The positive, negative and neutral outcomes of designed adaptation in the built environment

Abstract

This article posits that design of climate adaptation interventions is co-aligned in process with the social diffusion of innovation. As such, innovation is fundamentally a differentiation to the status quo through trial-and-error that is designed to fail and circumvent, as much as it is designed to insulate and transform. Through cycles of creation and failure, social, financial and ecological capital are reorganized within an adaptive cycle-a process that simultaneously offers the promise of both a subjectively more equitable and more exploitive set of potential outcomes. Adaptation has long been regarded as neither good nor bad-it is merely a social process of learning and tradeoffs from which some may benefit and others may bear the burden. This article challenges the rhetoric that resilience and adaptation activities universally yield positive outcomes for society and ecology. To the contrary, only in an optimal scenario would such activities yield a net positive result of a more equitable and just future. In some cases, designed adaptations may be failures for some and successes for others.