Melissa Bedinger

The University of Edinburgh | UoE

Flood hazards are increasing as a result of climate change and growing urbanization. Research has shown that people who are socially vulnerable are more exposed to flood risk. Flood disadvantage that exists today is projected to continue in the future: it is stubborn. We present a bold new research agenda for exploring how different physical, socia...

Urban science questions are often difficult to answer due to the complexity of cities and the processes that shape and sustain them. Past work responded to this by proposing the Urban Systems Abstraction Hierarchy (USAH) as a tool which overcomes four complexity obstacles and operationalises resilience concepts. For the first time, this paper appli...

Abstract Climate change will mean cities are exposed to more frequent short‐term shocks such as floods. City‐scale resilience is achieved by understanding how these shocks interact with longer‐term stressors (e.g., social inequality). The Urban Systems Abstraction Hierarchy (USAH) has been developed for this purpose. In this paper, Glasgow (UK) is...

To add to the engineer’s toolkit for the twenty-first century challenges, we demonstrate a novel systems model for understanding urban impacts. The model captures interdependencies between different interconnected systems (or sectors, e.g. recreational services or public healthcare) in cities, from the tangible (e.g. resources such as roads) to the...

Network analysis is a useful tool to analyse the interactions and structure of graphs that represent the relationships among entities, such as sectors within an urban system. Connecting entities in this way is vital in understanding the complexity of the modern world, and how to navigate these complexities during an event. However, the field of net...

The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted public health, the economy and society—both directly and indirectly. Few approaches exist to understand these complex impacts in a way that (1) acknowledges cross-sectoral interdependencies; (2) models how short-term shocks translate into impacts on longer-term outcomes; (3) builds in local, contextual variation;...

The paper discusses how the Urban System Abstraction Hierarchy (USAH) can be used as an informative hazard-agnostic tool to understand interdependencies between shocks which impact tangible parts of the city system, and longer-term stressors which impact intangible outcomes of the city system. To create resilient cities, we must grapple with such c...

Social capital is considered important for resilience across social levels, including communities, yet insights are scattered across disciplines. This meta-synthesis of 187 studies examines conceptual and empirical understandings of how social capital relates to resilience, identifying implications for community resilience and climate change practi...

Data analytics describes the use, manipulation, cleaning, processing, and analysis of data to reach conclusions. Taken at face value, there is nothing new about data analytics from a human factors perspective. A single, massive, multimodal data set could potentially be used for innumerable analytical purposes by a vast range of interested stakehold...

In this paper, we explore how we can use catchment resilience as a unifying concept to manage and regulate catchments, using structured reviews to support our perspective. Catchments are complex systems with interrelated natural, social, and technical aspects. The exposure, vulnerability, and resilience of these aspects (separately and in combinati...

The Sendai Framework serves to expand our understanding of disaster risk, complementing our increasing understanding of hazards with a deeper conceptualization of exposure and resilience. However the complexity of these concepts—and how to operationalize them in practice—is challenging. This chapter aims to explore what is missing from our current...

This paper argues that urban systems issues are design problems on a grand scale, and that various disciplines aiming to address them can have only a partial view of the problem. It is necessary to draw boundaries around the detailed analyses of specific issues, but a way to map the wider system, to contextualise and more deeply understand how they...

Climate change is a product of the Anthropocene, and the human-nature system in which we live. Effective climate change adaptation requires that we acknowledge this complexity. Theoretical literature on sustainability transitions has highlighted this and called for deeper acknowledgment of systems complexity in our research practices. Are we heedin...

A paradigm is an accepted world view. If we do not continually question our paradigm then wider trends and movements will overtake the discipline leaving it ill adapted to future challenges. This Special Issue is an opportunity to keep systems thinking at the forefront of ergonomics theory and practice. Systems thinking prompts us to ask whether er...

Imagine having to identify a critical flaw in a highly complex planetoid-sized orbital battle station under extreme time pressure, and with no clear idea at the outset where the vulnerability will lie? This was the challenge faced by the Rebel Alliance in the film Star Wars. One of the belligerents, the Imperial Empire, considered it highly unlikel...

Over the past decade there has been significant pressure to minimise emissions and safety risks related to commercial driving. This pressure to meet the triple bottom line of cost, environment, and society has often resulted in the rapid application of vehicle technologies designed to mitigate undesired effects. Often the cognitive and behavioural...

At the heart of distribution operations is an essential influence in the success or failure of achieving the triple bottom line of safety, efficiency, and environmental friendliness: commercial vehicle drivers, and the increasingly complex technology with which they interact. To the authors’ knowledge, no hierarchical task analysis exists for comme...