Abstract
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT—buildings and infrastructure—consists of the most tangible things we associate with a community. Threatened by extreme weather events, earthquakes, obsolescence, and age, the built environment has also been the predominant focus of efforts to build resilience in our communities.
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Notes
- 1.
Although I am keeping with common usage by calling a community “resilient” here, it should be understood that resilience is better thought of as something to continually cultivate rather than something to achieve (see chapter 1).
- 2.
The reality, of course, is different from community to community. One inspiring example of in-depth public participation in the land use process is Recode, a nonprofit organization in Portland, Oregon, that has worked to change city building codes to support deep green building practices such as on-site wastewater treatment.
- 3.
National Association of City Transportation Officials, “Residential Shared Street,” Urban Street Design Guide, accessed March 5, 2017, http://nacto.org/publication/urban-street-design-guide/streets/residential-shared-street/.
- 4.
- 5.
Although it is beyond the scope of this chapter to discuss, it seems that the process of community identity change as a result of gentrification also has some relation to the “release” phase of the complex adaptive cycle. As Brian Walker and David Salt describe it in Resilience Thinking: Sustaining Ecosystems and People in a Changing World (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2006), 77: “Resources that were tightly bound are now released as connections break…. The loss of structure continues as linkages are broken, and natural, social, and economic capital leaks out of the system.” Compare this view with the gentrification effects of long-time residents selling their homes, social relationships dissolving, community culture and memory disappearing, and, soon, the “capital” of urban space being repurposed for new homes and new businesses as new relationships and cultures form.
- 6.
See Daniel Lerch, Post Carbon Cities: Planning for Energy and Climate Uncertainty (Sebastopol, CA: Post Carbon Institute, 2007).
- 7.
Lauren Sommer, “California’s Water System Built for a Climate We No Longer Have,” KQED Science, February 27, 2017, https://ww2.kqed.org/science/2017/02/27/californias-water-system-built-for-a-climate-we-no-longer-have/.
- 8.
For example, see the writing of Charles Marohn of Strong Towns on “The Growth Ponzi Scheme” at https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme/.
- 9.
Laura Sullivan, “How New Orleans’ Evacuation Plan Fell Apart,” NPR, September 23, 2005, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4860776.
- 10.
See “Why Communities?” in chapter 1, “Six Foundations for Building Community Resilience.”
- 11.
City of Portland, “About the Portland Plan,” accessed March 7, 2017, http://www.portlandonline.com/portlandplan/?c=56527.
- 12.
See the Resilient Communities Project website at http://rcp.umn.edu/. The model of this project was originally developed at the University of Oregon as the Sustainable City Year Program, https://sci.uoregon.edu/scyp-0.
- 13.
See http://transitionnetwork.org. For an illuminating look at the overlaps between the transition movement’s approach to resilience building and the approach of the resilience science community, see My Sellberg et al., “Improving Participatory Resilience Assessment by Cross-Fertilizing the Resilience Alliance and Transition Movement Approaches,” Ecology and Society 22, no. 1 (2017): 28, https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-09051-220128.
- 14.
See Warren Karlenzig, “The Death of Sprawl: Designing Urban Resilience for the Twenty-First-Century Resource and Climate Crises,” in The Post Carbon Reader: Managing the 21st Century’s Sustainability Crises, ed. Richard Heinberg and Daniel Lerch (Healdsburg, CA: Watershed Media, 2010), http://www.postcarbon.org/publications/cities-the-death-of-sprawl/.
- 15.
Kelsey Wharton, “Resilient Cities: From Fail-Safe to Safe-to-Fail,” Arizona State University website, July 21, 2015, https://research.asu.edu/stories/read/resilient-cities-fail-safe-safe-fail.
- 16.
Aarian Marshall, “It’s Time to Think about Living in Parking Garages,” Wired, November 2, 2016, https://www.wired.com/2016/11/time-think-living-old-parking-garages/.
- 17.
However, care must be taken that the opportunities and efficiencies gained by technology do not decrease resilience by making systems too complex and brittle.
- 18.
Acceptance of the need for transformation is also required. See Brian Walker and David Salt, Resilience Practice: Building Capacity to Absorb Disturbance and Maintain Function (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2012), 101.
- 19.
My Sellberg et al., “Improving Participatory Resilience.”
- 20.
See http://usdn.org and http://icleiusa.org/.
- 21.
For example, the use of zoning codes to separate conflicting land uses (like factories and residences) emerged from a handful of communities in the early 1900s and went on to dominate American city planning for most of the twentieth century. By the end of that century, a “New Urbanist” movement had emerged to adapt planning practice in light of the problems unwittingly created by single-use zoning.
- 22.
Consider that, in the one hundred years from the launch of Ford’s Model T (the first car truly available to the American middle class) in 1908 to the start of the Great Recession in 2008, the inevitability of long-term nationwide economic growth and long-term availability of oil to power transportation and coal (and, later, natural gas and nuclear power) to generate electricity could generally and quite safely go unquestioned by communities (not to mention the long-term stability of the climate).
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Lerch, D. (2017). Community Resilience and the Built Environment. In: Lerch, D. (eds) The Community Resilience Reader. Island Press, Washington, DC. https://doi.org/10.5822/978-1-61091-861-9_18
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