Over spring break I participated in the Taubman College’s externship program. This program links urban planning and architecture students with opportunities to explore public-, private-, and nonprofit-sector jobs. In turn, these opportunities help students build their professional network and understand the kinds of work they can expect to perform at similar organizations through internships and jobs.
(Source: DC.gov: Resilient DC)
I was hosted by the newly formed District of Columbia (DC) Office of Resilience. Resilience is defined by the Office of Resilience as the “capacity of individuals, communities, institutions, businesses, and systems within a city to survive, adapt, and grow” through chronic stresses and acute shocks. Resilience is a field that a growing number of cities are pursuing, primarily through the Rockefeller Foundation’s, 100 Resilient Cities initiative.
(Source: 100 Resilient Cities initiative)
Through the 100 Resilient Cities initiative, DC incorporated the Office of Resilience as a new component City government. I refer to the Office of Resilience as a “component” of DC government because they are not fully vested with department-level authority within by design. Charged with increasing DC’s capacity as a resilient city, the Office of Resilience must work with and across multiple branches of City government. Due to the collaborative and cross-functional nature of resilience, the Office of Resilience’s duties are more easily carried out as a component of DC government, rather than a singular branch siloed in its own bureaucracy. For this reason, DC’s Office of Resilience lies within the Office of the City Administrator, the office that oversees the daily functions of Washington.
My brief tenure at the Office of Resilience opened my eyes to just how broad the planning field. One of the aspects that drew me to planning was the ability to think about issues expansively, crafting multi-disciplinary solutions to city problems. Classically, urban planners have been concerned with such issues as future community visioning, land-use regulation, transportation infrastructure planning, economic planning, and neighborhood planning and design. Despite the breadth of these topics, the issues being thought about by the Office of Resilience were intriguing because they seemed broader still. In looking at how DC could withstand acute shocks and chronic stresses to communities, institutions, and city infrastructure, the Office of Resilience was considering how the city could respond to issues ranging from severe storm events to terrorist attacks to radical technological change.
The breadth of these issues surpass the expertise of any one individual, forcing the Office of Resilience to seek specialized knowledge to develop nuanced understanding of specific issues and to become generalists who understand how specialized recommendations fit within the wider context of communities, institutions, and city systems. My role as extern was to help the Office of Resilience develop their generalized knowledge of identified resilience challenges and propose avenues for how they might begin conversations with local actors to address these issues. To accomplish this task I researched three resilience challenges and wrote memos on issues such as: adapting to workforce automation, cyber resilience for smart cities, and how future transportation schemes could affect the way people and goods move within the city. This research helped me to understand the broader context of planning in relation to resilience and how DC might begin to plan for uncertain futures.
(Source: Pew Charitable Trusts)
In adapting to workforce automation, I learned how automation risk is less correlated with low-skill labor than it is with routine. This suggests that jobs that even jobs traditionally thought to require specialized skillsets and deep analysis, such as radiologists and accountants, are thought to be at relatively high-risk of automation. [01] This research helped spawn questions that are designed to provide a starting point for DC as they begin to plan for increased workforce automation. These questions included, how can DC reformulate school curricula to prioritize teaching problem-solving and critical thinking skills that are well-suited to creating, managing, and supporting automated industries? Another question was, how can DC determine ways to incentivize businesses to retrain their workers to support newly automating industries instead of eliminating existing jobs? Finally, how can DC rethink its social safety net to provide citizens with the security to focus on acquiring new skills that allow them to reenter the workforce instead of subsistence?
(Source: Zurich University of Applied Sciences)
Cyber resilience in smart cities forced me to think broadly about what city infrastructure and governance might look like in a more connected future. I learned about how smart and connected technologies are changing how cities function and manage assets in the interest of promoting greater efficiency. To do this, cities and private companies are collecting increasingly sensitive information about citizens and infrastructure. If this information is stolen or attacked, it can do direct harm to citizens and has the potential to cost cities huge sums of money in vital systems restoration costs. [02] Some questions that came out of this research that I believe will help DC begin to think about cyber resilience are, does DC’s crisis-management plan address cyber threats and does it have the appropriate authority to marshal resources to address those threats? How does the city want to define its cyber-resilience goals? Has DC mapped its assets in relation to their likelihood of being attacked and assessed the relative vulnerability and importance of those assets? How can the District balance the need to collect data on citizens for efficient City-service delivery with the privacy concerns from citizens? Finally, what data do District residents consent to have collected about them in public space?
In researching how future transportation schemes may change delivery of people, goods, and services, I learned how technologies like autonomous vehicles are part of a larger technological shift represented by Mobility of Demand (MOD). MOD signals the increasing commodification of transportation systems generally, providing travelers with more seamless travel options (i.e., routing, booking, and payment) for all trip segments. MOD largely relies on wireless internet, smartphone, and sensor technologies that direct transit based on demand and road condition. [03] MOD likely signals a future where multi-modal human and product transportation (cars, bikes, pedestrian, light and heavy rail, air, freight, and bus) support specific transit needs. This future is likely to decrease personal vehicle ownership, encouraging resource sharing and collective ownership, but may also increase emissions from transportation as the increased convenience and decreased cost of transportation allows for greater mobility. [04] Research is not in agreement on MOD’s effect on real-estate development, with some thinking that the factors above will encourage sprawl and others believing they will promote denser communities due to the lack of personal vehicle ownership. Questions that were developed from this research include, to what degree does the District want to MOD transportation technologies deployed? How does the District balance encouraging transit innovation while maintaining a high-quality of life for city residents? What will the District need to do to ensure that city technology infrastructure has the ability to process, store, and utilize the large amounts of data coming from the sensor arrays monitoring future MOD transportation? Which codes and laws will need to be modified to allow for MOD transportation development? What new codes and laws will need to be created to govern MOD transportation deployment? Finally, how will deployment of MOD technologies within the District affect the region?
My experience externing with the DC Office of Resilience expanded my understanding of how planning as a discipline could be applied in the public sector. The scale of the challenges that the Office of Resilience seeks to address is both daunting and inspiring. In the future, I hope to get the opportunity to work on resilience issues as the coalition building and interdisciplinary process of addressing these societal issues resonate with me because they speak to the reasons why I was drawn to planning in the first place. I hope that my colleagues also had illuminating externship experiences and I would encourage future cohorts to take advantage of externship opportunities if you are able.
References
[01] Frey, C. B. and Osborne, M. A. (2013). The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs To Computerisation. Oxford, UK: University of Oxford. Retrieved from https://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/downloads/academic/The_Future_of_Employment.pdf.
[02] Cyber Resilience In The Digital Age. World Government Summit. Dubai: United Arab Emirates. Retrieved from https://www.worldgovernmentsummit.org/api/publications/document?id=24717dc4-e97c-6578-b2f8-ff0000a7ddb6.
[03] Shaheen, S. & Cohen, A. (2017). Smart Cities and the Future of Transportation. Move Forward. Retrieved from https://www.move-forward.com/smart-cities-and-the-future-of-transportation/.
[04] Crane, K., Ecola, L., Hassell, S., & Nataraj, S. (2012). Energy Services Analysis: An Alternative Approach for Identifying Opportunities to Reduce Emissions of Greenhouse Gases. RAND Corporation. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7249/j.ctt3fh16f.11.
(Cover Image Source: Electronics Weekly)