MEGADAPT (MEGAcity-ADAPTation), a participatory, hybrid, dynamic, spatially-explicit, integrated modeling approach, to analyze decision-making process as an endogenous system driver of urban vulnerability.

Abstract:

Urban planning is perhaps the ultimately a complex social and political process. In cities, the social and political norms, values, rules, and relationships that undergird and structure the myriad decisions made by public and private actors— or “socio-political infrastructure”—are likely to be as influential in urban vulnerability dynamics as “hard” infrastructure and environmental management. Although vulnerability is widely understood to be influenced by human decision-making, these decisions are rarely captured as endogenous to dynamic vulnerability models.

We analyze the role of socioenvironmental modeling in collaborative planning for sustainability, using urban planning in Mexico City as a case study. We present MEGADAPT (MEGAcity-ADAPTation), a hybrid, dynamic, spatially-explicit, integrated modeling approach to simulate the vulnerability of urban coupled socio-environmental systems. MEGADAPT is a methodological approach that allows vulnerability to be simulated as a reflexive process: the result of the interplay between mental models held by influential actors and the response of the biophysical and social world to the realization of decisions based on these mental models. MEGADAPT represents Mexico City as a self-organizing system. The output of MEGADAPT depicts the shift in the behavior of socio-environmental systems from one-way coupling/single-loop learning to two-way coupling/double-loop learning, with the decision-making process as an endogenous system driver