Natural disaster images displaying the wreak upon the built environment are a part of our cultural consciousness. They’ve been this way since the birth of photography, yet, the past decade or so has seen a worrisome convergence. Between the parallel increase in the ubiquity of media technology and the number of severely-devastating storms, the disasters have a high link to climate change.
It’s easy to picture the aftermath of a crisis. The question is, how do we visualize the calm before the storm—resilience in the face of more frequent 100-year floods and storm surges, and rising sea levels? Policies, regulations, and infrastructures that govern a city’s ability to bounce back from disaster are largely invisible—until they fail.
Getting people to adjust to climate realities is challenging. We assume that planning regulations and zoning are in place to protect us. Yet, the market often pushes development precariously into potentially hazardous areas, betting on a 100- or 500-year probability.
“No matter how many data points or models you show, no one likes being told not to build somewhere,” says Otis Rolley, a director at 100 Resilient Cities. “It can be difficult and emotional to think about building differently—it is not based on politics or inequity, but about their well-being and the overall well-being of the city.”
Landscape architect and educator Chris Reed of Stoss thinks that designing infrastructural spectacles could help the public understand what’s at stake. His fall 2016 studio at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design took on a pre-Harvey Houston as a site to investigate how to use landscape to address 21st-century realities of demographics, economics, and climate, among other things..
Can architects
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School of Design took on a pre-Harvey Houston as a site to investigate how to use landscape to address 21st-century realities of demographics, economics, and climate, among other things. For their studio project, graduate students Louise Roland and Jonah Susskind proposed retrofits of former water treatment pools to create a public pool and a multistory tower with a gushing fountain. If that whimsical fountain were built, it would serve as a daily reminder to the public that water is both a resource and a threat.
For Rolley, the recent storms did bring more public awareness, validating the importance of the work and a comprehensive idea of resilience that is social and economic as well as infrastructural. Yet it’s what he calls the “pre-covery” that remains unseen. “We do the pre-work in understanding the human and physical systems at play and how they can adapt to the shocks and stresses we will face,” he says. “Through data, analysis, and case studies, we advance stories and ideas within the cities we serve. Our goal is to change their approach to these risks before they occur.”
He points to an example in the San Juan, Puerto Rico, neighborhood of Playita, near the Los Corozos Lagoon, where Chief Resilience Officer Alejandra Castrodad-Rodriguez worked with the community, showing residents data models and maps of areas in jeopardy and having conversations about the danger. He estimates that 100 lives were saved, noting that because of those models people understood the risks and evacuated.
As this year’s hurricane season has shown, the optimistic (and perhaps even Modernist) goal of full recovery no matter where we build and what happens is no longer viable. And so there’s a growing tendency among designers and planners to scrap the word resiliency for adaptation, a term that is a bit of a fatalist’s reality check. “Resiliency has gone the way of sustainability—it has lost its meaning,” says Reed. “I subscribe to an ecologist’s definition of resiliency: the ability to adapt to new conditions. A wetland, for instance, changes and evolves over time.”
In Blue Dunes: Climate Change by Design (Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 2017), which tracks the development of WXY Architecture and West 8’s post–Hurricane Sandy barrier island proposal for Rebuild by Design, editor Jesse M. Keenan stresses the performative urgency of adaptation, writing “People need to change the way that they produce and consume in response or in preparation to climate change.” Perhaps then, in lieu of arguing for more robust buildings, architects have a responsibility to use their design and representation skills to help a larger public understand what a coastline looks like without buildings, and how a restored ecosystem would better protect inland development.
Architect Jeffrey Huber was a Florida adolescent when he saw his house destroyed by Hurricane Andrew. Now a principal at Brooks + Scarpa, he manages the firm’s South Florida office, where he is a director of planning and urban design. Huber rode out Irma in Fort Lauderdale, which weathered the storm but lost power for a week. Heat-related deaths followed across the state. The situation illustrates the difference between resilience and adaptation: Buildings were resilient and survived, but were ill-suited to what came next. “We are only chasing a symptom,” Huber says angrily. “We aren’t dealing with the inability of our contemporary architecture to allow us to live within the climate.”
Read more at https://www.metropolismag.com/architecture/resiliency-climate-change-cities/