In this Brown Bag, Lauren Hermanus will introduce the work of the Massive Small Collective, which seeks to make connections between small-scale urban sustainable development and resilience thinking.
The Massive Small Collective understands resilience as social, economic and environmental sustainability under conditions of dynamic complexity. As individuals, households, businesses, and governments are faced with increasing complexity, and more frequent destructive shocks, and new information and technologies, the context and need for resilience planning and implementation is growing. The assertion of the Massive Small Collective, is that top-down, large-scale, command and control strategies aimed to improve social well-being and manage ecological risks have not delivered the promised results. The collective believes that the ‘bigness’ of these projects is the source of their weakness. Local context and history are, by necessity, rendered marginal by end-state and solutions-focused wholesale reform. But we can now see that it has showed itself to be critical to long-term success. In response, the Massive Small Collective focuses on incrementalism and redundancy, dynamic interrelation, local context, learning from failure and responsive governance.
This Brown Bag will introduce the potential of small-scale urban sustainable development initiatives and investments to contribute to the resilience agenda in cities and towns around the world. This work is done in partnership with the Centre for Complex Systems in Transition, African partners of the Stockholm Resilience Centre.
About the Speaker:
Lauren Hermanus is has a BA in Politics, Philosophy and Economics, and a MA in Complexity Theory and Philosophy. She is currently enrolled in MPhil in Development Policy and Practice. She is a Sustainable Development Specialist focused on urban resilience and energy innovation. Her experience is in policy, strategy and programme development in both the public and private sectors. She is interested in applying Complexity Thinking to development challenges.
Date: 28th November
Time: 1-2pm
Venue: Davies Reading Room (library), EGS Building, Upper Campus, UCT