Suchergebnisse

Hilda Blanco reflects on her experiences as Founding Editor of the Berkeley Planning Journal, the underlying values with which she imbued the Journal and that the BPJ carries on today, and relates larger trends in planning and in our political economy from the mid 1980s to the present day.

Prioritizing is a fundamental task in capital facilities planning and finance. The protection of critical infrastructure systems, essential systems that underpin our society's "national defense, economic prosperity and quality of life" (President's Commission 1997), challenges the traditional methods used for prioritizing capital projects. The critical infrastructure systems identified in the various homeland security official documents are vast and complex systems which include among others, transportation, water supply, telecommunications1. The national interest in these systems is clear, protecting these systems from "incapacity or destruction". In effect, the national interest in these systems is to ensure that these systems are resilient and less vulnerable to potential threats, disasters, or accidents. The National Strategy for the Physical Protection of Critical Infrastructures and Key Assets (Office of the President 2003) requires government agencies as well as the private sector to identify and prioritize assets most essential to the nation's economic and social well-being. Traditional methods for prioritizing or selecting capital projects for investment fall into two categories, economic evaluation methods and more multicriteria approaches based on expert or departmental judgments, broad categories of need, urgency of need criteria, or program priorities, or goals. (Vogt 2004) Although the multicriteria methods could be applied to prioritize investments in critical infrastructures, such methods are difficult to apply to vast and complex systems often national in scale, and do not necessarily capture the systems or network aspects of the projects. In this paper, I first review and discuss major approaches to prioritization. I then focus on prioritizing system components and networks of critical infrastructures, focusing on Lewis's network theory (2006) approach to prioritize and invest for protection of nodes in critical infrastructure networks, and also review network interdiction approaches. Based on the limitations of the approaches reviewed, the final part argues that an enhanced systems analysis approach based on stock and flow diagrams would retain more information of the systems as systems and as networks than the more abstract network modeling.

Prioritizing is a fundamental task in capital facilities planning and finance. The protection of critical infrastructure systems, essential systems that underpin our society's "national defense, economic prosperity and quality of life" (President's Commission 1997), challenges the traditional methods used for prioritizing capital projects. The critical infrastructure systems identified in the various homeland security official documents are vast and complex systems which include among others, transportation, water supply, telecommunications1. The national interest in these systems is clear, protecting these systems from "incapacity or destruction". In effect, the national interest in these systems is to ensure that these systems are resilient and less vulnerable to potential threats, disasters, or accidents. The National Strategy for the Physical Protection of Critical Infrastructures and Key Assets (Office of the President 2003) requires government agencies as well as the private sector to identify and prioritize assets most essential to the nation's economic and social well-being. Traditional methods for prioritizing or selecting capital projects for investment fall into two categories, economic evaluation methods and more multicriteria approaches based on expert or departmental judgments, broad categories of need, urgency of need criteria, or program priorities, or goals. (Vogt 2004) Although the multicriteria methods could be applied to prioritize investments in critical infrastructures, such methods are difficult to apply to vast and complex systems often national in scale, and do not necessarily capture the systems or network aspects of the projects. In this paper, I first review and discuss major approaches to prioritization. I then focus on prioritizing system components and networks of critical infrastructures, focusing on Lewis's network theory (2006) approach to prioritize and invest for protection of nodes in critical infrastructure networks, and also review network interdiction approaches. Based on the limitations of the approaches reviewed, the final part argues that an enhanced systems analysis approach based on stock and flow diagrams would retain more information of the systems as systems and as networks than the more abstract network modeling.

AbstractThis paper develops the idea for a program of nationwide collaboratories. It argues that now that we have completed mapping the human genome, we should begin to map its corresponding social unit—the set of instructions that generate/constitute our knowledge. This is a pressing task because of the environmental and population challenges we face in the twenty‐first century, which require well‐informed public policy based on scientific consensus, and because the explosive growth in research and publications makes divergence, and not consensus, more likely. The major tasks of the collaboratory would be to take stock, make accessible and synthesize existing knowledge, to develop further methods for research synthesis/meta‐analysis; to integrate disciplinary research; and to develop methods to visualize scientific findings and their linkages. The paper discusses and documents the explosive growth of the use of meta‐analysis in the medical and other sciences. The program calls for establishing 6–12 collaboratory centers throughout the country that would initially specialize on specific areas, substantive and methodological. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The article explains a research program that stems from the author's recent book, How to think about social problems (1994), where she argues for a reorganization of the domains of knowledge in public policy and planning into explicit, pragmatic knowledge codes. The author argues that knowledge in the public policy and planning fields is the common knowledge necessary for informed and responsible participation in public affairs, and thus a necessary condition for creating participatory, democratic communities in modern society. The research project Thalia, outlined here, aims to show how expert knowledge in a relatively simple urban planning knowledge domain, urban forestry, can be made explicit and simulated. Thalia involves the appkation of an artificial intelligence cognitive architecture, FORR (FOr the Right Reasons), developed by computer scientist Susan Epstein. FORR is an architecture particularly promising for public policy and planning because of its ability to incorporate pluralism and pragmatism.

Against a backdrop of unprecedented levels of urbanization, 21st century cities across the globe share concerns for the challenges they face. This Companion provides a framework for understanding the city as a critical building block for a more sustainable future within broader subnational, national, and continental contexts, and ultimately, within a global systems context. It discusses the sustainable strategies being devised, as well as the methods and tools for achieving them. Examples of social, economic, political and environmental sustainable policy strategies are presented, and the extent to which they actually increase sustainability is analyzed