Technology Enhanced Stakeholder Collaboration for Supporting Risk-Sensitive Sustainable Urban Development

What is TRANSCEND?

The  TRANSCEND project, funded by the Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) in the UK, aims to investigate socio-technical systems required for enabling a transition towards a more risk-sensitive and transformative urban development approach in Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Malaysia. It aims to promote a participatory approach that supports the transparent and democratic involvement of all the relevant stakeholders (including experts from local authorities, disaster management authorities, developers, poor and vulnerable communities, and humanitarian organisations) to analyse, forecast, visualize and debate disaster-risk trade-offs and to choose development plans that ensure sustainability and equitable resilience, giving considerations to climate change adaptation.  

What are the key research questions TRANSCEND is addressing ?

• What type of formal and informal collaborative partnerships need to be established to alleviate long-standing tensions between development and DRR and progress towards more risk-sensitive and transformative urban development?
• What changes are required within the current urban planning process to facilitate risk-sensitive urban development, giving consideration to natural disasters and their impact on the environment, economy and vulnerable communities?
• What are the narratives that need to be developed, presented and discussed to establish a comprehensive understanding of the impact of the proposed developments on the community, economy and environment ?
• What are the underlying geo-spatial models, multi-hazard risk models, simulation models, social models, vulnerability, economic and climate change models that are required to analyse various narratives?
• How can we better present various complex narratives as visual scenarios so that they can be easily understood by a range of actors who are non-technical and who come from different disciplines, cultures, social backgrounds and vulnerable communities?
• How can we make participatory planning more accessible to a vulnerable communities?
• How can we use system dynamics’ modelling techniques to model the current state of the resilience of a vulnerable community and analyse if the new development projects are having a positive or negative impact on their resilience?
• What are the characteristics of a collaborative foresight and consensus building virtual workspace that can support participatory approach to risk-sensitive urban design?