Landscape and Resilient Public Open Space (POS)

We are living the world where the rate of urbanisation is growing exponentially, and ecological degradation is increasing like never before. Simultaneously, due to climate change, the number of life-threaten natural disaster (e.g. Floods, storms, drought, extreme temperature, Wildfires) are increasing day by day. Every city is facing different resilience challenges. The importance of the word resilience is getting crucial in the domain of urbanism, not just in research but also in practice.

Concurrently, there are also many positive changes are happening; public and private sectors have initiated several innovative approaches. Out of several disaster preparedness and prevention approaches Urban Public Open Spaces and its landscape plays the important role. Day by day it is getting more and more crucial to adapt more resilient landscape urbanism approaches to enhance its resilience. The high profile investment on Public Open Spaces (POS) of urban greening is increasing day-by-day. Waterfront development, collectively managed parks, park connector, Roof-top garden, etc. are few of the latest examples that designers, planners and policy makers are taking into consideration more often than ever before. These are considered as one of the low hanging fruits to enhance the sustainability and aesthetics of the city. But how such urban landscape projects for public open space can make its city more resilient? How can these projects help the user and city communities to recover faster and quickly when disasters happen?

To answer these, it is unavoidable to reviewing different theories and projects on Public Open Space (POS), landscape urbanism and urban resilience and investigate interdependency of the various interrelated components under the lenses of System Dynamics (SD).

The concept of System dynamic introduced at MIT by Jay Forrester(1994; 1968). Later Sterman(2002) made it popular in the field of Business and Management. Indeed, it's and useful tool to develop an in-depth understanding of any nonlinear, complex system dealing with cross-disciplinary issues like Climate Change, Sustainability, and Resilience and so on. Hjorth and Bagheri, (2006) argued that to understand the sources of and the solutions to modern problems, linear and mechanistic thinking must give way to non-linear and organic thinking, more commonly referred to as systems thinking. Based on system dynamics

Several researchers have completed a significant amount of researchers using System Dynamics in the domain of sustainable development. Based on system dynamics Gou et. al (2001) developed ErhaiSD model. It consists of dynamic simulation models that explicitly consider information feedback that governs interactions in the system. Using system dynamics methodology, Winz(2005) researched in the area of sustainable urban development with a focus on urban water systems.

The concept - 'resilience' also emphasises nonlinear dynamics, with thresholds, uncertainty and surprise, how periods of gradual change interplay with periods of rapid change and how such dynamics interact across temporal and spatial scales (Folke 2006). Presenting the ecological or ecosystem resilience perspective, Carl Folke(2006), science director of the Stockholm Resilience Centre and the Director of the Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, have put resilience and system dynamics in the context of complex adaptive systems, with emphasis on the cross-scale interplay and the two interacting sides of resilience as both sustaining and developing.

Certainly, we need a robust system thinking mechanism to finds out linkages and synergies between the various system and discourses on urban open spaces. Indeed, We need a framework for the in-depth understanding of different component of various landscape projects for POS and impact on the socio-economic and environmental structure. Using the concept of System Dynamics, we may investigate the structure and dynamics of the complex role of Landscape and social components for POS, and its resilient attribute.