What are the Role and Capabilities of Fab Labs as a Contribution to a Resilient City? Insights from the Fab City Hamburg

Recent events such as the COVID-19 pandemic or the Ever-Given accident in the Suez Canal, which have led to local product shortages and negative social and environmental impacts, highlight the need to build resilience in areas that are highly affected by such events: in cities. One aspect of a multidisciplinary concept of resilient cities is the local manufacturing of physical products, which currently is mainly based on globally complex supply chains. The resilience of a city can be impaired if the supply of consumer goods can no longer be guaranteed, e.g., due to the fragility of supply chains. From this perspective, one of several pathways to a more resilient city is the emerging movement of open production sites (so called Fab Labs), where physical products can be produced or repaired in a distributed way by the consumers themselves. In metropolitan areas such as Hamburg, Fab Labs form networks including makerspaces, open workshops and educational institutions – so called Fab Cities. This article highlights the role of Fab Labs with regards to urban resilience and displays the capability of the Fab City Hamburg to contribute to the resilience of the city. To explore these capabilities, semi-structured interviews were conducted with makers and operators, and different Fab Labs were explored via participant observation. This article demonstrates that Fab Labs can contribute to a resilient city - especially from the perspective of manufacturing capability but also regarding the development of technical education. However, there are clear limitations with regards to the vertical range and manufacturing diversity

Future-proofing the state: managing risks, responding to crises and building resilience

Summary: This book focuses on the challenges facing governments and communities in preparing for and responding to major crises — especially the hard to predict yet unavoidable natural disasters ranging from earthquakes and tsunamis to floods and bushfires, as well as pandemics and global economic crises. Future-proofing the state and our societies involves decision-makers developing capacities to learn from recent ‘disaster’ experiences in order to be better placed to anticipate and prepare for foreseeable challenges. To undertake such futureproofing means taking long-term (and often recurring) problems seriously, managing risks appropriately, investing in preparedness, prevention and mitigation, reducing future vulnerability, building resilience in communities and institutions, and cultivating astute leadership. In the past we have often heard calls for ‘better future-proofing’ in the aftermath of disasters, but then neglected the imperatives of the message. Future-Proofing the State is organised around four key themes: how can we better predict and manage the future; how can we transform the short-term thinking shaped by our political cycles into more effective long-term planning; how can we build learning into our preparations for future policies and management; and how can we successfully build trust and community resilience to meet future challenges more adequately

Synergy between biology and systems resilience

Resilient systems have the ability to endure and successfully recover from disturbances by identifying problems and mobilizing the available resources to cope with the disturbance. Resiliency lets a system recover from disruptions, variations, and a degradation of expected working conditions. Biological systems are resilient. Immune systems are highly adaptive and scalable, with the ability to cope with multiple data sources, fuse information together, makes decisions, have multiple interacting agents, operate in a distributed manner over a multiple scales, and have a memory structure to facilitate learning. Ecosystems are resilient since they have the capacity to absorb disturbance and are able to tolerate the disturbances. Ants build colonies that are dispersed, modular, fine grained, and standardized in design, yet they manage to forage intelligently for food and also organize collective defenses by the property of resilience. Are there any rules that we can identify to explain the resilience in these systems? The answer is yes. In insect colonies, rules determine the division of labor and how individual insects act towards each other and respond to different environmental possibilities. It is possible to group these rules based on attributes. These attributes are distributability, redundancy, adaptability, flexibility, interoperability, and diversity. It is also possible to incorporate these rules into engineering systems in their design to make them resilient. It is also possible to develop a qualitative model to generate resilience heuristics for engineering system based on a given attribute. The rules seen in nature and those of an engineering system are integrated to incorporate the desired characteristics for system resilience. The qualitative model for systems resilience will be able to generate system resilience heuristics. This model is simple and it can be applied to any system by using attribute based heuristics that are domain dependent. It also provides basic foundation for building computational models for designing resilient system architectures. This model was tested on recent catastrophes like the Mumbai terror attack and hurricane Katrina. With the disturbances surrounding the current world this resilience model based on heuristics will help a system to deal with crisis and still function in the best way possible by depending mainly on internal variables within the system --Abstract, page iii

Organizational Complexity, Plan Adequacy, and Nursing Home Resiliency: A Contingency Perspective

Some social and organizational behavior scientists measure resiliency through anecdotal qualitative research, i.e. personality analyses and stories of life experience. Empirical evidence remains limited for identifying measurable indicators of resiliency. Therefore, a testable contingency model was needed to clarify resiliency factors pertinent to organizational performance. Two essential resiliency factors were: 1) a written plan and 2) affiliation with a disaster network. This contingency study demonstrated a quantifiable, correlational effect between organizational complexity, disaster plan adequacy and organizational resiliency. The unit of analysis, the skilled nursing facility proved vulnerable, therefore justifying the need for a written emergency management plan and affiliation with a disaster network. The main purpose of this research was to verify the significance of emergency management plans within a contingency framework of complexity theory, resource dependency, systems theory, and network theory. Distinct sample moments quantified causal relationships between organizational complexity (A), plan adequacy (B) and resiliency (C). Primary and secondary research data were collected from within the context of public health and emergency management sectors within the State of Florida

Global Risks 2015, 10th Edition.

The 2015 edition of the Global Risks report completes a decade of highlighting the most significant long-term risks worldwide, drawing on the perspectives of experts and global decision-makers. Over that time, analysis has moved from risk identification to thinking through risk interconnections and the potentially cascading effects that result. Taking this effort one step further, this year's report underscores potential causes as well as solutions to global risks. Not only do we set out a view on 28 global risks in the report's traditional categories (economic, environmental, societal, geopolitical and technological) but also we consider the drivers of those risks in the form of 13 trends. In addition, we have selected initiatives for addressing significant challenges, which we hope will inspire collaboration among business, government and civil society communitie

State Antifragility: An Agent-Based Modeling Approach to Understanding State Behavior

This dissertation takes an interdisciplinary approach to understanding what makes states antifragile and why this matters by constructing a parsimonious, first of its kind agent-based model. The model focuses on the key elements of state antifragility that reside along a spectrum of fragility and transverse bidirectionally from fragile to resilient to antifragile given a certain set of environmental conditions. First coined by Nicholas Nassim Taleb and applied to economics, antifragility is a nascent concept. In 2015, Nassim Taleb and Gregory Treverton’s article in Foreign Affairs outlined five characteristics of state antifragility. This project aims to advance the study of anti-fragility in the context of the nation-state beyond these initial contributions by (1) development of three propensity variables associated with antifragility, (2) a new agent-based model to investigate antifragility, and (3) applying the findings of the model and the propensity score theorizing to two case studies. This research posits three propensity variables for a state to become fragile, resilient or antifragile. These variables include learning, power conversion, and agility. Cumulatively, these variables comprise a state’s capacity for dealing with various stressors in the international environment. The agent-based model in this dissertation captures the behavior of a single state when confronted with a stress in a variety of scenarios, forming an essential building block for future work (hinted at in the case studies) involving the interaction between states. The case studies show how the propensity variables, and the model results provide the basis for a distinctive and relatively novel evaluation of the historical record involving the history of the United States in and with Iraq, and the evolving great power rivalry between the United States and China, emphasizing the value of taking antifragility seriously in the context of International Studies

Playing in the End Times: Wargames, Resilience and the Art of Failure

This chapter argues that the political significance and cultural resonance of contemporary video wargames lies not simply in the forms of militarism that such games engender. Rather video wargames are a signature late modern medium through which forms of resilience are entrained through permanent arousal and continuous exposure to contingency and failure. The video wargamer is a subject who ultimately understands and experiences themselves as a resilient subject, a survivor. While inevitable failure may make the player deeply frustrated, such anger is predominantly directed towards a delimited form of self-improvement rather than towards structural critique of the gameworld, which is ruled out of court because the rules of the game cannot be changed. Wargaming thus serves as an activity in which specific models and practices of resilience training are increasingly made manifest. Wargames may be best understood and critiqued not simply in terms of cultural militarisation or pre-training for war, but as a space for playing through continual emergency, as an increasingly prominent cultural form where the player learns emotionally and imaginatively to bear the disaster of living in the end times