Transitioning to outcome-focused, place-based, community-enabled decision-making

The issues we are facing of climate change mitigation and resilience, biodiversity loss and social inequity are global systemic challenges. This means that an intervention in one part of the system could have an impact in another part of the system - intended or unintended, good or bad. The impact could be in another country. We therefore need a different approach to the way that we go about decision-making in order to make interventions – at a local, national and global level.

Outcome-focused Decision-making

First, we need to define the future we want - if not, we will have to live with the future we get. In Our Vision for the Built Environment, we brought together representatives from across the built environment to define that future. We can now all work towards it with our individual initiatives knowing we will arrive at the same outcome. Our Vision identified that key to shifting our behaviour is focusing on outcomes rather than outputs – outcome-focused decision-making. What does this mean? It is understanding that we do not need a hospital, what we need is better health outcomes for a community. This may or may not include the need for a hospital. And we need to ensure that if we do build a hospital it achieves that desired outcome. The performance of our infrastructure is even more important than how productively we construct it.

Place-based Decision-making

The follow up to Our Vision, Our Shared Understanding: A Circular Economy in the Built Environment, brought together the built environment community with the circular economy community. It became clear that we cannot solve our global challenges unless we transition to a circular economy as we are fast approaching the boundaries of what the planet can provide to sustain life. A clear message was that we need place-based decision-making as circular economy means something different to people depending on where they live, whether it be the difference between the global north and south or between two Local Authorities or towns. The issues facing places are different and therefore the solutions need to be tailored, even if we are trying to achieve the same national / global outcomes (ultimately the UN Sustainable Development Goals). We need to create the bodies, funding and processes to enable place-based decision-making.

Community-enabled Decision-making

A clear theme running through both is that people sit at the foundations of everything and ensure the success or failure of an initiative. The local community needs to be involved in defining the outcomes that are best for the place where they live and work – community-enabled decision-making. The more they can be involved in the initiative the more likely it will achieve the intended outcomes and be enduring. Our built environment will be used by people so they also need to have input into how the infrastructure is constructed. The staff and patients should have an input into the design of the hospital, as well as the community into how to get better health outcomes in the first place.

Taking a Systemic Approach

This form of decision-making requires a systemic approach. The various parts of the system that makes up our built environment – social and economic infrastructure, nature and increasingly cyber-physical infrastructure, combine to provide the services people and nature need to achieve outcomes. Currently we operate in silos with each stakeholder focusing on its part, which leads to individual outputs rather than joined up outcomes. If we continue operating in this way we will not achieve Our Vision for the Built Environment or solve our global systemic challenges.

Cyber-physical Infrastructure as an Enabler

Taking a systemic approach can seem complicated and it is difficult to understand which interventions will have the most positive impact on the system. However, for the first time we have cyber-physical infrastructure that can help us intervene more effectively. Organisations are already starting to use digital twins of assets, systems and processes but the future is connected digital twins like the Climate Resilience Demonstrator (CReDo), National Digital Twin Programme and Virtual Energy System. To enable the digital twins to connect across organisations and sectors we need data-sharing infrastructure. If we start to value our data and information as we do our physical assets, we would see that we need infrastructure that enables us to share it in a secure resilient way, ensuring it is fit for purpose - just as we have pipes that bring us water and gas, or roads and rail tracks to travel between things. We can still not even imagine what we can achieve when we start to layer AI on top – we just need to ensure that it is done in an ethical manner with the purpose of achieving better outcomes for people and nature.

In the UK we have built over 99% of our infrastructure already. So in a circular economy we need to use our existing infrastructure as a source of materials – not just pillage nature for raw materials. If we recognise that nature offers services that are critical to our survival, we will stop destroying the ecosystem services it offers. Instead, we need to know what materials are available in our current infrastructure and what condition they are in. We will then need to manage the logistics of matching the used materials with those who need them, and also of storing them if they are not needed immediately. Connected digital twins can help with this process. The Excess Materials Exchange is an excellent example of a ‘dating app’  for used materials and also creates a digital passport of the materials, tracing as far back as possible to identify where they came from.

Collaborate to Survive

Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman proposes a different reason for the survival and thriving of the human race – not survival of the fittest, but survival of the collaborators. Our strength, and the thing that separates us from other species, is our ability to collaborate. To achieve the future we want we need to get out there and do what we do best as a race: collaborate.
 

Melissa Zanocco OBE, Chair, Digital Twin Hub Community Council

 

Melissa will moderate the session "Harnessing Data for Infrastructure Resilience", which takes place at the Infrastructure Forum on Wednesday, April 30, from 13.30 – 14.15.