Urban Resilience and Planning Support Systems: The Need for Sentience

ABSTRACT

Developing resilience in built human environments is a complex undertaking. It requires decision support tools that can convey complexities in meaningful and understandable ways. Building smart cities and generating big data, however, is not enough. In order to improve decision-making and ultimately inform resilient communities we need to be able to translate big data at scales and in ways that are useful and approachable. In this paper we argue that creating more resilient communities calls for planning support systems (PSSs) that go beyond the ones we have today. We call for PSSs that possess a greater degree of sentience—that (a) possess a greater awareness of application context and user needs; (b) are capable of iterative learning; (c) are capable of spatial and temporal reasoning; (d) understand rules; and (e) are accessible and interactive. We consider the questions: How might intelligent or sentient information delivery systems allow for more strategic, context-aware, resilient, and ultimately sustainable communities? What primary design considerations would make such a system possible and useful given that, as of yet, no technology exists that is fully “sentient?”

KEYWORDS:

• Sentience
• urban resilience
• planning support systems
• urban dynamics

Acknowledgments

We would like to acknowledge the contributions made by our colleagues at the National Center for SuperComputing Applications (NCSA) and the Environmental Research and Development Centers Construction Engineering Research laboratory (ERDC CERL). Their insights and contributing discussions led to the writing of this paper.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on Contributors

Brian Deal is an associate professor in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Haozhi Pan is a PhD student in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Varkki Pallathucheril is an associate professor and Dean of the School of Architecture and Design at the American University, Sharjah, UAE

Gale Fulton is an associate professor and chair of the Graduate Landscape Architecture Program at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville