Engineering Systems Design: A Look to the Future

Engineering Systems Design is an emerging perspective with a growing community. The preceding chapters in the Handbook of Engineering Systems Design presented the engineering systems perspective, models for describing and methods for designing interventions in engineering systems, as well as reflections on the use of those methods and upcoming...

Making waves in resilience: Drawing lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic for advancing sustainable development

The current COVID-19 pandemic has affected societies across the world while its economic impact has cut deeper than any recession since the Second World War. Climate change is potentially an even more disruptive and complex global challenge. Climate change could cause social and economic damage far larger than that caused by COVID-19. The...

Making sense of resilience

While resilience is a major concept in development, climate adaptation, and related do-mains, many doubts remain about how to interpret this term, its relationship with closely overlap-ping terms, or its normativity. One major view is that, while resilience originally was a descriptive concept denoting some adaptive property of ecosystems,...

Ethics of smart cities: Towards value-sensitive design and co-evolving city life

The digital revolution has brought about many societal changes such as the creation of “smart cities”. The smart city concept has changed the urban ecosystem by embedding digital technologies in the city fabric to enhance the quality of life of its inhabitants. However, it has also led to some pressing issues and challenges related to data,...

COVID-19 and public transportation: Current assessment, prospects, and research needs

The COVID-19 pandemic poses a great challenge for contemporary public transportation worldwide, resulting from an unprecedented decline in demand and revenue. In this paper, we synthesize the state-of-the-art, up to early June 2020, on key developments regarding public transportation and the COVID-19 pandemic, including the different...

Between aspirations and reality: Making farming, food systems and rural areas more resilient, sustainable and equitable

This paper explores the connections between farm modernisation, rural development and the resilience of agricultural and rural systems. The paper starts by ascertaining why agricultural and food systems need to change systemically. Evidence from case studies in fourteen countries is used to explore the possibilities for, and drivers and...