Hacking for Urban Resilience
Urban resilience is a global challenge. Too often the emergency of the day leads to recriminations and post-event public displays of finger-pointing. The small voices of the dedicated government official, nonprofit activist, scientific researcher or journalist in hindsight prove prescient, and the catastrophe’s costs of remediation rise to unimaginable levels.
The Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities Project, and numerous national disaster response plans (such as FEMA‘s) take a longer term view, weaving from cascading risks of failure, a quilt of intersecting and interdependent agency, corporation, NGO and other organizations to forecast and mitigate the threats on urban systems and settings.
Stanford University faculty and students have been applying hackathon / lean startup methods to persistent coordination and other issues in defense and diplomacy settings. Hacking for Defense (H4D) and Hacking for Diplomacy (H4Di) courses pioneered at Stanford are now being organized and taught at dozens of universities and agencies worldwide. (See this Los Angeles Times article).
Urban Logic has proposed and is now collaborating with faculty at Stanford University and resilience professionals to organize Hacking for Urban Resilience (H4UR) as a fast 10-week (one academic calendar quarter) course leveraging the methodologies of H4D and H4Di to support Silicon Valley startup thinking that would anticipate, mitigate and respond to urban disaster conditions.
Bruce Cahan
Bruce Cahan is CEO and co-founder of Urban Logic, a nonprofit that harnesses finance and technology to change how systems think, act and feel. He is an Ashoka Fellow, aa Lecturer at Stanford University's Department of Management Science & Engineering, a Distinguished Scholar at Stanford mediaX and a former CodeX Fellow at Stanford's Center for Legal Informatics. Bruce was trained as an international finance lawyer at Weil Gotshal & Manges in NYC (10 years) and as merchant banker at Asian Oceanic in Hong Kong (2 years). Bruce graduated The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania (B.S. Economics 1976) and Temple Law School (J.D. 1979). Bruce has been licensed to practice law in California (2006), New York (1980) and Pennsylvania (1980).
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