These days, I spend a lot of time thinking about cities and synergies. I believe that the very basic components of urban sustainability–and education about it–must be grounded in showing linkages between concurrent, parallel,and  symbiotic processes.  We can not talk about anything ecological without discussing the economic or equity component to it. Clearly I’m not the only one thinking about this stuff.

Resilience. via: http://maryjaneryan.files.wordpress.com/2009/08/resilience.jpg

SEED Magazine has an excellent article on urban resilience. Its header reads: Merging complex systems science and ecology, resilience scientists have broken new ground on understanding—and preserving—natural ecosystems. Now, as more and more people move into urban hubs, they are bringing this novel science to the city.

Discussing examples that range from the loss of wetlands around New Orleans–that ironically were destroyed during the construction of the levees as well as natural gas exploration–that ultimately helped contribute to the tragedy of Katrina’s effect, to the spoiling of 25 million liters of raw milk in Australia when natural gas power supply was knocked out, the article discusses the concept of resilience on an urban scale. And while of course there are parallels between ecosystem design and urban design, the fundamental basis of resilience is diversity, redundancy, and variety. These things are often seen as “inefficient” on an urban scale.

This might seem theory heavy to you, but it really was one of the most fascinating articles I have read in a long time. And real life applications–contemporary and existent–examples are used for every sub-heading. So, yes, while there are lofty concepts, the reality of our urban world is the basis for discussion.

And of course the question of climate change is never far removed. A brief excerpt reads:

“A key feature of complex adaptive systems is that they can settle into a number of different equilibria. A lake, for example, will stabilize in either an oxygen-rich, clear state or algae-dominated, murky one. A financial market can float on a housing bubble or settle into a basin of recession. Historically, we’ve tended to view the transition between such states as gradual. But there is increasing evidence that systems often don’t respond to change that way: The clear lake seems hardly affected by fertilizer runoff until a critical threshold is passed, at which point the water abruptly goes turbid.

Resilience science focuses on these sorts of tipping points. It looks at gradual stresses, such as climate change, as well as chance events—things like storms, fires, even stock market crashes—that can tip a system into another equilibrium state from which it is difficult, if not impossible, to recover. How much shock can a system absorb before it transforms into something fundamentally different? That, in a nutshell, is the essence of resilience.”

Take time to read this article. I promise you will be thinking about synergies afterward as well.

Michele Pierre-Louis, former Prime Minister of Haiti and current director of the Open Society Institute’s (OSI) reconstruction efforts in the country wrote a piece called, “My Pride and Hope for Haiti,” which was published in the Huffington Post and on OSI’s website.  In it, she talks about the apocalyptic and inhumane conditions that people have been forced to live in since the earth quake struck. But also about the pride and sense of community that is just as visible. Her closing line, which has stuck with me since I first read it was, “I am more convinced than ever that we should put the country back together not as it was but as it should be.”

The tragedy of “natural” disasters of course is that they aren’t necessarily natural in their damage.  Yes, in the Siberian tundra or the middle of the ocean, bad storms can happen, trees will fall, but once there are heavily populated areas involved, the exponential destruction stemming from that single natural event becomes the real issue. Multiply population density by existing socio-economic conditions that have at times led to less than sound construction (and inhumane living conditions before a quake) and your disaster seems like the opposite of natural. It is beyond belief.

There has been no shortage of opportunities to witness the situation on the ground. Photoblogs, articles, even google-earth have allowed the most distant onlooker to see the events unfold. But once the debris is cleared, services are somewhat restored and mourning for the lives lost becomes tangible through tributes, memorials and other initiatives, Haiti has an opportunity to rebuild itself the way it could have been.  Much of the built environment was lacking structurally sound components. Buildings with too much sand in the concrete mix were the norm. Reinforcement beams were scarce. Architecture for Humanity has started a fund raising campaign to bring their design services to the country once it is ready to reconstruct. But for now, there are a few signs of (solar) light shining.

The British Government recently released a map that forecasts the disastrous scenarios that could play out with a 4 degree (C) rise in temperature across the globe.  It features nine categories of effects (including drought, sea-level rise, and permafrost) which can be toggled on and off.  The selected category tab displays a “hot spot” on the map that comes accompanied with some explanatory text.

The graphics of the map may not be super sleek and the data behind it may not be groundbreaking, but the real significance of the release lies in the official shift in discourse which it represents.  The Guardian reports that until recently politicians have been unwilling to entertain the prospect of failing to stop global warming at the 2 degree mark.  With the Copenhagen talks looming near–talks which Foreign Secretary Miliband described as “the most complicated international negotiations ever attempted”–this release should be understood as an attempt to turn up the heat (sorry, I couldn’t resist!) on Copenhagen.

From Delft University of Technology

Here at the Institute, sea-level rise is way up there on our list of pressing climate-related problems facing cities like New York (our director has a great little interview on the subject and co-chairs the Mayors Panel on Climate Change that just released this report).  It’s no coincedence then, that this story on Dutch designs for floating cities caught our eye.  Green Inc. reports:

Under DeltaSync’s plan for a floating city, large blocks of polystyrene foam connected by a frame of special, high-strength concrete would be used as floating devices, allowing the cities to be located in shallow waters. Dome-like structures would be linked to one another by floating pedestrian bridges.

A floating highway would connect with existing cities.

Heat could be drawn from the surface water and stored in the ground either under the floating city or onshore before being used to heat buildings.

“Not only does this reduce the surface water temperature, leveling out the temperature increase caused by climate change, it also significantly reduces carbon dioxide emissions,” Mr. de Graaf said.

Chaos at rush-hour... downtown Providence, Rhode Island as the storm surge of the 1938 Hurricane submerges downtown (RI Historical Society).

Since we are in the midst of hurricane season and Hurricane Bill got our attention, I thought it would be a good time to discuss urban sustainability challenges with respect to natural hazards.

This entry is inspired by an iRevolution blog entitled Disaster for Techies, which does an excellent job teasing out subtle attributes of a disaster by separating the concept from its cousin—the natural hazard.

“There is a subtle but fundamental difference between disasters (processes) and hazards (events); a distinction that Jean-Jacques Rousseau first articulated in 1755 when Portugal was shaken by an earthquake. In a letter to Voltaire one year later, Rousseau notes that, “nature had not built [process] the houses which collapsed and suggested that Lisbon’s high population density [process] contributed to the toll (1)”

A short summary of definitions: A disaster is measured by the extent to which society is impacted by a hazard event (or indirectly by a changed environment), which depends on the vulnerability and resilience of a population, and supporting systems. Vulnerability describes how exposed social and natural systems are to hazards while resilience is a measure of how well systems can absorb hazard impacts and rebound.

The above quote points out that there is really no such thing as a natural disaster, so to speak about disasters in terms of phases, e.g., pre-and post-disaster phases with respect to a natural hazard event can be deceiving. The extent to which a hazard can potentially cause a disaster is governed by a complex product of past social, economic, and political processes that has ordered current social and physical infrastructure regimes, and consequently, global, regional, and local vulnerability distributions. When referring to a disaster only in relation to a specific hazard event, it becomes all too easy to focus on the event and the condition of a place at the time and not emphasize the processes that allowed the event to result in a disaster. That is, the tendency to drown-out the causes of vulnerability by focusing on the strength of a given storm (or any other natural hazard) or the geography of an impacted place (as a static phenomenon), etc. Since disasters are ongoing processes that do not depend on the actual occurrence of a hazard event, describing the phases of a situation as post- or pre-disaster obscures the social processes that are the underlying causes of disasters. To drive this point home—as a society rebuilds during a “post-disaster phase,” another disaster may be being constructed (in the processes), resulting in another pre-disaster condition.

Focusing on a specific hazard event and the static geographical situation as the causes of a disaster obscures complex issues that are deep-seated in past social processes.

To properly assess a disaster, we need to look at the processes that have resulted in a geographical situation and assess it in light of best estimates of hazard risk. For example, the industrial revolution brought people to the coastal area of the Gulf of Mexico to take advantage of an advantageous location to bring oil into the United States. The oil industry, in turn, attracted workers, increasing the population along the coast as people flocked to earn a living. (Of course there are many other processes that have caused the the population in the Gulf of Mexico—this is just an example.)

The Gulf of Mexico is subject to hurricanes and land subsidence, which makes populations in this region vulnerable. The processes above increase vulnerability as population grows and economic activity increases rates of land subsidence (fluid extraction—water/oil; build environment—buildings, homes, bridges, and levees that prevent sediment replenishment from the Mississippi River that would offset land subsidence rates), as relative sea rise further exposes the region to natural hazard risk.

When using the word “disaster,” these are the kinds of processes that we are referring to. Of course the risk of a hazard event is part of the assessment of vulnerability, which describes the potential for a disaster, but a specific hazard event itself is not a disaster.

City designs that do not view disasters as ongoing processes will not address to true underlying causes, making inhabitants vulnerable to natural hazards.