Evaluating Practical Implementation of Geodesign and its Impacts on Resilience

Using systems thinking, geodesign offers a promising mixture of design process and strategic analysis for building more resilient landscapes. Although the scholarship and literature on geodesign is increasing rapidly (C.-L. WU & CHIANG 2018), there is little evidence of an empirical evaluation of the geodesign approach in practice. Do geodesign processes encourage more resilient outcomes? Using content analysis and multivariate regression, we evaluate 35 geodesign projects from the 2019 International Geodesign Collaboration to determine the connections between geodesign processes and resilience. The projects were submitted by academics from over 50 different places across the world as part of landscape or urban design studios. We find that most of the submitted projects include a comprehensive and explicit set of design objectives and a wide range of diverse strategies. Most projects, however, fail to address process relationships, raising concerns that this deficiency might reduce the diversity and dynamics of design outcomes. Our evaluation also found that projects with more robust and comprehensive design strategies scored higher in our resilience measures. The findings offer insights for designers, practitioners, and policymakers to better utilize the geodesign approach.