The Little Book of THEORY OF CHANGE for Infrastructure and Cities

Infrastructure and cities are crucial components in creating a more sustainable and liveable world. Despite their role in supporting civilised life, we have allowed them to age and deteriorate, making them less effective. At the same time, they are under pressure from our increased and changing demands, and they are required to deliver their services in a fast-changing world (it’s rare a week goes by without some major story). Thinking about places and the way they operate as a ‘system-of-systems’ helps us understand that a change made to one part of the system will have consequences in other parts. Infrastructure and city systems involve people and this makes them infinitely complex: people are not robots, we behave in different ways and our actions can’t be easily predetermined. To add to this, infrastructure and cities serve the entire country, demanding a certain degree of internal consistency, but they must also be synergistic with global systems in this joined-up world we now inhabit. What we do in the UK has an impact beyond our borders. It is these combined impacts that are the focus of this Little Book. Treating change as a system intervention introduces the need to ‘think systemically’ and work seamlessly across disciplinary, sectoral and government silos – multidisciplinary teams of people collaborating on interdisciplinary problems using transdisciplinary working practices. These principles underpin the work of UKCRIC, which seeks to improve the support our systems provide for people while moving our places and what we do to a more sustainable, resilient and liveable state. These system changes, which can refer to the creation of or change to an artefact (such as installing smart electricity meters), an operational system (such as the entire UK energy transmission system), a policy (such as the energy ‘feed in tariff’) or a practice (such as everyone turning down the central heating), usually take the form of a project (a discrete activity) or a programme (several activities combined). The term ‘intervention’ is used herein to cover both.

source :

https://www.ukcric.com/media/1839/23562_theory_of_change_book_publication_aw4_230214.pdf