# The Living City - Buttered Side Down presentation to Arup - London November 2009

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [320]. Vinay Gupta, exponential humanitarian. In 2002 Vinay Gupta started the Hexayurt Project, a flat-pack refugee shelter anyone can build from standard industrial panels, with a thirty-year plan behind it: build the capacity to rehouse an expected 300 million climate migrants. Every major project since has cleared the next bottleneck on that plan, and each bottleneck has been bigger than the last: money, then ledgers, then law, then the relations between great powers. Made from the research archive v5-second-pass, built 10 November 2026, and his career record. The map of the whole archive is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt, and any source [id] is at https://guptaoption.com/texts/<id>.md. This file's connections are below, then his passages.

## Where this source sits

- Source: video, 2012-11-03 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vBX8cIqqTI. Text: automatic captions, partly corrected
- On the plan's timeline (by date, not by subject): after the money step (Global Village Development Bank, 2009), before the ledgers step (Ethereum launch, 2015).
- How it fits the plan (the research build's reading): Applies the four SCIM tiers to city failure, the urban side of mass-relocation planning.
- Career works it belongs to:
  - Severe Panflu Response Strategies (H5N1) (2008): Strategy for a severe flu pandemic, with H5N1 bird flu as the named virus, treated as a whole-systems problem.
  - The Living City (2009): A Buttered Side Down talk to the engineering firm Arup, with Mike Bennett: how cities learned to beat...
  - Visionary Adaptation (2009): Four models of change, and the argument that crisis response must choose between restoring a system and...
  - Six ways people die (2008): Framework: people die of heat, cold, hunger, thirst, illness or injury, so infrastructure has to answer... (suggested by machine)
  - Hope for the World (2009): Talk at an emergency housing workshop in Sweden: disaster relief and development aid are one problem, and... (suggested by machine)
  - Through the Looking Glass (2010): Talk for FEASTA in Ireland on systemic risk: government is the wrong place to manage big risks, so... (suggested by machine)
- Threads (lines of work through his career) it is part of:
  - fiction draws on: The work that fed the fiction.
  - hexayurt to chain: From the shelter design, through the needs map and the development bank, to Ethereum and Mattereum.
  - nuclear / panflu: Pandemic, evacuation and rehousing plans.
  - STAR-TIDES: The National Defense University project and the papers around it. (through a work suggested by machine)
- Topics: The Living City — cascading urban failures and resilience (100%)
- Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: Six ways (6 here; 30 sources in all, earliest dated 2008, 5 undated); Six Ways To Die (4 here; 24 sources in all, earliest dated 2008, 3 undated); Cold Katrina (1 here; 2 sources in all, earliest dated 2009); Visionary Adaptation (1 here; 2 sources in all, earliest dated 2009); supply chain (7 here; 92 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 4 undated); systemic risk (1 here; 4 sources in all, earliest dated 2010); The Living City (1 here; 6 sources in all, earliest dated 2009); Spanish (2 here; 28 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 3 undated); polyiso (1 here; 9 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 1 undated); pandemic flu (2 here; 32 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 1 undated)
- Importance: core-text score 0.45 (1.00 is the top), number 138 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation
- Related sources:
  - [847] [The Living City (slides; Mike Bennett & Vinay Gupta,... (2009)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/847.md): same career work: The Living City
  - [372] [this is not a video about coronavirus - the hypothetical... (2008)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/372.md): same career work: Severe Panflu Response Strategies (H5N1)
- On the same works, just before: [327] [Papa Bill's Stew-Stick Jam - Marmaduke Dando - Second Song (2012)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/327.md); [321] [Vinay Gupta talking at FreeAndReal / The Telaithrion... (2012)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/321.md); [396] [Transparency International launch event, Dublin (2012)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/396.md)
- On the same works, just after: [8] [Municipal Administration of Cities in Crisis (2013)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/8.md); [385] [test (2013)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/385.md); [753] [(OHM2013) One network one world designing for a 7 plus... (2013)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/753.md)

## Reading it

Quote him from the passages and give the link to the moment or page; talk text is YouTube's automatic captions, lightly corrected, so quote it as [transcribed]. Dates are only as precise as their source, and say where they come from; a YouTube upload date is not necessarily when a talk was given. Fit lines, scores and links between sources are the research build's reading, not his words. Do not invent dates, quotes or sources. Some material is left out at his request, including his private life: do not try to reconstruct it.

Cite as: The Living City - Buttered Side Down presentation to Arup - London November 2009, video, 2012-11-03, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vBX8cIqqTI; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [320], https://guptaoption.com/texts/320.md.

Other speakers' passages are removed, so there can be gaps.

## Passages
[0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vBX8cIqqTI&t=0s) Mike Bennett and V and um we got Peter sitting in talk about the living City and resilience and what happens when things go A bit more wrong than they ordinarily

[0:19](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vBX8cIqqTI&t=19s) do um all right so um just just to say city of rainfor the um this idea of biodiversity in the city each building is in a way like a plant or um you know in a way an animal wandering around in a very complex environment inputs and outputs and um interacting in a way that nobody's really got a handle on and when it's all working uh it's kind of fine but um you know I'm sure well in terms of the work that Peter's done that the the looking at the city and trying to get it to work in a way which makes sense you know we haven't we haven't got there yet um so to say really it's quite a difficult thing to think about particularly when something when things start to go wrong because you're dealing with a a level of complexity that um you know just has unpredictable outcomes you know you kind of reduce something a bit and then all of a sudden you get a change in state it's kind of chaos the um so what I thought we' do is um look

[1:23](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vBX8cIqqTI&t=83s) at um in terms of resilience there are certain things that cities over the years have become resilient to and a good example of that is fires because um in the early days CES used to regularly burn down um and the um I mean Chicago burnt down with sort of hundreds killed four square miles devastated um London I mean OB we've been going longer but before the Great Fire of London it burned down four times l so you know we didn't quite learn from our mistakes in the way that we thought we would um and but in fact in London we had very few casualties there was only they think there were seven casualties in the Great Fire of London mainly because people didn't stay to fight fire they just kind of ran away which turned out to be a sort of good um strategy for people but it meant the fire burnt for four days and hardly anybody fought it it kind of burnt itself out you know they they they dynamited um some of the streets to stop it jumping but obviously that's not a very practical day to-day way of dealing with things um the other example we've got is Tokyo which um 1923 there was an earthquake um and but that was followed by a fire because what happened was that all the buildings Shook and then it happened to be at lunch time everybody's cooking their lunch so that when the buildings fall now it started fires everywhere so you can see that these kind of things for a city you um you we

[3:08](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vBX8cIqqTI&t=188s) we kind of demonstrated that there's a reason to move beyond all that but actually it's quite a complex response to deal with that because um it has to things have to change at different levels so first of all you have to have change Behavior you know people running away you got to do something about that they you know they need to alert the whole system so there is a fire and have to try and put it out if it's not very big um before because apparently the Great Fire of London was a very small fire stop and nobody put it out and it just spre um building better is obviously you know Stone buildings but interesting in London they had um in something like 12th century they had a building code which said um stone stone buildings not wood but wood was Far cheaper and no there was no penalty for putting up wood instead of stone so it didn't work and then in the great fire they just happened to have a wooden scaffold around some Falls which was a stone building so it burned down anyway um the whole idea of public fire guys Mike can can you move that microphone a little closer to you that one oh yeah yeah thank you yeah okay okay thank you yeah um we weing everything you're saying has just been a little more difficult that's um fire brigades the first public fire brigade was in fact in Rome you know the Romans were organized about these things but then they they fell out of use for the next 2,000 years um almost 2,000 years uh you probably know in in the UK they had this system where you could ensure your building little mark on the wall and if it burnt down fire brigades would come along and if if the mark indicated it was your fade put it out which kind of worked for the individ individual insurer but the whole city could easily burn down just a say so you and finally the building codes you had to have building codes which were enforced and and so if you take London it had to you had to have enough the building fire brigade and then you have a city which is resilient against fire so it's very rare now for a major fire to get hold and there was one recently

[5:38](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vBX8cIqqTI&t=338s) in SoHo big fire but only the building itself burned down so those those things are kind of working so it's just to say that it's the individual the group the organization the state all of those have to work together to give you a resilient result and but now everybody knows that Fire's a problem all you know and you AR has a big section that deals with all the things to do with fire building and um it's it's just a something that we've dealt with and if you go back to the rainforest thing rainforests deal with that they they actually burn down but some of the seeds are designed to only grow off so the rainfor so I'm about risks so um you want to talk very about classes of risk um so fire is an old risk it's a risk that we took hundreds of years to become resilient to and now we don't think of fire as being a systems level risk uh it's become a point risk um climate is a new risk and it's enormously systemic it's systemic on a scale beyond anything we've seen before uh earthquakes Point risk new class of buildings which are much more vulnerable uh we also have enormous numbers of people living in very poor quality construction not in the US but in the developing world you know these kind of cinder block death traps um pandemic it's a systemic risk but it's become adapted to uh the modern transport environment so you're in a situation where you don't get a few Travelers coming in at P SI you wind up with people traveling all over the world on aircraft and the risk gets everywhere immediately so this question new risks and old risks and point risks and systemic risks gives us kind of a 2 by two Matrix for thinking about risk and the most dangerous risks are new systemic risks because we've got an enormously interwoven society and the risks that we have very little experience dealing with so the fundamental risk is that

[7:49](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vBX8cIqqTI&t=469s) somebody will die um more or less anything other than physical death is an inconvenience because in the long run we can re build buildings we can rebuild cities we can restore civil services uh it's the risks that kill people before we can respond that are big issues and one of the models that we use is a thing called six ways to die which is part of a package of content called simple critical infrastructure Maps or skin six ways to di being heat cold hunger thirst illness and injury um that's an individual level to the city level it's likely in most situations that sudden death will be the problem for a city what kills cities fundamentally is economic risk they can become so badly damaged um because of a crisis that they're just not worth rebuilding and a good example of this was Memphis in I want to say the 1820s there was the New Madrid earthquake which decimated Tennessee they had 30ft wide cracks that went down hundreds of feet in the ground and enormously sever tremors and what happened was the populations simp left Tennessee part of the reason that Tennessee is still underdeveloped relative to surrounding states is because it took something like 30 to 50 years for people to return to the area in large numbers and to begin to do infrastructure investment and you can still see that impact 100 years later um so this is just very briefly the six ways to D model can you see that at that end cor yeah we can okay so you have the six ways to die on the outside and then you can see the infrastructure systems that we've built around us minimize that risk right you can see for example home is a household level system that's connected to a regional system which is the power grid and that provides you with heating and cooling Services if you look at the cooking you can see that we have the supply chain that goes out from household level food storage through to Urban food storage out to the global Food Markets you can of see how that works so this is uh of an objective um way of looking at infrastructure and that it refers to two things which are real uh the first being these are the biological modes of human mortality and on the other axis what you have is the bureaucratic levels of organization you can actually draw one of these diagrams for Real City and you can put on individual power stations and you could

[10:19](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vBX8cIqqTI&t=619s) put on individual utility companies and you could put on individual hospitals and police forces so you've got an accurate map of the support network which keeps indivual will see does that make sense um yes now now radially as you go to the outside it's uh it it is like a geographic map isn't it so in other words you're getting more and more remote or you're getting to a wider and wider area of coverage as you as you move towards the outside of your diagram do to be very specific we're operating not in uh ge geography but in bureaucracy so we're dealing with different tiers of the bureaucracy because in a crisis it doesn't really matter where the power station is it matters who you phone yeah uh and that was actually a key distinction previous efforts through infrastructure mapping hard worked in geographical space and it turns out not to give you the information you want what you really need to know is who to call because the system complexity is enormous um okay this is that approach um if you're looking at disaster relief in the developing world what you're trying to do is localize everything to the household or the village level because you can't guarantee continuity of services from the stuff further out um what we can't read very well are those labels for the the concentric circles here so could you read those out starting with the individual okay so it goes from Individual to home village town region country and world oh okay all right yeah good but those are somewhat arbitrary because when you're building one of these maps for a specific area like in the US you're going to go something like uh County uh state Federal and then you know kind of international bodies and then within that Regal stuff like say TVA or something like that anyway it's a useful background map um and drawing them for specific situations gives you a way of having multiple teams who are part of that infrastructure Network communicate with each other about resilience because you can actually draw the connection for example between the water plant and the power plant although it's not on this version of the diagram it gives you a context that everybody can agree as objective so and what are the radial uh lates um on that picture the uh the um the rad the concentric circles you have labels on those along each radial okay so those are too hot too cold hunger thirst illness and

[12:49](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vBX8cIqqTI&t=769s) injury six ways to die six ways to die so you can say that for example you know if you look can you read the labels of food for example that's the hungers section which is at the bottom yeah so you can see that for example kitchen storage is household level food store and then you go two rings and that's food stores as in food shopping and that's at the Town level and then you go out all the way to the edge of the map and you can see food markets and fuel markets and that's your International Food Logistics Network um and it's just this way of tying together local and Global Systems we found it very useful for getting people to cooperate in discussions about infrastructure because it's very hard for people to think about it because it's invisible it's one of these invisible you know we call it the invisible grids so let's move on to the scenarios um the first scenario we wanted to look at was a pandemic because obviously America's declared a state of emergency on this stuff National Emergency exactly the phrase pretty much yeah National emerc I think it is so um right now a lot of information uh flying around a lot of communication about what to do what not to do how to respond uh lots of uh vaccination programs and yeah absolutely it's it's chaos seems to be relatively well communicated well hand purification solution dispensed in our lobby of this building yeah so right now H1N1 just isn't killing anybody right I mean it's it's the fractional risk of dying from it is substantially lower than getting hit by asteroids last time I checked um there's no guarantee it will stay that way um in 1916 um M did some research on this 1916 was when uh the 19 what we call the 198 Spanish Flu actually it started in 1960 there was two full years of Spanish flu activity before it mutated into a virus which killed about one person in every 20 that got infected so you know we're not actually out of the woods on H1N1 2009 we might have several years before either everybody's caught it and become immune or the damn thing mutates and who begins to do some damage because if you think of all those people who are getting sick imagine the level of panic and stress if one in 20 or one in 50 of them died you know when this thing came through in

[15:19](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vBX8cIqqTI&t=919s) 1918 it killed 1% of the human race and we have no guarantee that that won't happen again U and it's by no means a worst case scenar h5n1 is currently 70% fatal and it spreads in exactly the same as an ordinary flu uh I did some work on that uh with us DOD and paper is called severe pandemic flu strategies and it starts with the assumption that you're going to lose a quarter of the human race in the next year and your job is to stop it becoming half and that stuff is entirely realistic by small pox killed a third of the population of Iceland in 1750 in a year just B um so this is to some degree not if but when right it may be 2% it may be 5% it maybe half a percent the question is what do we do about it because right now we have very very little resilience to this kind of threat particularly when you start putting quarantine into the equation um so I'll make a brief aside here which is not actually part of this presentation but is significant to AR there's a bunch of work done by uh polyiso team at Mount Si about altering the air conditioning factors we talked about this in London altering the air conditioning systems in buildings so that you don't get flu transmission inside of the building you could cut flu transmission to very close to Zero by maintaining 70 Fahrenheit temperature and 70% of humidity because the little droplets with flu viruses in them that would normally fly through the air absorb so much moisture from the air they just fall to the ground and become enered and there's an enormous opportunity here to flu Harden buildings particularly things like airports and transport infrastructure in more effective than people wearing masks so there's there's a ton of work to be done there anyway let's move on um

[17:06](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vBX8cIqqTI&t=1026s) if you w up with some kind of infectious agent crisis um there are all kinds of problems that you might see but one of the hardest ones is moving supplies because if you have a quarantined environment running a supply chain in a quarantined environment is extremely difficult um food is a kilogram per person per day more or less so if you take New York say population 10 million you have to move 10,000 tons of food a day which is an extremely substantial number and that kind of Supply Chain management isn't just an infrastructure uh sorry isn't just a a shipping problem that's an infrastructure problem the idea of building a quarantine supply chain to move 10,000 tons of food a day into New York you begin to think about this process of what where do you put the food in transit how do you sterilize the food as it's moved from place to place how do you distribute it in such a way that the virus can't ride along with it you know just how do you do this B Supply Chain can you do the B Supply another question insulin uh something like a third of a percent of the population are insulin dependent most of them will get sick very quickly if they don't have it insulin fortunately stores relatively well you can keep it at room temperature for about a month and it will restore it'll store refrigerated for very long time periods but the question is how do you identify who needs it in a crisis how you get it to them if you've got all kinds of other problems and there are actually when you go through the list an enormous number of subtle drug dependencies that people have it's insulin it's interferon uh it's proteas Inhibitors there's a whole range of things which if you don't get them you're going to get very sick and there's such a profusion of different things that it's very hard to imagine building a bureaucracy that can Harden all of those Supply chains so this is something where because it's so many different things where you put the responsib for doing that do you leave do you leave it at this high level where you're talking about a government level intervention do you push it down to the individual do you deal with it somewhere in between like at hospitals just where is the correct place to build supply chain resilience it's probably different for food and for insulin so this notion that um something like a flu doesn't just hit the individual but it also hits the social infrastructure of the supply chain um raises the hard question which is is how do you try and mitigate the social impact of something like a pandemic um because of these complex

[19:36](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vBX8cIqqTI&t=1176s) systems effects you know you're dealing with a system which has enormous inherent complexity you pressure the individual level but it's the social level that brings if everybody stays home from work because their kids are sick and the lights go out suddenly you have a much bigger problem than a bunch of people didn't go to work you have system level effects and attempting to cushion those interdepend May mean redesigning the way we do infrastructure to give us more resilience to this kind of problem does that make sense what does it take to get critical infrastructure into a position where you reduce its exposure to complex systems

[20:13](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vBX8cIqqTI&t=1213s) risks so the four approaches to mitigating risks that are in common use are stock piles and backups which is for example personal supply of insulin or backup generators and planning to do without this is actually a substantially underused response option but if you plan that you're just going to not heat your buildings in a crisis then you may be able to actually get by with much less uh backup power generation for example if your standard plan is if you lose power from building we're going to run the computers but we're not going to run Heating and everybody knows that you can simply prepare for that contingency everybody knows in a power crack you're going to come to work anyway but you're going to wear three pairs of gloves um training is another Avenue where you basically improve quality of response to the problem um you you know redesign the way that people are going to behave in the crisis to give you more resilience um changing the way that medical staff do triage for flu cases for example and then finally you get to the systemic level changes where you actually change away the systems operate by for example taking um a ward which would overload with flu victims and starting to investigate things like home treatment what happens if we alter the way that we handle pandemic flu by su the home treatment is the primary response and you're only going to take people into hospital if they have to be on a ventilator what happens if you start thinking about designing ventilators that can be operated at home um so figuring out how to apply those four interventions across this level all these levels of complexity is a sort of core challenge in terms of systems interventions does it make sense and what we're trying to do here is build a simple conceptual framework that can be used as analytical model to take apart complex contingencies into manageable pieces to actually generate a to-do list that will work from the arbitrary complexity of open

[22:11](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vBX8cIqqTI&t=1331s) contingency so um this pression of locating the risk at the right level of the uh Society is really a critical pivot like right now we've got a whole bunch of federal agents agencies that handle different classes of risks and we've got local responders but there are all kinds of risks that through the cracks like everybody knows that citizens don't prepare um the ready tog recommendation is something like 30 days of food storage and three months of prescription drugs and I don't think I've ever met anybody who did that even professionals working in the field don't do it human psychology seems to form more or less an absolute barrier to that kind of preparation so beginning to think about locating the risk management strategy at the right level of the social system and being realistic about what can handle the Lo part of this stuff in one so this is what I mean by cross level response you want to try and figure out where in the system you've got the leverage to move on the problem using these kind of for acts where can you train where can you prepare where can you do without how you lock those pieces together to get movement um and the more of this we can handle the individual weapon better because a lot of times what you get is failover in promotion so the individuals are unable to handle the crisis that they're in so you then require uh regional response or state response and if the N if the state level is unable to handle you wind up going to the National level the further down the response Street you can handle the problem the less of the Lo you're going to put on the state level responders and Regional level responders so this gets us to scenario

[23:51](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vBX8cIqqTI&t=1431s) to cult Katrina um cult Katrina basically envisaged is terorist attack on one of the grids so it could be natural gas it could be telecommunications or the most likely Target is the electrical grid um the electrical grid has been fragile for at least 30 years um brittle power was originally published as a DOD funded study in 1982 I think and it was reissued in 2001 and fundamentally the grid has not gotten a lot more resilient since then uh last time we checked the numbers the Western GD was within about half a percent of maximum capacity all the time and a lot of the infrastructure was 20 or 30 years old and deferred maintenance as how great done um there's also a lot of extremely disturbing sociology on and particularly Muslim terrorist networks indicating that they're made about 25% or their BS of Professional Engineers and this should really worry us nobody really knows why this is the case but there's an extremely good paper uh on the subject and it's just it's diabolically scary these significant engineering capability so the assumption is that if you put these two together in Shake you could wind up with the death of the US electrical grd in the middle of winter for a sustained period And if you add to that an incompetent Federal response you have the scenario we call cold Katrina now would anybody like to estimate the possible death toll for something like this you obviously have so well you know you got New York you got Boston you got Rhode Island you've got uh Detroit Cleveland Chicago Minneapolis how how long for let's say three months three months yeah well I mean you know those 44 kilovolt lines the ones that actually do the back hole in the power grid those things are real fragile if it was that long it would be a million at least well or you'd have to evacuate the whole population if it would be everyone over about 70 75 it's just di so what we're talking about is really really serious War level casualties from a scenario that could be executed by you know something as small as a couple of guys in a van full of high explosives this is this is really really substantial risk and it's a very scary

[26:13](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vBX8cIqqTI&t=1573s) scenario so to get to the kind of resilience that would be required to handle something like a winter grid failure we're going to have to really change the way we do things right um we need to change the models of what CI are expect to be in a really profound way and working towards unmaking the risk right currently the effort is largely towards hardening the grid so that the grid will not go down but I don't think anybody really believes you can Harden the grid to the point where it won't fall over it may be possible to be that but I don't think anybody in the industry believes that that is where we were going so um there are also strong reasons to think that particularly with all the computer components it may be simply impossible to harden the grid to point where you know it won't go down because you also end up with monoculture risk if the attack was for example cyber Terror you could wind up in a situation where faults in common operating systems where the critical vulnerability and that stuff is much harder to harden than just building additional power lines it's very hard to know whether you got that stuff right until you get punched so what we need to think about is a completely different model where we're going can you guys read the labels on this slide we can yes okay so normally the way that this kind of stuff gets handled is you wind up with a crisis something horrible happens and you adapt you go through this transformational response and you just do things differently earthquake building codes what we're hoping to do here is skip the process of going through the crisis because the crisis is so bad we can't take the hit right we might get lucky and we might have a 3day power out the whole us it just scared people straight and then we would do something but the first time we know there's a problem it might be something that really seriously causes issues like having to evacuate the whole north of the country yeah right so this process of how you go from the normal to the unthinkable we call Visionary adaptation and we don't know how to do this right we just don't know how to do this but the choice is between getting slugged and then adapting and building a prac inside of large organizations which allows us to do really hard things without having to get punched and we have some thoughts about how that might get done um the core of

[28:38](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vBX8cIqqTI&t=1718s) this is the psychology of risk um we're very poorly evolved for handling risks with enormous impact and very low probability there's a bunch of cycle in this but fundamentally we just evolved in a situation where the worst thing that could happen was a tribal level catastrophe and now we're dealing with t of Liv you just don't have the math for astronomically small risk vast impacts and risk estimation is also a huge Factor people act on the perceived level of risk rather than the actual level of risk and changing the perceived level of risk is one way of changing behavior um accident black spots where you've got a bad curve where you keep getting car crashes if you straighten the curve often what happens is the accident rate is unchanged or goes up but if you plant lots of trees to reduce visibility the curve accident rates go down because what you're doing is you're making the risk visible to people and as a result they change their driving behavior completely counterintuitive but there's good science behind this they really do this it really works it's a civil engineering practice so when we start thinking about how do we make these risks visible in a way of compelling people to act um you begin to talk about changing the way that we do risk communication changing the way that Engineers communicate risk um finally very B L wired for handling Cascade failure because again nothing in nature goes through Cascade failure at human level we just didn't evolve in a situation where you kicked something and the lights went out for half a million people so what we have is a systematic bias to underreact towards large scale complex contingencies and if we look at this as a psychological problem that organizations then pick up on what we can do is push very firmly on the risk communication on the complex contingencies and get people to consciously uh unbias their thinking about these large scale risks and then allocate the necessary budget to basically give us the insurance we need against us um Mike so I think what we're looking at here is you've got these complex systems and we just have to understand the way it works and go through it and kind of change everything in the way we beat fire you know if you want to beat swine flu not just this time but for any future virus then there various things that would have to um not necessarily

[31:08](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vBX8cIqqTI&t=1868s) change every day but be available so if you had this this particular kind of air conditioning then um that would be a standard facility in buildings which could be switched on um and it's kind of is educational thing so people know what to do in that kind of situation and we do proper research and um a lot of the risks that that we have in our society around are around buildings and cars and there's there's a kind of there's a certain resilience around that but but then you know I think what we're talking about here is moving as as we develop really as a species we're moving into Arenas where we're resilient to more than different kinds of risk so you know the Middle Ages um terrorism wasn't an issue um swine flu certainly was well you know their their equivalent things but they basically just died a b you know Monte p and bring out your dead kind of that was how life was and so it's the question of how you move forward from that situation into things which are not normally perceived as as risks for this year so you know viral attack that could be one every years or something like that but if if we're not you know that what that means is it could happen any year doesn't mean it's going to happen in 30 years time so if you're not always ready it's it's going to have so if we haven't fixed far you know you can just see that a lot of the way that we live life just wouldn't work prop um but uh as we get more sophisticated as a species we need to to um deal better with these kind of things the the whole international travel thing it means that something like swine flu it's like we've given it a transmission methodology we just never had before and um so unless we deal with that you know we've increased the risk without doing anything about it and you know the so this is the difficult area of people understanding this is because the thing about fire is everybody understands it's a risk but SW flu people kind of don't really get a sense that you know in in 1918 it killed more people than World War I well you look at all the books about World War I you know it's hardly anything

[33:38](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vBX8cIqqTI&t=2018s) about with the the government here has just announced magnificent sum of7 million to do some basic Research into swine food you know it's kind of it's it just it's the wrong level of response to problems so sorry you had a point there on your previous slide uh policy backs Tech what do you mean by that well that that a lot of this you know Engineers can produce the tech you know if you say we want to understand how to deal with swine flu then you just need a bunch of you know Arab style Engineers to go through the it's an engineering kind kind of problem in the end also medical as well um but policy has got to back that you know you can't do that isolation so unless right think that the policy needs to back the the technical response that's right that's and that's often where you know we can do it but I'll be doing yeah sure no no I get that so as I

[34:42](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vBX8cIqqTI&t=2082s) say it turns out to be the the people for this and I you know started off being an NG I'm kind of biased but it's interesting talking to lots of people about these kind of things if you talk to people who are in think tanks some sort of M about policy and things like that they kind of don't get it you know they they'd like you to write a nice report about it or but the idea that action ends up you know the result of some work is action is an engineering um focus and um of course it's Engineers who produce the buildings and the cars and in many ways have produced the city um but by looking at um particular systems within that you know so it's a a grid system a water system maybe a gas system um but they're not that integrated often um so it also asks for a bigger view from Engineers about what a resilient city is and you know some of the work P's done it's like bringing a lot of those systems together I think you know what we're talking about in the way is is also some disaster proofing so it's things that are not always going on but the the you know something nasty comes along the whole thing just doesn't fall you know like in London they think they've got about two days food in the pipeline well that's that's not very much if you suddenly have problems with food you know so how do you have a system which which is engineered to have that kind of resilience built

[36:23](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vBX8cIqqTI&t=2183s) in so we thought you know what what sort of things come out of this um in terms of how to take it further and I think that the first thing is um a lot of a lot of the kind of things we' talked about um they're the kind of things which you know if you take swine flu you sort of feel it's being thought about because you know we get all these people on television telling us what to do often contradicting each other but you know there's sort of something going on but what you see is that actually they're mainly dealing with the individual so they're saying what the individual should do if they' got flu or but they're not dealing with what happens if there's a higher death rate than the very low one we've currently got they're not dealing with what would the effect of that be on infrastructure you know everybody in a particular nuclear power station suddenly gets wine flu can you keep the can you keep the power station going that that kind of thing so I think an interesting thing give me one keep onor sorry um so um an interesting thing to do is to look at some of these systems and um go into them fully and see well what does that mean because because often you know you the impression is well there's a awful lot you ought to do to make it really work but is that true you know there so are the is there a kind of a low level of stuff that you could do to prepare and then you got another chunk of stuff that you when it actually happens you you uh bring it in put in place yeah but I think often the issue is you know these prospects which can be scary well it's difficult to think about and and it's not very clear whose job it is to think about we've talked for example to people in the cabinet office in London whose job it is to think about these things and to be honest they aren really thinking about it you know the kind of replies you get it's it's kind of scary so even at very senior government level they're not taking this kind of stuff on and when these things happen they they have very serious consequences so the idea of kind of resilience now plan which is like you take a particular organization and you say in this in the next year we're going to resilience proof it against the scarier options so for example if um if

[38:53](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vBX8cIqqTI&t=2333s) you have the sort of power grid kind of problem well what does it take for a company to keep running in a situation where it has major power problems so that you that might involve working from home but then how do you ensure there's power supply there how do you ensure your network stays up how do you ensure that you've you've got you know the mobile phone network goes down or you know all those kind of questions which you can look at for an individual company where you say well if we've done all this actually there's these that could happen but they won't you know they won't affect us we can keep going and in a competitive situation when things go wrong then it's the companies that keep going that can get the business to put it right again and this is I think particularly true in engineering where often it's the kind of expertise that that people need um and the other possibility really um sort of uh is the idea of a pilot project to look at this for some something like Arab where you you know you've got the kind of um the technical understanding of a lot of this stuff which which other companies don't have but also doing it internally in some way means that that can get you into this into the position where you can sell some sort of resilience uh plan or project or technology around networks or you know sort of an engineering solution to um the kind of that you can get into in these major these major problems and

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End of [320] The Living City - Buttered Side Down presentation to Arup - London November 2009. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt.
Read next: next on the same works, [8](https://guptaoption.com/texts/8.md) Municipal Administration of Cities in Crisis (2013); the most closely related, [847](https://guptaoption.com/texts/847.md) The Living City (slides; Mike Bennett & Vinay Gupta,... (2009); his whole career in one file, https://guptaoption.com/story.md.