Focus 3

Urban environmental risks

Unravelling the dynamics of exposure and adaptive behavior

To improve urban resilience, it is essential to include the perceptions, motivations, and behaviors of relevant actors (housing market stakeholders, vulnerable individuals, city administration employees, organized civil society, etc.). The aim of our research is to assess exposures and risks for individuals, groups, and cities/neighborhoods, as well as their perceptions of urban environmental risks and the resulting adaptive behaviors. To overcome sectoral approaches, we develop (communicative) strategies and (modeling) tools in interdisciplinary collaborations within IPl6 and with IPl4-IPP-CityTech.

Tasks

Our tasks comprise:

• Empirical studies and innovative approaches to modeling, measurement, observation, and perception, as well as for longitudinal study designs.
• Estimation of long-term trends (including meta-analyses) of adaptive behavior in large networks, its motivating and limiting factors (social psychological, resource-based, capacity-related, etc.), and the management of higher-order risks.
• Recommendations for (urban and personal) adaptation, prevention, and precautionary measures developed collaboratively with end users and tailored to their needs.

Projects

Projects we are currently leading, participating in, and building upon include:

• Helmholtz Climate Initiative with sub-project Urban Systems
• PIVO
  
• Leipziger BlauGrün
• ExpoAware
• KlimaKonform/RegIKlim with sub-project on green infrastructure on municipal level

Contact

Prof. Dr. Uwe Schlink and Prof. Dr. Christian Kuhlicke, Deptartment of Urban and Environmental Sociology