| Major disruptions by natural hazards create transformative opportunities for the introduction of radical alternative solutions to service provision in urban systems that can enhance overall system wealth and adaptive capacity. In August of 2005, Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast of the United States, resulting in one of the most costly natural disasters on record. The subsequent recovery efforts highlight the need to minimize the time it takes for new systems to emerge following a natural disaster. The window for introducing alternative technologies is very narrow. Effective adoption of evolutions or transformative solutions depends, in part, on understanding the pre-event network environment and identifying alternative means of providing similar levels of service in advance. This necessitates the quantitative description of material use through the spatial characterization of in-use stocks in the context of indicators of social capacity, physical descriptors of the built environment, and patterns of known and potential hazard exposure. This research demonstrates a method for using material flow analysis (MFA) to create a highly spatially-resolved material profile of in-use stocks for the U.S. In combination with locally derived damage assessments, the material profile was used to quantify the material impacts of a nationally-significant disruptive event at the parcel-level.;By extending the ecological metaphor employed in industrial ecology to consider the identification of foundation species within urban systems, important service configurations across the urban landscape can be identified. This approach to identifying service profiles across the built environment can be understood to frame the need for envisioning portfolios of evolutionary adaptations and technological transformation options for urban service provisioning, so as to "prime the pump" for innovation in response to disruptive events. Examination of clusters of foundation species, service profiles, within urban agglomerations can facilitate planning for selective senescence and renewal in response to disruptions, both lasting and episodic. Identification of foundation species across larger spatial extents allows for common solutions to place specific challenges. |
