Systems & Technology Research LLC — Department of Defense STTR Phase I: ST17C-003

Description

The unique scale, population density, complexity, and connectedness of megacities requires new tools for detecting and assessing risks related to civil unrest, rule of law, terrorism, and other sources of instability, and for understanding the underlying dynamics. In addition, gray zone operations pose a new and strategically important class of threats to the stability of nation states and cities within them, and new tools are needed to detect and counter these threats. To address these challenges, STR and Draper Labs propose to develop and demonstrate novel technology for assessing and forecasting 1) risks to an urban environments stability, and related to this, 2) the environments resilience or anti-fragility for a range stressors. Stressors may be organic (e.g., population pressure due to immigration; food shortages due to crop failures in the surrounding countryside) or externally imposed by a hostile actor (e.g., gray zone information operations to politically destabilize; terrorist attacks). Our approach aims to provide objective metrics for risk and fragility at the city and neighborhood level.