Hurricane Sandy has changed the national conversation on
climate change. Unlike Hurricane Katrina, which much of the country was happy
to pin the blame for on New Orleans itself (“they shouldn’t have built there in
the first place!”), Sandy revealed climate change to be a growing threat to
nearly all coastal settlements. Formerly abstract warnings of growing
inundation risk, stemming from rising sea levels and increasing storm
frequency, suddenly became concrete and impossible to ignore. A new found sense
of vulnerability descended on coastal cities. In this light, urban design
cannot be dismissed as merely a luxury or an aesthetic consideration. The
discipline has taken on a new relevance and sense of urgency: cities,
particularly in coastal settings, must reconsider their built form in order to
adapt to radically altered environmental conditions. Three new books by Island
Press approach these issues with renewed sense of the value of the urban
design.
Entertaining and attractively designed, Alexandros
Washburn’s The Nature of Urban Design: A New York Perspective on Resilience
provides a fantastic introduction to the discipline of urban design for
non-designers. Washburn, the chief urban designer for New York City, uses that
city as case studies to explain what exactly urban designers do and why it
matters. He broadly defines urban design as “the art of changing cities,
guiding growth to follow new patterns that better meet our challenges while
improving our quality of life.” Of course, perhaps the biggest challenge facing
cities today is climate change, and The Nature of Urban Design uses Hurricane
Sandy to illustrate the need for adaptation, and how urban design can act as an
agent of change.
Washburn includes the suburbs in his definition of the city,
stating that the suburbs simply represent low-density cities, thus breaking
down the false city/suburb dichotomy. Washburn’s inclusion of the suburbs is
important because it allows him to expand the purview of urban design beyond
the city center to the entire metropolitan area. Urban design isn’t about
recreating a single notion of what the city is, but instead about adaptation
and improving living conditions, regardless of location within the metropolitan
region. Instead of seeking a rigid urban design toolkit, Washburn asks, “Is
there a form of the city that can survive new extremes of weather, that can
accommodate millions more citizens in dignity and prosperity, that can avoid
contributing more to climate change, and still be worth living in?”
He methodically walks us through why urban design matters,
how urban designers work, how urban design can be a catalyst for transformation
(using the High Line as a case study), and how it can lead to resilience in the
face of climate change. He discusses two strategies for resilience: mitigation
and adaptation. Mitigation means reducing greenhouse gases in order to prevent
adverse climate change, while adaptation involves reducing vulnerability to
projected climate change. With a certain degree of environmental change now
inevitable and a dramatic, global reduction in greenhouse gas production
seeming less and less likely, Washburn’s approach to resiliency is both
idealistic and practical.
Like Washburn’s book, The Hidden Potential of Sustainable
Neighborhoods: Lessons from Low-Carbon Communities, by Harrison Fraker, uses
global climate change to frame the new importance of urban design. Unlike
Washburn’s broad overview of the profession, however, Fraker’s is more narrowly
focused, using four European case studies to dig into the specifics of several
low-carbon urban design projects. Fraker describes how sustainability issues
such as energy efficiency have historically only been considered on the
building scale. The neighborhood scale, however, represents new opportunities
for carbon reduction. Fraker argues that the neighborhood scale has the
“potential to integrate the design of transportation, buildings, and
infrastructure while engaging the design of the public realm as part of the
system.” He refers to this as a “whole-systems approach,” where all urban
systems are considered together, greatly expanding the potential for
resiliency.
If The Nature of Urban Design is a layperson’s introduction
to urban design, and The Hidden Potential of Sustainable Neighborhoods is a
case-study resource for urban designers, The Guide to Greening Cities, by Sadhu
Aufochs Johnston, Steven S. Nicholas, and Julia Parzen, is probably of most
interest to urban planners. Like the other two books, The Guide to Greening
Cities lays out the challenge of designing cities in the face of climate
change. Johnston and his co-authors also refer to Hurricane Sandy, as well as
other climactic events, to establish the new urgency of resilient city design.
Instead of studying
the design of resilient cities, however, Greening Cities explores how city
leaders can implement new sustainability projects. Johnston and team state that
the book is “written from the perspective of green city leaders and champions
who are working inside city governments in North America and who have succeeded
in pushing forward innovative green projects.” Rather than emphasizing the
design of sustainability, Greening Cities walks through how city leaders can
make a case for, fund, implement, and subsequently monitor green projects. In
this way, The Guide to Greening Cities is a useful book for urban planners
wishing to increase the resiliency of their communities.
Cities are now faced with the task of both adapting to
inevitably changing environmental conditions and minimizing their contributions
to future climate change. The political, economic, environmental, and
technological challenges associated with this task are bewilderingly complex.
However, recent events such as Hurricane Sandy have shown inaction to be an
increasingly tragic prospect.
The complexity of designing for urban resilience requires a
broad cultural shift across many different disciplines. These three books
address the same problem of designing in the face of global climate change, but
do so for different audiences – the general public, urban designers, and urban
planners. With the consequences of global warming no longer abstract, hopefully
the sense of urgency that inspired these books will not abate.
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