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Design for uncertainty in urban contexts: looking at risk perceptions of lay people from vulnerable communities

Urban development and the organic growth of cities and the activities they encompass impose strains over various dimensions of cities' life. Logistics, including people and cargo transportation; Food supply; Energy supply; waste management; and Social cohesion are just some of the areas in which risks affecting cities at a systemic level can arise.

Rational:
Tackling these risks requires designing resilient cities, with emphasis on flexibility, sustainability, inclusiveness and integration of knowledge and technological infrastructures.
During 2012, the focus of IRGC Portugal was on launching a team for innovative "hands on" approach based on the design of new engineering-based products and processes to help shape perceptions and peoples' behavior.
Two areas of intervention were chosen in terms of risk mitigation, including energy consumption and non-communicable diseases (e.g., diabetes). While it is increasingly acknowledged that there is a need for intervention in these areas, there is considerable debate about the factors and policy mechanisms that can bring awareness of lay people towards these areas of risk. The research at this stage did not aim to cover all these factors but to identify gaps and future research needs. At this point, we focused on how engineering design and the usage of engineered-based products can support change of perceptions and behavior.

Setting the problem:
The main goal is to assess risk perceptions of lay people belonging to vulnerable communities and, in the process, to examine strategies of risk communication towards these groups. While early studies on risk perception were based on "unilateral" expert views (i.e., "methods of expert elicitation"), it has become more and more clear that the involvement of lay people in the process is critical for the governance of risk (i.e., to ensure their participation). But, and despite these new trends, vulnerable groups remain an outlier category of this type of analysis.
Only recently, these studies have started to address risk perceptions of vulnerable groups (e.g., exploring differences in terms of risk perception across genders, white/non white population). But, efforts in this direction remain rather limited. For example, it is quite surprising that the argument regarding the need to communicate risks regarding non-communicable diseases, such as diabetes, to vulnerable groups constitutes by itself a topic for a recent publication in Science . However, the literature is scarce in providing recommendations how to communicate risks in such environments.

Building a theoretical background: a brief overview of sample theoretical approaches
Different approaches have been put forward to explore risk perceptions of lay people towards risk. We distinguish the biases approach from other perspectives centered on values and attitudes. While the former approach argues that, by uncovering people's biases in processes of decision making, we can raise their awareness and change behavior accordingly, other approaches argue that information per se does not help shaping behaviors. The biases approaches focuses on information based strategies of risk communication.
In these models it is considered that the debate has to be focused on the communication of uncertainty itself. In some ways, it is assumed that people are capable of handling uncertainty, provided they have the right information. Other perspectives consider this approach as limited. They argue that information is not good enough to shape people's behavior. For example, other approaches argue that to mitigate risk behavior towards non-communicable diseases, one has to consider people's values in life or to consider their attitude towards diabetes.
The biases approach explores, on one hand, the cognitive and emotional biases of lay people towards risk perception, and, on the other hand, their representation of risk (by contrast to expert's views). These studies have shown that people assessment of risk do not conform to Bayesian rules of probabilistic decision-making. Instead, people systematically deviate from these standard norms of rationality. Their reasoning is biased and they use heuristics or rules of thumb when taking decisions under risk. People's cognitive biases include overconfidence, anchoring and availability (availability refers to the fact that they ignore initial bases rate due to the information that is available in their memories).
Moreover, it has been shown that decisions are emotionally overloaded (people's attention tends to be focused on catastrophic events - people's attention to cancer is much higher than other diseases that kill more). On the knowledge representation side, it has been shown that representations of risk and experts differ. While experts examine risk perception using statistical evidence, lay people use other components such as, dread, exposure and controllability.
The values approach is currently used in medicine to mitigate people's behavior in diabetes. Rather than asking people their perceptions on long-term risks, this methodology focuses on current values of people. The theory of planned behavior argues that attitudes, perceived behavior control and social pressure are the dimensions to be considered when looking at the need to change behaviors. While these models are useful, it is certain correct to assume that information is still important, especially for lay people from vulnerable communities. More likely, this people lack basic knowledge on diseases.
We take, as a starting point, the bounded rational hypothesis, but we argue that it needs to be stretched alongside a new dimension. We need to consider the social fabric in which behaviors take place, namely communities (behavior is shaped by context interdependences). For example, analysis has shown that social cognition (e.g., people' s perceptions of risk) depends on their affiliation groups.
In other words, people with more conservative background think that risk does not need to be shared, while people from more equalitarian background think the opposite. The idea that people have cultural biases has also been shown to be correct (their perceptions towards risk depends on group identity and culture, an area called cultural cognition). We purpose this line of search and argue that we need to contextualize behavior into their communities.