Motivated by the need for cities to prepare and adapt to unpredictable future weather conditions, we take a pragmatic approach to increasing the adaptive capacity of cities to climate change with a novel decision-making theory of safe-to-fail infrastructure. The goal of advancing safe-to-fail theory is to help guide development decisions that consider infrastructure failure and their consequences. Thus, there is an emerging need for decision makers, including policy makers, planners, engineers, and operators to understand infrastructure failures, bring this knowledge into the development process, and help adapt cities to unpredictable and changing climate risks. This approach connects to sustainability, where the cities deliberately think of and include the future cost of social, environmental and economic attributes in planning and decision-making. Safe-to-fail theory further reveals an emerging “infrastructure trolley problem” where the adaptive capacity of some urban regions is improved at the expense of others. we suggest a new decision-making perspective for resilient urban development, “safe-to-fail”, that helps manage climate adaptation trade-offs and improve city resilience.

Project 1: Fail-safe and safe-to-fail adaptation for roadway flooding in Phoenix

As climate change affects precipitation patterns, urban infrastructure may become more vulnerable to flooding. Flooding mitigation strategies must be developed such that the failure of infrastructure does not compromise people, activities, or other infrastructures. “Safe-to-fail” is an emerging paradigm that broadly describes adaptation scenarios that allow infrastructure to fail but control or minimize the consequences of the failure. Traditionally, infrastructure is designed as “fail-safe” where they provide robust protection when the risks are accurately predicted within a designed safety factor. However, the risks and uncertainties faced by urban infrastructures are becoming so great due to climate change that the “fail-safe” paradigm should be questioned. We propose a framework to assess potential flooding solutions based on multiple infrastructure characteristics using a multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) analytic hierarchy process algorithm to prioritize “safe-to-fail” and “fail-safe” strategies depending on stakeholder preferences. Using urban flooding in Phoenix, Arizona as a case study, We first estimate flooding intensity and evaluate roadway vulnerability using the Storm Water Management Model for a series of thunderstorms that occurred on September 8, 2014. Results show the roadway types and locations that are vulnerable. Next, We identify a suite of adaptation strategies and characteristics of these strategies, and attempt to more explicitly categorize flooding solutions as “safe-to-fail” and “fail-safe” with these characteristics. Lastly, We use MCDA to show how adaptation strategy rankings change when stakeholders have different preferences for particular adaptation characteristics.

Project 2: Expert elicitation on resilience perspectives and safe-to-fail infrastructure development 

Our current understanding of safe-to-fail is based on academic literatures. We expect that practitioner’s perspective on safe-to-fail can be dissimilar to researchers. Safe-to-fail systems thinking requires practitioners to reflect the resilience concept and system characteristics in this static decision making process with space- and context- specific subjectivity. This subjectivity of practitioners produce diverse perspectives on resilience and safe-to-fail from decision maker’s side and help researchers to understand how practitioners conjugate the theoretical concept of resilience in climate adaptation practices. This study explores practitioners’ perspectives on implementing resilience in decision practices for developing safe-to-fail infrastructure, which are recognized as reflecting the cultural, social, institutional, spatial and historical contexts in which their perspective is constructed. We utilize Q method – a research method used to study an individual’s subjectivity – to assess how practitioners view resilience as important theory for planning infrastructure and how they arrive at these conclusions. Q method allows us to explore diverse perspectives on employing resilience concepts and strategies and to recognize a shared vision among practitioners to achieve a safe-to-fail system in a city.