Shoreline Adaptations to Flooding in Urban Waterways Weekly Blog [PIG]

[DButler]

WEEK ONE

1. What did you accomplish last week?

• Onboarding with the program
• Advancing our understanding of protocols!
• Last week felt like a dismantling of our initial concept to investigate its parts. We’ve been spending time doing some personal exploration of protocols based on our individual experiences:
  • Celeste worked on reading more about protocols of stakeholder/community engagement that exist in the environmental and democracy space, especially.
    • Participatory democracy, methods and practices
    • Deliberative polling and People’s Assemblies
  • Danielle has been wondering: what are the large-scale measurement systems in place that we could use?
    • e.g. Sustainable Development Goals

1. What do you plan to do next week?

• Preparation for our Singapore trip! We need to set up meetings with contacts in Singapore related to our interest in shoreline adaptations. Danielle will continue to travel to Jakarta and Bangkok - there’s a lot to research and set up in advance.
• We need to develop a set of key questions that can help standardize the information we get as we begin interviewing experts and stakeholders.

1. What (if anything) is blocking your progress?

• We need to focus our project a little; the complexity and scope of our interest needs to be refined.
• Also, Celeste has been on pre-planned travel the past week and Danielle was finishing up teaching for the semester; that has made it harder to move forward. We did some pre-work the prior week, but we’re excited to focus.

1. Fun insight/tidbit, link, or idea?

A protocol intends to clearly define, and with that clarity, make something complex accessible. The intent of our project is to investigate shoreline adaptations to enable comparison of potential solutions, broaden the options on the table, and illuminate the complex convergence of government, environment, and culture that is shaping our future relationship to the water.

In Jana Tay’s A Phenomenology of Protocols, she discusses aliveness and flourishing. She links the concreteness of a protocol to the ethereal nature of how we perceive and live in the world; how we flourish in the world. Our passion for this project is born from a belief that people and societies are better off when they are connected to their environment. In coastal cities this means having access to the water, having an opportunity to have a relationship with the water. In our work, we have called this vibrancy, a belief that when waterways are as vibrant and diverse as the rest of the city they are part of it is good for both people and the environment. As more and more infrastructure is altered to adapt to rising waters this is more important than ever. Will the future further access achieved now or will it continue standards of disconnection with more walls? So the intent of demonstrating paths that lead to more access and work with the opportunities of water (not just in response to fear) is a desire to enable more flourishing.

Our challenge is that protocols are most useful when they are clear, concise, and simple. The elements shaping regulations and infrastructure on urban waterways are anything but simple. This week we have explored a multi-prong inquiry, approaching our project from the perspective of getting to know protocols and teasing apart what aspects of shoreline adaptions are most useful to highlight.

The first, getting to know and understand protocols has consisted of protocolizing various aspects of my life. I (Danielle) realized that all my practices are just protocols. I set about visualizing them. Morning Routine Protocol, Preparation for Work Protocol, Drawing Protocol. Most daunting and applicable - a protocol to check the assumption of our proposed project.

Celeste and I operate grassroots cultural organizations. We have seen the power of community projects and advocacy to change and influence policies about the water and begin normalizing a different standard of access to waterways in New York. Our framing for this project has been to create a tool for laypeople to better advocate for more innovative responses to flooding that can build a future where we are more not less connected to our waterways. In this research phase, we want to speak to more people and see if our assumption of the appropriate audience is correct. What is the right place to push to enable flourishing?

[Venkat]

Awesome update! I’m trying to find Singapore waterfront contacts for you.

[celerae]

Week Two!

1. What did you accomplish last week?

• We have begun to effectively narrow the scope of our research. After both interrogating the large number of protocols at play in how cities respond to sea level rise and beginning to map out the complexity of this issue, we’re looking to focus primarily on how publics are, or could be, engaged in decisionmaking about adaptation.
• We did some interviews with climate change adaptation professionals in Portland, Ore., and Philadelphia that helped us with this focusing process.
• We prepared for the research portion of our Singapore trip.
  • We have made initial contact with artists, curators, activists, and academics working on climate and public engagement issues locally, and we’re getting excited to learn how public knowledge, social activism, and stakeholder engagement activities work in such a very different social context!
  • We continued honing our research questions based on our focusing efforts.
  • Pre-reads for the workshop and learning about Singapore, generally.
  • Danielle is continuing on with other research work in SE Asia, and worked on her plans for those legs of the journey.

1. What do you plan to do next week?

   • We’ll be in Singapore! We’ll be roadtesting our research questions and kicking off our first 3-week “Research Sprint” of the summer. We’re aiming to spend two weeks in research/expansion mode, and one week in collaborative synthesis, refocusing, and (initially lo-fi) prototyping.

2. What (if anything) is blocking your progress?

   • Details about the Singapore trip have been fairly limited, so scheduling meetups with our potential sources has been somewhat blocked… but largely we are not blocked.

3. Fun insight/tidbit, link, or idea?

   I (Celeste) have spent quite a bit of time over the past few weeks looking at existing protocols for urban adaptation to coastal flooding and sea level rise.

   A growing number of cities have adopted formal guidance on how to incorporate and assess technical and scientific information about expected flooding into their planning processes. These documents are often quite detailed and technical, dealing with a broad range of conditions, site-specific data that must be evaluated regarding flood elevation, existing essential infrastructure, natural resources, and current usage. A few such documents include public engagement as part of such protocols — but I have yet to find a detailed protocol for how the experience, use, and knowledge of stakeholders should be included.

   The most detailed plans on these points — such as this one from Portland — do not specify standards or expectations for how knowledge generated through ‘community engagement and outreach’ should influence policy. Similarly, when specific methods, techniques, or actions are included, they often include a limited set of tools that provide “feedback” opportunities for the public — “charrettes, focus groups, open houses, workshops, and public meetings.”

   If climate, flooding and tidal data — which have enormous local variation, high degrees of uncertainty, and extreme sensitivity to changing conditions — can be incorporated into protocols for evaluating climate change-related action, why couldn’t such policies include a better protocol for engaging with the public?

   As Kara Kittel and Toby Shorin write in Unprotocolized Knowledge, "By setting out the boundaries of global validity, knowledge protocols also determine the lines of conflict where new ideas and theories fight for inclusion.”

   This is where we are hoping our work can have an impact; how can we improve, expand, and scale up protocols that expand the sources and types of knowledge that shape urban shorelines?

[chelbelllllls]

Hi Celeste and Danielle, chancing upon this thread as a participant in the Datus and Nusas Workshop. I am part of a few environmental groups in Singapore advocating for biodiversity conservation along shorelines and have some connections to researchers. Let me know if I can help build some connections!

[DButler]

Link to blog that got posted off this thread:

[PIG] Weeky Update: Shoreline Adaptations

I’m tardy posting this update this week, because it’s been so busy! Also, I should note that Danielle is still in SE Asia at the moment, so I’m posting this update without her review/good edits. What did you accomplish (in the) last (two) week(s)? Two weeks ago: Danielle and I spent the prior week in Singapore, attending the Nusantara workshop, before spending a few days, on our own, doing some shoreline research on site. We were unable to meet with as many experts, in person, as we hoped in …

[DButler]

1. What did you accomplish last week?

Last week I did field research in Bangkok. I tried to visit many different types of water locations and talk with people who could give me insight into Bangkok’s water culture, flooding, bureaucracy, and informal sector. My time in Bangkok ended with me being invited to present about my work and philosophy to Landprocess, a landscape architecture firm run by Kotchakorn Voraakhom. It felt great to drive deep enough into a place to be invited to give something back while I was there.

Bangkok Field Research

Celeste is supporting the Gowanus community through a public comment period of the Superfund-related restoration process. Our SoP project explores these three areas:

• Culture change activities that shift perspectives and engagement with the water in advance of planning
• Community education and informational activities that aim to equip communities with technical and scientific context for evaluating and proposing solutions
• Public engagement processes within infrastructure planning that accept cultural adaptations as strategic responses to climate

Celeste’s engagement with this process is giving us direct insight into the second step.

1. What do you plan to do next week?

While I was in Thailand Celeste updated our project plan as we’ve focused and clarified our scope. We are starting to see the shape our research can go inside. We will synthesize our learnings from Singapore and Bangkok into this structure and continue to explore the tentacles of what we’re researching.

1. What (if anything) is blocking your progress?

Jetlag. I’m slowly recovering.

1. Fun insight/tidbit, link, or idea?

Datus Nusas Protocols Workshop

What tools assist with expansive thinking and considering different perspectives? How can a group be prepped and run to enable the best outcomes within a think tank experience? I left the speculative-thinking protocol workshop considering these questions. I found the workshop to be engaging and the group dynamics positive, silly, and experimental (hard things to achieve) but there were also a few personalities that dominated the experience and outcomes could be clarified.

Brainstorm list:

• Include opportunities for individual writing so people could get their ideas clear before joining group work

• No phones

• More time - the workshop focused on Maritime Southeast Asia. More time to be in Singapore and explore the area would have added an experiential element to the things we discussed. Maybe assigning missions, interviews, thematic explorations, workshop participants planning mini-trips to show others their view on the place. . .

• While doing group work with strangers I was reminded of the article, The Everyday Supercommunicators Who Get Groups in Sync. The piece discusses the characteristics of group members that bring groups into alignment.

  “Some of the groups had become much more synchronized than others. The brains of these participants looked strikingly alike during the second scan, as if they had agreed to think precisely the same way.”

  These groups contained people who were more likely to ask questions, follow emotional tone shifts, have their minds changed, and encourage brainstorming. I don’t know if alignment is always the goal in group work, but it is interesting to consider what group dynamics would be most fruitful and then chart a subtle path to suggest those traits. It’s easy for people to fall into patterns of conversational dominance. I also believe these patterns can be nudged with suggestions to more supportive behavior.

• Facilitators should disrupt patterns of dominant communicators. Nothing needs to be heavy handed but an example would to hand the microphone for sharing to different people each time or construct sharing to take different shapes.

• One of many things I found successful was creating a game. Creating in the context of a game is such a great way to consider something serious through a non-serious lens.

While participating in the workshop many ranges and relationships were discussed. I’ve been curious about how protocols and processes can be visualized so I’ve started to draw these spectrums.

Bangkok

Emerging themes:

• Over reliance on grey infrastructure
• Spectrums of informal to formal, piecemeal to systems thinking
• Successful adaptations that worked someplace else not working as expected

From my perspective in New York, I think about flooding and sea level rise as an emerging problem. The problem is that the water is increasing and we need to adapt. In Bangkok, the water has always been there and the problem is the hardening of the city. I sat in on a lecture given by Professor Danai Thaitakoo. He described Bangkok as an amphibious city with seasons of deluge and seasons of draining. “All the sad songs were about the dry season.” This pulsing landscape was built into the culture and built into the infrastructure. Homes along waterways were floating or built on stilts. Places that got a lot of water grew long-grain rice and places that got less grew rice that was suited to less water. Thaitakoo marked the Green Revolution as a turning point in this cycle that accepted the coming and going of the water. Instead of one crop per year of a variety that worked within the natural environment the new kinds of rice had three growing cycles and required a consistent amount of water - disrupting the historic pattern of how water flowed through the landscape and when. The flip side of this was the 300% increase in food production and dramatic increase of life expectancy. (Making the Rice Bowl Bigger: Agricultural
Output and Rural Poverty in Thailand).

Controlling water in one places takes it from or pushes it to another. So walls and hard infrastructure were built to protect the areas that had never before flooded. As Bangkok’s waterways became walled silt stopped being deposited on the landscape leading to another of the city’s issues - it’s sinking.

This context has made me consider the importance of how we define the problem. Is the problem water, walls, or our inability to consider the complexity of a system? What if we exchanged problem for opportunity?

[Venkat]

Nice job in Bangkok!

[celerae]

What did you accomplish last week?

We have been deep in research land. Danielle has been looking into social infrastructure and Hamberg’s use of interactive digital tools in their planning of Hafencity. Celeste has continued digging into coastal resiliency planning as it’s done today, and the use of participatory design in related planning contexts. We went to some relevant public meetings, as well. Danielle attended a kick off event for the coastal resilience plan in the South Street Seaport neighborhood of New York. Celeste also attended the Aspen Ideas Festival this week, where she connected with a variety of folks working on related civic engagement, architecture, and public sector innovation.

What do you plan to do next week?

Celeste is away on a long-ago-planned family vacation next week. Danielle is continuing to collect case studies of adaptation strategies, and thinking about visual models for our output.

What (if anything) is blocking your progress?

Nothing, really

Fun insight/tidbit, link, or idea?

We interviewed someone who works in resiliency efforts as part of an NYC agency’s capital planning. We got a really great picture of the soft protocols — norms, culture, org structure — that shape the city’s planning approach, beyond just hard engineering protocol. For example, the location of resilience planning within state and local government can vary widely, depending on the people/politics involved. In this conversation, we saw how placement inside a capital planning department can result in adaptive choices that emphasis hardening and barriers: Capital projects need to be designed for a 25-50 year lifespan, and under the city’s climate design guidelines, projects are designed to protect existing infrastructure from the dramatically higher sea levels (daily flooding) anticipated in 2080.

Over the next 50 years, though, flooding events will become more frequent — a few times a year, then monthly, then weekly, before becoming daily or permanently inundated. These are dramatically different conditions, and most places aren’t accustomed to designing for this level of dynamic change in a long-range capital plan. Therefore, the solutions that get designed and built today prioritize the end-state of permanent or daily flooding — and overlook the experience of waterfront communities during the earlier periods of flooding.

Design solutions that might accept intermittent and increased flooding, or newer solutions — whether technical, cultural, or policy — that take a more dynamic or adaptive approach aren’t as common. Many also haven’t been “proven” in other contexts, making it harder for a department doing long-term, public infrastructure investments to adopt.

That’s part of why many of these waterfront plans seem to lack imagination. Most people can only imagine what they know. Part of the intent of our project is to collect and share methodologies to help people expand their imaginative capabilities. A challenge is sharing these examples in a comparable and digestible format while not losing the complexities of these disparate places.

The article Venkat posted in the Telegram chat: Should this be a map or 500 maps?, opens the question of synthesis wider. The piece is about a distributed mapping project that was attempted in Spain at the end of the 18th century. Priests across the region were given a questionnaire and instructed to map the area. Chaos ensued. No two maps shared any characteristics. “Each priest implicitly reveals how they see the world around them, and the relative importance of its constituent parts: nature or people, religion or trade, architecture or landscape, precision or vibes.” Each of these maps shows the variation of human perspective and values. One of the author’s takeaways is that “modularity is inversely correlated to expressiveness.” We take this note to heart as we attempt to find a way to compare and synthesize water stories and processes across vast variations in governance, culture, landscape, and challenges faced. Flooding interventions, even within the same city, need to take into account the particularities of each area’s issues and environment. There are multiple examples of an intervention that works in one place not working as expected when implemented somewhere else.

One potential superpower of the priests in this map-making project that created all these dynamic outcomes was that they had potentially never seen a map! In a world of Google Maps, we would all likely draw something that fell along a narrowing definition map. I (Danielle) experienced this recently while helping my 4 yr old nephew draw a treasure map. He and I had a very different idea of what a map meant. Mine were based in a lifetime of learning the definition of “map” and “treasure”, he was uninhibited by any preconceived notion.

One map or 500 maps? How can these disparate interventions and processes be captured in a way that is both digestible and also enables expansive consideration of possibilities and needs?

[DButler]

WEEK EIGHT

1. What did you accomplish last week?

Celeste is traveling in the UK and toured the Somerset Levels drainage infrastructure. In Langford, a community riverfront park used recreational access and examples of how frequent and seasonal flooding was a normal part of life in local towns to encourage greater awareness of local climate change adaptation.

Danielle studied forms and tools of participatory processes.

1. What do you plan to do next week?

• Research methods of evaluating the efficacy of informal participation methods
• Interviews scheduled with some organizers and academics
• Writing

1. What (if anything) is blocking your progress?

Nothing blocking

1. Fun insight/tidbit, link, or idea?

How does culture change?

We are researching flooding adaptations and the conditions that enable community investment and meaningful participation. I admit to being slow to apply the group conversation about punk to this work, but a few things have changed my thinking. (Including me, Celeste adds!) However, I have become very interested in the concept as a lens for examining techniques for changing culture.

I started to see participatory models along a spectrum of informal to formal. The paper, Making space: how public participation shapes environmental decision-making would label the spectrum “created” to “invited” spaces.

“Invited” spaces are participation opportunities where decision-making authorities invite the public to provide input (i.e., public participation as traditionally understood). But citizens themselves also create spaces for engagement rooted in shared identities and common interests (i.e., mobilization).

The planner we met with last week said that her group was not influenced by any advocacy and community groups, but later said that she had become passionate about the water through participating in street end clean up and other “weird” events held by the Newtown Creek Alliance and other community groups. This small anecdote means a lot to me. Celeste and I both make community events on the water in New York. I experientially know the value of this scale of activation but don’t have much to back up that emotional knowledge.

I believe that activations on the informal, created space, grassroots scale are integral to creating culture change. It feels important to dissect this assumed belief to investigate how culture changes, what methods are available, and what the opportunities are at each scale. (I’m looking at culture change through social and political movements not through calamity.)

I believe that action at all points of the spectrum is necessary, as the Making Space paper points out “nearly all contentious decisions today are shaped by both structured
public participation and mobilization.” I’d like to know how one informs the other. What are the conditions that enable people to become invested enough to participate in often arduous public process?

I believe that these more informal actions are necessary to initiate culture change on a small scale and then invest some people enough that they participate in more formal ways.

I’m curious to know what the steps are between informal and formal.

Do you all want to play?

I made us this collaborative excalidraw spectrum so we could lay out organizing methodologies and examples along it.

Some of it might be an exploration of language - is informal the same as invited space?

How will the placement of mid-spectrum methods be determined? What would a framework be? A protocol???

How do these concepts (methodologies/ideologies) get actualized in the world?

How to play

Go to the Collaborative Spectrum

Add methodologies, ideologies, and what-have-you to the top line.

Add examples of actions and projects that exemplify that position in the spectrum to the 2nd line.

• You can add links to text (highlight →2 finger click → create link)
• There is infinite space on the board so have at it with connective lines and comments.
• Feel free to move things around. If you are making large changes or reordering please screenshot the previous state and post it in the blog comments
• Group text with associated lines
• Try grouping concepts that tie together
• Feel free to include your initials so we can find out more about your idea

Characteristics to be considered

• Collective intent
• Desire for large-scale change (aka not invested in remaining counter-culture)
• Keep in mind some methods might act as a bridge between different levels of formality

Follow-up question

• Is this a valuable lens to consider through?
• How do these steps interact with one another and bridge?
• How did you determine where along the line something was? What’s the framework?
• Would it be possible to know the impact of informal interventions?
• What would methods of determining value be? If you have ideas, suggestions for who to talk to, or things to read please share.

One opportunity of this lens is that it frames culture change as happening even in small-scale acts, suggesting that anyone could choose to shape culture.

[Ideas in the blog come from both Celeste and Danielle]

[celerae]

I’m delayed posting this update because I was trying to cram too much into the final question/response.

1. What did you accomplish last week?

   Last week, Danielle was traveling on a client project, so I was on my own. I did a lot of reading and spent an enjoyable amount of time reviewing past SoP content and PILL projects.

   The prior week, we spent our time in deep discussion about how to refine our output from this project. (I also attended an event about community-led design for climate adaptation that was excellent food for thought.)

2. What do you plan to do next week?

   Next week:

   • A few more conversations with folks in the space we’re working in.
   • Prepping for our first jury meeting.

3. What (if anything) is blocking your progress?

   • Nothing.

4. Fun insight/tidbit, link, or idea?

   Over the past few weeks, Danielle and I have been zooming in on a pair of related issues/opportunities that we think need to inform our approach to improving coastal adaptation planning protocols. I would describe them as:

   • Defining and framing the problem or risk that sea level rise poses for cities, an issue I wrote about in an earlier forum post.
   • Created space and informal activations that build feeling and curiosity about the water, which Danielle wrote about in our last update.

   We’ve also been trying to figure out what form our output — which we’ve envisioned as a tool — should take, and trying to figure out what our toolkit might do to support transformative action on these two points, specifically.

   Over the past week or so, there have been some really interesting discussions in the Telegram and in the PILL project presentations that helped me knit together these pieces with the larger protocol research framework. I want to try and braid together a few things that seem like they’re coming together for me. I am eager for folks to chime in with comments or questions; I feel like I’m just scratching the surface of so many recent learnings. I’ll share thoughts on three things:

   1. Yuemin Huang’s “Protocol with uncommunicables” project, and specifically her insights into the importance of affect to disrupting and improving protocolized spaces.

   2. Venkat’s musing about the ‘protocol for rizz’ on the Telegram chat:

      “This usage of ‘protocol’ feels a bit weird. Most people wouldn’t try to develop charisma in such a structured way. It’s similar to why “non-violent communication” (NVC) feels like a bit off. But now I’m thinking these are both cases where ordinary intuitive behaviors need unintuitive levels of protocolized structure because either the person is unusually awkward and needs more structure to figure things out (the link I posted) or the context is extra sensitive/risky (NVC). It’s a bit like being in social outer space. In space, all ordinary intuitive behaviors need to be protocolized.”

   3. Efforts to engage indigenous communities in adaptation planning

   I think there’s a really important thread tying all three of these things together that has something to do with the relationship between protocols and how they relate to the ways on knowing.

   “It Is Feelings That Give the Shape of the Problem”

   Yuemin’s project really excited me, because I think it helps articulate, in a playful way, the fact that protocols structure action-taking in a way that assumes knowledge of the problems we are trying to solve through compliance with the protocol. However, a problem, as she reveals through her project, always has an affective dimension: feelings inform my understanding of the problem requiring action; I am always part of the problem I intend to solve. As her presentation says, “It is feelings that give the shape of the problem, not the logic.”

   Intuitively, as Danielle wrote two weeks ago, we know this. It’s why, in our own projects, we each work on cultural interventions and try to form created spaces that spark questions and draw attention to alternative framings of the problem.

   This resonated with me as I have been thinking about our deepening sense that coastal adaptation planning is a great example of a dangerous protocol: in almost all cases, coastal adaptation planning begins in a place that assumes the shape of the problem and seeks to gain compliance by emphasizing threat and building a social consensus that the desire response is to seek protection, increase fortification, or retreat from a rising sea.

   But through our research this summer, we more clearly can see specific protocol design flaws, many of which are being actively debated and discussed by organizations and agencies worldwide. For example:

   • Coastal flooding is typically measured through a limited set of data — tide levels and projected sea level rise for these measures — that often undercounts other related sources of urban flooding.
   • Risk from sea level rise is calculated on data set of economic costs, which typically fail to account for social, cultural, or other softer experiential measures of the impact of flooding.
   • Planning timeframes often require low-frequency, high-investment decisions that fit into capital planning and long-range thinking, viewing incremental and adaptive planning as wasting money and time or ignoring the long-term realities of climate change.

   Feelings and perception influence each and every one of these framings. In all cases, there other ways of knowing that can open other ways of framing the problems and imagining opportunities. Many of these ways of knowing are about affective and experiential knowledge that help us reframe value and risk. (I found a particular resonance between the planning timeframes issue and the recursive nature of Yuemin’s proposed approach, which forces a re-evaluation of the problem as both the facts and the feelings change through protocol.)

   As Yuemin suggests, a multi-sensory validation of the protocol can be a powerful tool for better understanding — and perhaps even improving — the protocol outcomes.

   It’s a Bit Like Being In Social Outer Space

   Venkat shared a link in the Telegram to a newsletter on a protocol for developing ‘rizz’ that he found somewhat confounding — and after engaging with the Uncommunicable project, I got more interested in his comments. Building social relationships is a skill, and there are a ton of implicit protocols for how we relate to one another. This group often uses the handshake greeting example in talking about protocols, but there are so many others that are within the social functioning space: small talk; ritualized behaviors around how to end a meal and show appreciation to the host; how to start and end networking conversations in a professional context. These are all social skills that have fairly strict, intra-community rules. Of course people need guides and teaching — but often it’s seen as somehow gauche or awkward or declasse to need them articulated.

   My own personal theory here is that it’s only OK to teach such protocols to people when you’re thereby gaining compliance with a larger social order that you want to uphold. (I’m thinking of examples ranging from things like Love on the Spectrum, which explained normative dating protocols to folks with autistic spectrum disorder, to the programs at universities that help first-generation college students, students of color, or otherwise disadvantaged students learn about the social and cultural (aka class) aspects of college life.)

   This is precisely what I found interesting about Uncommunicables. It is a way of interrogating knowledge systems through affective experience that makes you aware of your own assumptions, your own ways of knowing/what is legible to you, and can reveal how those things are implicit in the intended protocol outcomes. I think making assumptions explicit can destabilize them and open up new possibilities for the outcome.

   Mātauranga Māori

   The final thread here, and I’ve gone on way too long already, is that this reading of Yuemin’s project also helped me understand the difference between kinds of efforts to incorporate indigenous knowledge into official resiliency planning practices.

   One piece that I read this week was a Climate Adaptation Report from the Cree Nation in Canada (the website seems to be down currently, so I’m not linking to the report), which was dramatically different than any other such report I have seen. While most climate adaptation reports center on data sets of temperatures and precipitation and other hard metrics, with experiential and narrative elements used to bring data to life for readers, the Cree report inverted this model. It is rooted almost exclusively in community observation, narrative, and experiential knowledge, with climate data playing, at best, a supporting role.

   We’ve encountered a lot of writing over the summer about the way that planners are learning from indigenous communities, e.g., to learn water management techniques that were lost under colonial control or learn about the ecological history of a place to inform understanding about flooding risk. But this was something different; rather than planners incorporating indigenous knowledge into their existing protocol, the Cree seem to be transforming the very nature of the protocol.

   I haven’t fully synthesized these ideas into some clear direction for our project, but in the ongoing effort to work in public and share my ideas in progress, I welcome responses!

   Note: Any good ideas in here are attributable to Danielle, as well — but the lack of a clear thesis and half-baked or amateur ideas are entirely my own.

[uminh]

@celerae

and can reveal how those things are implicit in the intended protocol outcomes.

I also really agree with this, I think the visibility is one of the powerful outcome that protocol can bring to us.

I’ve deeply appreciated your project, and I’ve sensed a strong human-centric approach in both your work and the SoP previous meetings.
Seeing the content you mentioned, I myself am quite moved. I feel that when you incorporate my framework into the actual thinking process, it vividly interprets and displays another part of the content that I decide not to express in the project. I have limited myself to formal reasoning, really hoping it could serve as a framework without any private or personal intentions, capable of offering help to open up new ways of thinking when facing real issues. It is indeed an empty skeleton, thank you for seeing it and giving it flesh and blood.

Also, I super agree that socially engagement is very Punk.

[DButler]

1. What did you accomplish last week?

Celeste and I have been interviewing engagement strategists and park designers and diving into the details of specific shoreline resiliency projects and engagement events.

It was satisfying to share our work on Wed and get good feedback and leads.

1. What do you plan to do next week?

Continue to work on the database and refine the criteria

1. What (if anything) is blocking your progress?

The complexity of the area we are pursuing is daunting (insert your own, duh, here). We’ve been working on a tool to support conversations between communities and planners, asking what would get people ready to have more productive interactions. I come to this work with a steadfast optimism that improvement is possible, however, some of our research and interviews have demonstrated the entrenched brokenness of the process and left me so frustrated. Is this a block? Maybe it’s a motivator.

Another block/accelerator - power and wifi have been intermittent in Vermont where I’ve been working over the past week due to rain and wind. Vermont has largely been considered a climate change proof place by its residents. The last few years of severe flooding are calling that into question. People are confronting flooding in new ways and going through a process of shifting how they think about flooding and water. A flood was once a thing that happened along rivers, now it washes out roads and sends gravel into basements on the highest of hills. Unanswered question of whether Montpelier should be rebuilt and how are commonplace. And like in most places these hard climate driven conversations are happening alongside a housing crisis.

1. Fun insight/tidbit, link, or idea?
   
   

I love the moment of illumination when a new way of imagining the world occurs. This xkcd comic has been getting new life in the wake of that one random person in San Francisco stopping a catastrophic hack. The comic gives a visual for the tenuous slapdash structure of the internet. It is also a reminder that mental models don’t need to be true to be helpful and that we can choose to toggle between lenses.

In our research, as highlighted in the last blog post, we’ve begun to see some core assumptions of how risk is framed in shoreline development projects as an example of a dangerous protocol. If Dangerous Protocols is chapter one - the recognition of how choices become assumed and assimilated into identity and culture, what does ch. 2, disruption of assumed protocols, look like?

Dangerous Protocols premises that we live inside assumptions, that protocols are “increasingly implicit, or embedded into our consciousness, and therefore harder to detect or resist.” It’s a natural assimilation to find efficiency in navigating a complex world. The outcome might be positive, neutral, dangerous, or lead to missed opportunities on small or large scales.

When assumptions are dangerous or lead to missed opportunities for better outcomes,

• How can we initiate a disruption to examine if an underlying premise should be held on to or changed? What tools enable this?
• What tools facilitate a process for expanding ways of thinking and valuing?
• How can opportunities for interrogating assumptions be built into a process?

This brainstorm doesn’t put a judgment on assumptions, just the belief that we should routinely check if the instilled framing backs up the values and outcome we want to disseminate.

The nature of assumptions varies. Some are held loosely. Some are never chosen personally but invisibly ingrained through culture. Some are attached to values and identity. Some get codified into our systems through infrastructure and bureaucracy and “persists by inertia” as Drew Austin put it in Protocols Don’t Build Pyramids.

Disruption of our beliefs and assumptions often comes in the form of a crisis. In more ideal circumstances they come as accidental or cultivated ah-ha moments when we learn something new, gain perspective, or employ tools for examination. The area of application, issue, audience, and level of entrenchment would dictate a wide variation in strategy.

I’m specifically interested in the assumptions that are not only embedded but also laced with fear and tension. There’s an interesting theme between Shoreline Adaptations (us), Fire Protocols, and Pluralistic Voting. We all have identified a need for soft-interventions that disrupt assumed base framing and ask participants to shift lenses or hold more nuance. However, flooding, fire, and voting all have complex histories of distrust, fear, and thus tension built into interactions around them.

Games, future casting, and science fiction are powerful methods of facilitated expansive thinking because they distance people from fear and failure states to enable problem solving of real issues in a failure free proxy world. Games and speculative exercises also invite non-experts to contribute and thus diversify the pool of perspectives and ideas.

Ender’s Game comes to mind as a sci-fi example of this concept used to a dangerous end.

Yet, gameplay and experimentation involve social risk and thus require buy-in from participants. A game at a planning meeting with a city agency would be nearly impossible due to the expectations of decorum, social risk, power imbalance, and real-world stakes. Therefore, initiating a disruption from outside of the formal process would enable more opportunities to expand upon calcified patterns. (Shoot, I’ve circled back to punk!)

The opportunity here isn’t always to keep these methods on the exterior. But in that space, you can experiment and defy expectations. Finding methods that work there can then be adapted into more subtle shapes once they are known. For example, in a setting with buy-in, you could say “Soften your gaze into your periphery vision,” because that triggers the parasympathetic nervous system and slows heart rate. But in a setting with less buy-in where you wanted to calm participants and even that prompt would be outside decorum, you could ask people to try and take in as much of the skyline as possible.

Working from an informal space allows for experimentation and pulling tools from any genre. If a method for disruption lies in removing people from expectations, cross-pollinating across spaces with surprising tactics could be a powerful strategy.

Next up, Chapter 3, Tools for Expanding Perspectives and Ideas.

If anyone wants to talk about these methodologies over zoom or a cocktail let me know. I’m starting to put together a nested list of framing, methods, and opportunities but it’s far too sprawling for public consumption.

Ideas come from both me and Celeste