Complex Resilience and Entropic Risks in Urban Megaprojects

Abstract

This paper explores issues of urban resilience and risk and presents some key conceptual and analytical elements to apply the notion of entropic risk to the analysis of urban megaprojects. The paper claims that the concept of risk needs to be understood together with that of resilience, and thus the paper starts by defining both urban resilience and risk. Entropic risks are defined as the disruptive and disorderly impacts of megaprojects in urban areas. The project management literature has been concerned with risks affecting megaprojects and has neglected the many kinds of risks and negative outcomes produced by them. This is due to their modeling of megaprojects as closed systems and to their focus on providing insights to contribute to megaproject performance improvement. The purpose of the paper is to shift attention from risks affecting megaprojects to risks produced by them for a better understanding of the damage produced by megaprojects. Urban systems and megaprojects are defined as complex adaptive innovation ecosystems, or networks of people in close proximity exchanging information and opinions, creating new knowledge, and interacting, in actor-networks, with the matter as well as other forms of human and non-human life. Megaprojects can be characterized as complex systems (organizationally and scale-wise) embedded in complex urban, political and socio-economic systems.