Resilient cities are able to persist, grow, and even transform while keeping their essential identities in the face of external forces like climate change. As cities face increasing risks associated with non-stationary climate and extreme weather-related events, the ability to deploy infrastructure to protect people and maintain services is becoming a major challenge in climate adaptation. Adverse impacts of heavy precipitation in cities—which are projected to increase both in frequency and magnitude—leading to urban flooding are likely to be exacerbated due to anthropogenic changes in urban environments. Motivated by the need for cities to prepare and be resilient to unpredictable future weather conditions, this talk introduces a novel infrastructure development theory of “safe-to-fail” to increase the adaptive capacity of cities and their infrastructure systems to climate change.

In this talk, Dr. Yeowon Kim will present ways to develop safe-to-fail infrastructure that depart from the current practice of risk calculation and manages failure consequences when flood risks overwhelm the existing infrastructure systems. The safe-to-fail approach connects to urban sustainability, where city practitioners deliberately think of and include the future cost of social, environmental, and economic attributes in climate adaptation planning and decision-making for extreme weather events.

About the Speaker:

Dr. Yeowon Kim is an Assistant Professor in Urban Systems and Environmental Engineering at Carleton University. Her research focuses on advancing urban infrastructure resilience to extreme weather events and investigates ways to mitigate the impact of urban flooding and its consequences by advancing resilient and “safe-to-fail” infrastructure system design, stormwater management, and nature-based solutions.

Dr. Kim links hydrologic models, infrastructure vulnerability analysis, decision support tools, and participatory workshops to improve infrastructure design and development strategies for systems-level urban water management. Furthermore, she studies how governance in diverse socio-cultural and biophysical contexts addresses climate extremes, the dynamics of social-ecological-technological systems (SETS) tackling hydrological risks in cities, and knowledge co-production approaches for institutional climate adaptation planning and community-based capacity building for urban resilience to extreme weather events.

About the Series:

Ingenious Talks is a special speaker series from the Faculty of Engineering and Design that engages the community in discussions of timely and innovative ideas in engineering, design and technology.