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Leadership for resilient urban systems : two cases in Asheville, NC
The role of leadership in the resilience of urban systems is poorly understood. Leadership can be thought of as a complex practice, where the functions of leadership emerge from the relationships amongst actors, systems and institutions. There are five theorized functions of Complexity Leadership: Community Building, Information Gathering, Information Using, Generative and Administrative. The purpose of this dissertation was to explore the connection, if any, between Complexity Leadership and the resilience of urban systems.
This was explored in the context of two cases in Asheville, NC: the Residents' Council of Public Housing of Asheville and Rainbow Community School. The Residents' Council is a non profit that represents residents’ interests; Public Housing in Asheville is a typical for a 100k small city. The case documents some of the Residents' Council's attempt to adopt Dynamic Governance, a set of self-organizing governance practices. Rainbow Community School is a private k-8 school, recognized internationally as an Ashoka Change-Maker School for its innovative model of education. Data was collected through a hybrid of traditional ethnographic techniques and distributed ethnography. Data was analyzed inductively, using a combination of qualitative analysis and set theoretic analysis.
The research generated findings of three kinds. First, complexity leadership was necessary but not sufficient to account for the observed resilience qualities. To explain the observed coordination across other functions and capacity to engage with mystery , this research theorizes an additional function of Complexity Leadership—a Spiritual function. Second, individual strategic leadership played a role in fostering resilience through strengthening weak functions of complexity leadership. Third, resilience qualities emerged over time through the process of Panarchy. Spiritual leadership plays a role in fostering Panarchy through creating conditions for cross-scale resonance. The dissertation closes with the contributions of this research to theory, practice, and methods for research in complex urban systems.Community and Regional Plannin
Genomic reconstruction of the SARS-CoV-2 epidemic in England
AbstractThe evolution of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) virus leads to new variants that warrant timely epidemiological characterization. Here we use the dense genomic surveillance data generated by the COVID-19 Genomics UK Consortium to reconstruct the dynamics of 71 different lineages in each of 315 English local authorities between September 2020 and June 2021. This analysis reveals a series of subepidemics that peaked in early autumn 2020, followed by a jump in transmissibility of the B.1.1.7/Alpha lineage. The Alpha variant grew when other lineages declined during the second national lockdown and regionally tiered restrictions between November and December 2020. A third more stringent national lockdown suppressed the Alpha variant and eliminated nearly all other lineages in early 2021. Yet a series of variants (most of which contained the spike E484K mutation) defied these trends and persisted at moderately increasing proportions. However, by accounting for sustained introductions, we found that the transmissibility of these variants is unlikely to have exceeded the transmissibility of the Alpha variant. Finally, B.1.617.2/Delta was repeatedly introduced in England and grew rapidly in early summer 2021, constituting approximately 98% of sampled SARS-CoV-2 genomes on 26 June 2021.</jats:p