Time-geographical approaches to emergence and sustainable societies

Infraplan is an integrated supply- and demand-side model for water management - the first of its kind ever developed. If pipelines are too large, water quality issues must be solved. If too small, they are terribly expensive to replace. Optimising supply and demand side when demographic changes are rapid is a complex problem involving the use of demographic data and genetic algorithms in a complex boot-strap computational exercise. Please see: http://www.tigress.ac/reports/final/infraplan.pdf

TVK is now available as open-source software freely downloadable at: http://tvk.sourceforge.net/ TVK is a specialist tool, for a special purpose. We have used it to explore the movement of birds (plovers) with some success and can foresee other uses in the future. It has no obvious competitor. It allows us to zoom and rotate the space-time aquarium, even when it contains large numbers of time-lines, to move the current map up and down the time axis to explore spatial pattern at different times and toggle between the space-time and the biography views. We have made TVK available as open source software to encourage others to explore these methods.

This is described more fully here: http://www.tigress.ac/reports/final/WP1_innovation.pdf We now know that: - Innovation is a qualitative change of system behaviour. Some marketable products and services may consolidate innovations; many do not - they merely sustain or intensify pre-existing behaviours in a changing environment. - Many de facto innovations have no impact on growth and competitiveness. Some may actually reduce competition - the reform of the CAP to reduce subsidy and take land out of productive use, for example. - Innovation is not caused by large-scale investment in technical research, but by small-scale changes of perception at the pioneering stage that overcome inbuilt inertia, pushing a system past its tipping point. - Highly competitive environments often have more systemic inertia than less competitive environments. This is so, both in ecological and social systems. In general, the more competitive a system is, the harder it will be to consolidate an innovation. The contrast is that between a tropical rain-forest and an intensively managed wheat-field; the diversity of small retailers in the centre of an early twentieth century market town and the handful of supermarkets we see dotted around them today. - Systemic inertia, coupled with the role of small-scale adaptive potential as the ultimate source of all innovation, makes it very hard to establish a Command Economy for innovation. There are stringent negative feedback control mechanisms in place that create laws of diminishing returns. It is almost impossible to drive innovation from the centre. Highly regulated, deeply stratified societies, though intensely competitive, are seldom effective innovators. Over-regulation creates social exclusion by suppressing cultural diversity, punishing pioneers. It tends to block innovation by locking societies into intensification or entrenchment. In extreme cases this can lead to a co-evolutionary catastrophe.

This MS is now available for download: http://www.tigress.ac/reports/final/Phoenix.pdf Breaking the Phoenix Cycle is about cultural ecodynamics - the dynamic coupling between the biosphere and the world of beliefs and about the way our attempts to understand and manage these processes have changed scientific enquiry. I write as a participant observer rather than as a scholar, so the book is more or less self-contained. It is organised into nine thematic sections, each containing a few short essays. Some deal with theoretical matters, some with method, others with the management of research projects or policy in respect of knowledge and innovation. Anyone capable of reading this page knows a great deal about cultural ecodynamics. We are humans, programmed by our genes and experience to engage in those processes. However, for many that knowledge is tacit and unexamined. This is a formidable obstacle to public and, indeed, professional engagement with recent policy initiatives. Drives to promote innovation, the knowledge-based society and competitive sustainable growth, for example, presume a consensus that does not yet exist. This book is to stimulate discussion and so facilitate that consensus. My central thesis is that many communities get locked into a pernicious cycle of synthesis, paralysis, conflagration and renaissance that retards our ability to innovate, especially at times when the need for new knowledge is most urgent. Our well-being and possibly even our survival as a species may be determined by our ability to break the Phoenix Cycle.

EUROSIM is a simulation model of the development of the entire urban network of Europe. It can be used to study local or supra-national changed (cross border migration, say, or the effects of European enlargement. A report and contact details are available on the TiGrESS website: http://www.tigress.ac/reports/final/eurosim.pdf This research was co-ordinated from Paris in conjunction with RIKS (development of data handling conventions) and Newcastle (conceptual modelling). This WP was to help policy makers to think of possible urban futures in a way, which takes account of our knowledge about the specific dynamics of urban systems. The 21st century marks a new stage in the history of system of cities. The urban transition which in two hundred years transformed our way of inhabiting the planet, from a scattered and rather homogeneous rural settlement system into a very concentrated, hierarchical and heterogeneous urban system, is now over. We need new models to explore qualitatively new types of urban dynamic. The questions addressed included: What future can be expected for cities in developed countries, where there is no longer migration from rural areas or local demographic growth - will population and activities continue to concentrate in the largest metropolises? Are small and medium size towns condemned to decline and disappear like many villages in the past? Are the new trends sustainable? What types of policy will build the capacity to reorient the contemporary evolution of the systems in a desirable direction?

Full details are on-line at: http://www.tigress.ac/reports/final/madrid_start.pdf The Madrid team undertook a detailed survey of the geological, geographical, political and environmental aspects of current developments in the Madrid Autonomous Region. This is a large area (8025 square kilometres) and it was necessary to obtain a substantial geographical database and review the political history of land-use regulation in the region. There was also a need for extensive fieldwork to explore the relationship between biodiversity and habitat fragmentation. Given the amount of data preparation required, WP5 was only required to produce a conceptual model that could be investigated using the TiGrESS system. The data were produced and incorporated, but the conceptual model produced a striking change of perception within the team. Newcastle and Madrid undertook statistical studies that characterised five conflict zones in the Madrid Autonomous Region. A booklet was written (in Spanish and English versions) and used as the basis of a substantial stakeholder engagement programme. Initial work has focussed on regional agencies, developers, farmers, local authorities, NGOs and, of course, the Regional Government. Initial responses have been favourable and the team is now exploring the scope for establishing a Sustainable Planning Observatory that will provide a first port of call for citizens and developers wishing to engage in the planning process. The Observatory will (we hope) be funded on a mix of public-funding, commercial and competitively tendered project work aimed at facilitating convergence and compliance with EU law, particularly in respect of Environmental Impact Assessment.

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