Flux.Land is an interactive geo-socio-spatial platform designed to increase awareness and bridge the gap between different stakeholders of urban development through a data-driven, collaborative, web-based toolkit for design, planning, and decision making across scales. Developed in collaboration with the MIT Urban Risk Lab and Broward County -Florida, Flux.Land simultaneously and swiftly overlays complex and critical information rarely visualized in tandem. Users can overlap socio-demographic data (income, race, age), physio-geographic conditions (elevation, soil type, ground cover), and policy planning information (land use and zoning, wells, property values) – and then intersect them with climate risks. The tool also includes real-time live-feed data from weather stations, tidal gauges and wells.

The aim is to connect planning and policy level data for cross-departmental decision making, participatory planning, education, and civic engagement with eco-morphological information. Flux.Land does not limit itself to just visualization of risks and their projected impacts - it aims to provide recommendations and actionable insights for its users in the form of specific preparedness and adaptation / mitigation strategies at the parcel, neighborhood, and city scales. The first phase of “Flux.Land” was presented to a large international audience onDecember 14th, 2017 at the Southeast Florida Climate Leadership Summit, in FortLauderdale Florida, funded by the SSHRC Institutional Grant.  Starting in the Fall 2020, the platform will be used as an educational module in Broward County District School Board’s climate education curricula. By visualizing the local consequences of global trends in resilient design and urbanism, the project aims to help planners build a literacy in climate mitigation and adaptation methods and techniques.

As part of the research, the team identified a series of “Climate Action Zones” (CAZ) using spatial clustering algorithms built into the Flux.Land platform. CAZs are areas within the city that exhibit a high degree of uncertainty based on socio-environmental risk profiles at the intersection of various parameters, such as topographic elevation, surface permeability, infrastructure/building age, socio-demographics, land values, and land use. These CAZs represent opportunities for developing innovative multi-scalar (from the local to the regional) climate change-related hazard adaptation policies that account for equitable socio-ecological resilience.