CEES special issue – the body of knowledge for systems 2020

Abstract

The question ‘What is Civil Engineering Systems – CES?’was posed by the editors not as an attempt to arrive at a set of common definitions but more to foster conversation around the issues. The disparate contributions to this special edition have achieved that goal by exposing very large differences of approach ranging at the extremes from the formal (Carmichael) to the informal (Elms). The editors also ask what constitutes a ‘BOK’ – Body of Knowledge for CEES. This question begs many further questions such as what is ‘knowledge’ anyway when we cannot predict the behaviour of a deterministic non-linear hinged pendulum after just a few cycles? What is the role of science in engineering and how do they both relate to technology in an age when STEM is dominated in the minds of so many people by the S? What is uncertainty when so many theorists deny looking beyond statistics and probability to embrace ambiguity, incompleteness and unknown unknowns? How do we categorise and manage uncertainty to make our systems resilient, sustainable and robust against ‘surprises’ like banking collapses and pandemics never mind the challenges of climate change? How do we learn from mistakes when accidents and disasters like Grenfell follow similar patterns to previous disasters of history? How does CEES relate to the wider world of politics and economics and the arts? Should STEM be expanded to STEAMM to include the arts and medicine? The implied assumptions in the various papers about the questions seem to depend on the experiences of each author and their necessarily partial reading of the massive amount of material available to a modern researcher. That is natural and to be expected – but is incumbent on us all who follow a systems approach to embrace all relevant points of view (particularly the journals relating to civil engineering) and adapt and learn from them. That is the real value of this Special Issue. The editors compared contribution under nine headings (Jowitt and Dias Table 1). I looked at the responses of the authors to some other key system ideas which, for brevity I will restrict to just five – complexity, uncertainty, emergence, interdependence and learning. All authors refer to complexity but only Whyte et al discuss it in any depth although Jowitt differentiates between complicated as rich in detail and complex as rich in structure. No-one refers to the sense-making models called Cynefin which differentiate the complex and messy (high emergent uncertainty, interconnectedness and conflict) from the complicated (highly interconnected but well understood),