Designing Anticipatory Knowledge for Resilient and Sustainable Urban Futures

The challenge of ensuring that urban resilience agendas do not compromise sustainability and equity goals demands that our cities be capable of envisioning future pathways and anticipating trade-offs of resilience strategies and solutions. While future-thinking is a common practice in urban planning, cities will need to get more ambitious about how they factor in foresight and unintended consequences of actions at very distant temporal scales into the knowledge systems that underpin their planning and decision-making. We ask, to what extent is the knowledge coming to bear on urban resilience planning and strategies inclusive of sustainability and equity goals? What kinds of upgrades or innovations are needed to make city knowledge systems more anticipatory? We draw upon the knowledge-action systems analysis (KASA) currently implemented in multiple US and Latin America cities to explore the types and networks of knowledge shaping urban resilience in different context and how conducive they are to moving beyond risk-based knowledge systems to enhancing anticipatory capacities for cities.