The Vulnerable City

By Dr Brydon Wang

For much of modern history, cities have been presented as triumphs of human control through construction technology that lets us build roads that overcome distance, dams and levees that hold back rivers and floods. We have built electricity networks to deliver power on demand and sophisticated planning systems that separate incompatible land uses and direct our insatiable appetite for growth towards more desirable outcomes. And beneath these systems sits an implicit, foundational promise that urban life can be made safer, more efficient and more predictable through careful design and governance of these construction technologies.

This promise has shaped the way cities are imagined and managed. Contemporary discussions about smart cities extend the same logic through this next wave of data-focused technologies. Sensors provide visibility of urban conditions in real time, that then feed digital twins models that help us monitor and predict for different types of future development scenarios. Various AI systems now promise more efficient allocation of resources and more sophisticated forms of prediction, again predicated on the assumption that better information will inevitably offer a pathway towards better decisions.

The appeal of this narrative is obvious, and yet it requires us to pause and consider whether we are baking in new forms of risk into our cities. Cities are systems, extraordinarily complex systems. They contain millions of people, thousands of interconnected infrastructure assets that require countless decisions being made simultaneously across public and private institutions. Faced with this complexity, the desire for greater visibility and control has become one of the defining characteristics of contemporary urban governance.

The experience of recent years has exposed the limits of this aspiration.

Floods, bushfires, the pandemic, housing shortages, supply chain disruptions, cybersecurity incidents and energy insecurity have demonstrated that uncertainty remains a persistent feature of urban life even as our technologies become ever more granular and backed by exponential growth in computation. While technological sophistication has undoubtedly increased our capacity to understand and respond to many risks, it has, unfortunately, become apparent that the complexities associated with the design and deployment of such technologies generate new forms of risk exposure. As such, the systems that make cities more capable of addressing inherent risks associated with its siting can also make them more dependent, interconnected and potentially fragile.

In response to these pressures, a growing body of urban scholarship has begun to move beyond the language of optimisation and efficiency towards a recognition that uncertainty has become a defining condition of contemporary city-making. Some commentators have described the emergence of the Anxious City: a city increasingly organised around anticipation of future threats. Security infrastructure, flood mitigation works, emergency management systems, resilience strategies, public health interventions and sophisticated forms of monitoring all reflect attempts to manage uncertain futures before they arrive. In sum, the modern city has become highly skilled at sensing potential disruption.

This shift is significant because it reveals a subtle change in the way cities understand themselves. While the twentieth-century city was often imagined as a project of mastery through engineering, planning and technological innovation that promised the subsumption of environmental constraints and social challenges, the anxious twenty-first century city is less confident. Beneath its technological ambitions, policymakers are now aware that many of the risks a city faces cannot be fully eliminated. Climate change, cyber insecurity, geopolitical instability and rapid technological transformation create conditions that are difficult to predict and impossible to control completely.

The result is a growing tension within urban governance. Cities continue to pursue visibility through sensors, data collection and predictive modelling, while simultaneously confronting forms of uncertainty that resist precise measurement. Civic groups are now attuned to the fact that the challenge is no longer about simply gathering more information (because what then is done with such data?). Instead, we are learning how institutions can govern responsibly when uncertainty remains despite sophisticated knowledge systems.

These developments suggest a different way of understanding the relationship between cities, governance and uncertainty. Cities can thus be understood as systems that organise and redistribute exposure to risk across communities, institutions and infrastructure networks.  

Much of contemporary policy treats vulnerability as a characteristic possessed by specific groups. That is, ‘vulnerability’ becomes something that belongs to or characterises the elderly, the economically disadvantaged, people with disabilities or communities exposed to environmental hazards. While these forms of disadvantage are undoubtedly important, vulnerability theory offers a broader insight. Scholars such as Martha Fineman argue that vulnerability is not exceptional but universal. Human beings are inherently vulnerable because they are embodied, dependent and embedded within social institutions. Throughout our lives we rely upon systems that sit beyond our direct control: legal systems, markets, governments, infrastructure networks, financial institutions and increasingly digital platforms.

Cities are perhaps the clearest expression of this condition. Urban life is built upon layers of interdependence, with infrastructure designed, delivered and availed to residents in ways that they have little control over. Consequently, residents are dependent on these natural monopolies, relying on water systems they do not operate, electricity networks they do not own and transport systems they cannot individually maintain. In the same vein, housing markets, planning systems, insurance frameworks and public institutions all shape opportunities and constraints within cities in ways that remain largely invisible until they fail. As such, urban life is best understood as a continuous process through which risk, dependencies and protection strategies are distributed and renegotiated across institutions and communities, as well as infrastructure systems.

This insight carries significant implications for urban governance. The central challenge lies in how exposure to risk is distributed across communities. Some neighbourhoods experience greater exposure to flooding, heat stress, housing insecurity, infrastructure deficits or exclusion from digital services. These patterns are rarely accidental. Instead, they reflect decades of decisions about land use, investment, planning, technology and public policy. Urban development continually redistributes risk, determining who bears risk, who receives protection and whose interests are prioritised when trade-offs become unavoidable.

Governance and city-making, therefore, function as the mechanisms through which these decisions are negotiated, justified and eventually released into the urban wilds. Viewed in this way, urban governance becomes less a project of eliminating vulnerability and more a question of how vulnerability is recognised, distributed and managed across society. These questions sit at the centre of much of my own research. Whether examining automated decision-making systems, digital twins, construction contracts, renewable energy infrastructure or low-lying coastal cities, I’ve noticed a common theme emerging. Each context I’ve examined involves communities bearing the consequences of decisions made by others under conditions of uncertainty. And the legal and institutional arrangements surrounding these decisions matter because they shape how risks and burdens are recognised, negotiated and ultimately allocated across society. As such, urban development has always involved choices about who bears risk, who receives protection and whose interests are prioritised when trade-offs must be made.

Climate change provides one of the clearest illustrations in rising sea levels, more intense storms and increasing flood events that expose structural fragilities that have accumulated over generations. Low-lying communities often face the greatest impacts despite contributing least to the underlying causes. Infrastructure designed for historical climatic conditions is now required to operate within environments for which it was never intended.

I explore this challenge in my recent edited collection on buoyant urbanism: Large Floating Solutions, published by Springer in 2025. In it, I considered how discussions about adaptation frequently focus on engineering solutions, yet the deeper questions concerning governance, such as questions about tactical retreat, protection, adaptation and investment involve competing interests, unequal consequences and difficult decisions to be made about acceptable risk. While rising waters expose these underlying dependencies, it also reveals the governance systems through which those vulnerabilities are (meant to be) managed.

A similar dynamic appears within the digital city.

Much of my research in this space has examined automated decision-making systems, digital twins and artificial intelligence. These technologies are frequently presented as mechanisms for reducing uncertainty. Despite the promise of larger data sets leading to better pattern identification and more precise modelling, analysis and decision-making, these data-focused technologies likewise introduce new forms of fragility.

Individuals become dependent on, or perhaps even reduced to, classifications and data points (perhaps partially capturing their lived experience), with modelling and subsequent decisions made in ways that are difficult to observe or challenge. Information asymmetries between those designing these urban technological systems and those affected by them make errors hard to detect and challenge before they are replicated at scale across entire communities.

Consequently, the challenge is not simply technical but a concern that is characterised by the distribution of power and the capacity of individuals to understand, contest and participate (or influence) the decisions that affect them.

This was one of the central themes of my doctoral research on trustworthiness in automated decision-making systems (including AI systems). Trust becomes necessary whenever vulnerability exists. A person only trusts when they are willing to be exposed (vulnerable) to the actions of another, whether that other is an individual, institution, technological or governance system. Vulnerability therefore precedes trust formation. Before questions of trustworthiness arise, there must first be some condition of dependence, uncertainty or exposure to risk. This becomes a crucial lens for looking at the actions of city-makers and technology developers because it provides signals that this exposure to risk is being managed responsibly.

The framework I developed identifies three signals of trustworthiness that is based on the seminal Mayer model: ability, integrity and benevolence. In the context of cities and urban technology systems: Infrastructure demonstrates ability when it performs reliably and safely. The institutions that sit behind the design and delivery of these infrastructure projects demonstrate integrity when they operate consistently with legal and democratic principles. When governance systems are oriented towards the individuals and vulnerable communities, this then is a reflection of signals of benevolence.

This is why trustworthiness matters beyond artificial intelligence and its deployment in cities because the same questions arise whenever institutions exercise power over vulnerable communities through planning systems, infrastructure investment and allocation, environmental regulation or urban development. Trustworthiness provides a framework for evaluating whether those decisions are being made responsibly under conditions of uncertainty.

Seen through the lens of vulnerability, contemporary urban governance often involves managing competing dependencies rather than eliminating them. Every major infrastructure investment creates new opportunities while simultaneously exposing particular communities, landscapes and institutions to new forms of risk. The challenge is not simply determining which projects should proceed, but establishing legitimate processes through which these risks and burdens can be recognised, negotiated and shared.

Trustworthy governance becomes particularly important under these conditions. Communities are more willing to accept uncertainty when decisions demonstrate ability, integrity and benevolence. While technical competence (ability) remains essential and there is requirement to comply with legal obligations and the norms of society (integrity), at its heart, conditions of uncertainty require the signal of benevolence to convey how decision-makers have recognised the interests and risk borne by those affected by their decisions. This final signal of benevolent conduct is often the determiner as to whether projects ultimately secure social licence to proceed.

The growing debate surrounding data centres illustrates the point. Data centres have become essential infrastructure for the digital economy and the rapid expansion of artificial intelligence. Their development requires access to land, electricity, water and increasingly scarce network capacity. Similar tensions are emerging around renewable energy zones, transmission infrastructure, housing and transport systems. These developments are frequently framed as technical or economic questions. Yet beneath each sits a deeper governance challenge concerning the allocation of benefits, burdens and risk across society.

The increasing incursion of water in our cities provides perhaps the clearest illustration of this broader challenge. Water has a remarkable capacity to reveal the hidden fragilities of urban systems. Drainage networks, transport corridors, energy infrastructure, insurance arrangements and planning assumptions often appear robust until tested by extreme conditions.

For centuries, urban development has been premised upon the idea that water should be controlled, redirected or excluded. Rivers were channelled, wetlands reclaimed and sent to pasture, and coastlines were progressively hardened and fortified with various measures to hold back the waves. These interventions enabled extraordinary urban growth and transformed many of the world's great coastal cities. But at the same time, this approach reinforced an assumption that environmental risk could be reduced through ever-greater levels of engineering control.

Climate change is steadily exposing the limits of that assumption. The growing intensity of rainfall events and disruption to traditional precipitation patterns, rising sea levels and frequent coastal flooding are revealing long-standing fragilities embedded with decades of urban development. When accompanied by subsidence of cities and broader migration patterns to urban environments, this challenge has now extended beyond what engineering can address on its own.

These pressures have prompted growing interest in urban forms that adapt to water rather than seek to exclude it. Among the most intriguing is buoyant urbanism: an approach to amphibious architecture and permanently floating solutions that seek to accommodate water rather than simply resist it. Floating neighbourhoods, buildings that rise with the temporary incursion of water to fall back onto existing foundations, and water-adaptive infrastructure (think: ‘sponge cities’) are often presented as technical innovations. However, their greater significance may lie in the governance philosophy they embody because rather than pursuing complete control over environmental uncertainty, buoyant urbanism begins from an acceptance that vulnerability is an enduring feature of urban life and then proceeds to work this this acknowledged condition.

In this sense, buoyant urbanism represents more than a response to climate change. It presents a practical response to the vulnerability condition itself. Instead of assuming uncertainty can be engineered away, it asks how cities might remain functional, legitimate and liveable when uncertainty persists. A city capable of living with water is ultimately a city capable of acknowledging human and environmental limits, adapting to uncertainty and developing institutions that remain trustworthy under changing conditions. As urban communities confront a future characterised by greater uncertainty, the capacity to govern the distribution of risk fairly, transparently and with legitimacy may be one of the defining challenges of twenty-first century city-making.

This challenge extends well beyond climate adaptation to how artificial intelligence is deployed, how critical infrastructure is planned and received, to how housing is delivered and the manner in which public institutions will maintain legitimacy in periods of rapid change. And in this way, I return to the persistent question that continues to shape my research: how should societies govern shared vulnerability under conditions of uncertainty?

Related research

• Brydon T Wang (2025). Buoyant futures: our global duty to recognise floating cities as ‘territory’ in international law. Large floating solutions: design, construction, legality of offshore structures and buoyant urbanism. Edited by Brydon T. Wang, Chien Ming Wang, Kim Weinert, and Rutger de Graaf-van Dinther. Singapore: Springer.507-525.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-96-5435-2_22

• Brydon T Wang (2021). The machine metropolis: introduction to the automated city. Automating cities: design, construction, operation and future impact. Edited by Brydon T. Wang and C. M. Wang. Singapore, Singapore: Springer Singapore.1-21.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-8670-5_1

• Wang, Brydon T. (2025). Floating cities and buoyant urbanism in international law: inundation, territory and erga omnes obligations. WCFS 2024: Fourth World Conference on Floating Solutions, Hong Kong, Peoples Republic of China, 2–4 December 2024. Gateway East, Singapore: Springer Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-96-4569-5_89

• Brydon T Wang, Chien Ming Wang et al (2025). Large floating solutions: buoyant urbanism is our key solution to the emergent global water crisis. Large floating solutions: design, construction, legality of offshore structures and buoyant urbanism. Edited by Brydon T. Wang, Chien Ming Wang, Kim Weinert, and Rutger de Graff-van Dinther. Singapore: Springer.1-26.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-96-5435-2_1

• Brydon Timothy Wang (2022). The role of trustworthiness in automated decision-making systems and the law. PhD Thesis, School of Law, Queensland University of Technology. https://doi.org/10.5204/thesis.eprints.231388