Big Question: Enhancing community resilience to traumatic events

Principal Investigator: Gary An, Surgery; Charles Macal, Argonne National Lab; Jonathan Ozik, Computation Institute

Funding Type: Workshop

Focus Area: Complexity

Big Idea: Urban trauma from violence is perhaps the most dramatic and disruptive type of event that can occur in a community, collapsing multiple scales of factors (social, economic, historical, ethnographic, behavioral, etc.) into a catastrophic personal event localized in space and time. Addressing the complex multi-scale, multi-aspect nature of the pathogenesis of urban trauma requires the integration of these various factors, bringing together a wide range of expertise, perspectives and opinions from researchers, policy makers and community members, each with their own conceptual/cognitive models of the urban environment, various “cites of the mind,” that determine how they view the challenge of urban trauma. This workshop will bring together these stakeholders to design and develop a participatory simulation environment derived from the large-scale, geographically embedded agent-based model, chiSim, which can serve at a unifying platform to integrate the various informational sources, cognitive maps and complex interactions involved in the dynamics of urban trauma.  This participatory simulation environment can serve both as rhetorical device, where the consequences of different beliefs and conceptual models can be visualized, shared and discussed, as well as a virtual environment where putative interventions can be explored prior to testing in the real world.