposed policies, as expressed by Folke, Hahn, Olsson, and Norberg (2005), who asserted that self-organization leads to the strengthening of institutional memory. Greater institutional memory nurtures learning, which promotes adaptive co-management (Olsson, Folke, & Berkes, 2004). This feeds, again, into the point that an increase in the range of knowledge for learning also increases the AC of social-ecological systems (Berkes, 2007) and thus their resilience.

Redundancy

Self-organization also promotes redundancy. Heylighen (2001), while elaborating on the resilience of self-organized systems, mentions that one of the reasons for the tolerance of self-organized systems is the redundant, distributed organization. Redundancy is an established characteristic of ecological resilience (Peterson, Allen, & Holling, 1998). An ecosystem which has several species performing similar tasks is more resilient than one in which that is not the case. A reason for a decrease in redundancy in a system is the application of command-and-control measures which aims to increase the predictability and stability of systems (Holling & Meffe, 1996). Such approaches of flood risk management, referred to as flood control, have been found wanting, especially in light of climate change and urbanization. A flood risk management system with redundancy would represen...