CityReads | Radical Adaptation to Climate Change

楼市   2024-11-08 21:36   上海  

523

Radical Adaptation to Climate Change


Radical urban adaptation to climate change must be dispersive, reparative, nonnormative, and, physically deconstructive.

Stone, B. (2024). Radical adaptation: Transforming cities for a climate changed world. Cambridge University Press.

Sources:https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/radical-adaptation/reviews/CA915D793DF2F7FF34CCEA3BFBC7553F

https://medium.com/@stoneenvironmental/radical-adaptation-unlearning-how-to-plan-a-city-76054122bed4

Just beneath the surface of our cities is a second, shadow city that makes urban life possible: the array of storm sewer tunnels under our streets, the buried powerlines transporting our electricity, the pipes instantaneously delivering drinking water to our homes from a long distant treatment facility. These massive municipal infrastructures render cities habitable. No longer able to safely draw drinking water from our own wells, we must purify it at a centralized public works facility. No longer able to infiltrate rainwater through the impervious materials of the city, we must collect and divert it to centralized wastewater treatment facilities. No longer able to repurpose our residential waste as nutrients for growing food, we must truck it to towering landfills at the citys edge. These are the tools we have developed for managing the environment in cities, and they are of little use to us in adapting to climate change.

Developed in response to the demands of rapidly growing cities in a stable climate, our conventional set of tools for environmental management are ill suited to climate instability. Climate change is altering not only the intensity of longstanding environmental stressors to be managed a rapidly rising frequency and volume of rainfall, as one example but the array of stressors to which municipal governments must respond. In a climate changed world, it is no longer sufficient to collect and treat our urban environmental effluent stormwater, excessive heat, planet warming emissions we must lessen the volume of effluent to be managed.

While the principal focus of adaptation will vary with geography, all cities must prepare by degree for a few universal elements of rapid ecological change: extreme heat, rising water, and prolonged droughts. Compounding these imminent threats to urban populations is the capacity of critical infrastructures to anticipate and rebound from systemic failure. Exacerbating these climate change threats is the critical importance of predicting and restoring failures in key infrastructure systems. Traditional environmental management tools are insufficient, both in scale and design, to address the four climate-related threats now facing cities: extreme heat, drought, flooding, and critical infrastructure failures.

The compounded impact of climate change and infrastructure failures is disastrous. A typical case is the water crisis that São Paulo, Brazil, experienced in 20142015. Brazil occupies less than 2% of the Earths land area, yet it holds 20% of the worlds freshwater resources. However, even with such abundant natural resources, it could not withstand increasingly abnormal climate patterns. A single rainy season in 2014 with less than expected rainfall was enough to deplete São Paulos water supply within 100 days in a city of 21 million residents. This forced municipal water authorities to shut off the water supply for weeks, sparking protests and unrest. During the most severe drought months, even military escorts couldnt ensure the safe delivery of water to parts of São Paulo.

As the frequency of extreme weather events leads to increasingly prolonged disruptions in critical urban infrastructure, the familiar patterns of urban life are changing. A city without water is characterized not so much by silent streets or gray skies but by the pervasive, unrelenting odor of human waste. São Paulo residents had no choice but to ration the scarce water supply, reserving most for drinking and cooking, while water for flushing toilets was relegated to a lower priority.

In his book Radical Adaptation: Transforming Cities for a Climate Changed World, Brian Stone, Jr., professor at the School of City & Regional Planning at Georgia Institute of Technology, advocates for a fundamental shift in the way we manage urban environmental risks. Specifically, he argues that radical urban climate adaptation requires four principles.

First, the principle of decentralization: instead of building large centralized public infrastructure, climate-adaptive infrastructure should be integrated into every parcel and community. Second, The principle of least-first: radical climate adaptation methods should prioritize the most vulnerable human communities. Third, the principle of nonnormative: breaking away from conventional approaches to managing urban environments is necessary. Fourth, the principle of deconstruction: planned urban retreat is a primary step in radical climate adaptation.

Radical Adaptation is divided into four chapters, combining findings from multiple studies and international case examples to elaborate on specific strategies and methods for cities in dealing with extreme heat, flooding, drought, and planned retreat.

Dispersive

With these centralized management systems now regularly failing from weather events exceeding their design capacity, ever larger diameter pipes will not prove sufficient to stem the flooding. We will need as well to reduce the volume of runoff and the irradiance of heat from urban surfaces to maintain the viability of urban spaces. The most effective tools for doing so are rooted more in ecology than technology, but these approaches can work hand in hand. Through a radical approach to climate adaptation, every building, every street, and every greenspace is modified to collect and store rainwater, reflect and utilize radiant energy, and integrate vegetation as the most effective means of daily climate regulation. These approaches are not needed because they beautify the city (they do) or because they strongly promote other dimensions of human wellbeing (they do) but because nature-based approaches are demonstrably superior to our engineered substitutes. By retrofitting our cities to once again adapt everywhere, we shift from seeking to control the climate to working within its changing parameters.

The least-first

The earliest efforts by large US cities to adapt to climate change demonstrate the limitations of conventional approaches to environmental management. Consider, for example, the highly ambitious campaign of New York City to add one million trees to the citys canopy in less than a decade a campaign undertaken, in large part, to lessen heat exposure and flood risk across the city. With about 80 percent of these trees targeted to parks and other public land across New York, it has been the greenest neighborhoods of the city that have received the most new tree canopy, to the exclusion of lower-income neighborhoods that tend to have less public greenspace. Likewise, one of the largest climate adaptation awards yet granted by a US federal agency $140 million for flood resilience planning in New Orleans more than a decade after Hurricane Katrina would be targeted in its entirety to the Gentilly District, encompassing neighborhoods with an average household income above the median for the city as a whole.

Those communities least well protected from climate extremes by ecological bulwarks, such as high ground and extensive vegetative cover, must be prioritized for climate adaptation investments designed to lessen flood risk, moderate heat exposures, or otherwise enhance neighborhood-wide resilience to climate-related exposures rendered more intense by the state of the local ecosystem. I refer to this adaptive strategy as least-first, and it is fundamental to the idea of radical adaptation.

The least-first principle is radical in concept in that it inherently acknowledges that cities are not positioned to act everywhere equally that public investments must be prioritized. Beyond its imperative that the most vulnerable communities be prioritized in the expenditure of public funds for climate adaptation, the least-first principle further militates against the idea of an equitable distribution of funds, wherein each planning district in a city receives investment equal in proportion to its population size. While not in conflict with the idea that cities must be redesigned across their full extent to manage climate risk, the least-first principle requires that these investments be strategically deployed to the most vulnerable communities first. For municipal governments confronting the challenge of rapidly rising climate exposures, the first question to be answered is not how to intervene but where, as the socio-spatial context must inform the strategic approach. The least-first principle is in this sense a precondition to adaptation, and it requires municipal governments to be reparative in their approach to managing climate risk.

Nonnormative

The third principle of radical adaptation requires that municipal governments embrace a set of strategies once deemed socially untenable. As the planet approaches 1.5°C of warming above pre-industrial temperatures a threshold effectively reached in 2023 the global area of land experiencing drought conditions in any year is projected to be 50% greater than in recent decades. In the context of drought management, a societal discomfort with the recycling of municipal wastewater a voluminous and valuable source of drinking water available to all large cities can no longer be accommodated in regions experiencing a pronounced reduction in annual rainfall.

The redesign of cities to retain rather than discharge rainwater, to shift away from water-intensive landscape design, and to repurpose wastewater for irrigation and drinking water is to move outside of socially sanctioned norms of urban water management, at least in the context of highly industrialized cities. Derided in an earlier era as toilet to tap, a characterization intended to scuttle public acceptance, the recycling of wastewater for greywater or irrigation purposes is more enticingly branded today as showers to flowers. Necessitated by a delayed adaptive response to the now manifest stresses of climate change, radical adaptation will require that the bounds of normal be redefined.

A recycling of urban wastewater is only one of many expansions needed in our collective thinking about urban responses to climate change. Other examples include the construction of houses designed to float during flood events (known as amphibious housing); the erection of fabric canopies over streets and other pedestrian corridors for shading; or the use of construction materials designed to melt and re-solidify in response to extreme temperatures. Each of these strategies represents a departure from our conventional approaches to environmental management in cities, and their deployment will require a rapid shift both in the design of the built environmental and in the governmental policies prohibiting their use. Nowhere is this need for revised thinking more pressing than in the context of planned retreat.

Retreat comes first

A final principle of radical adaptation is that planned retreat is the first rather than the last step in climate adaptation. While planned retreat is not an established component of urban environmental management, recently proposed frameworks for climate adaptation identify retreat as one of four core elements, and the element, at least in practice, to be pursued only once other approaches have failed. But the benefits of retreat can only be fully realized if undertaken as the first step in climate adaptation.

Retreat must come first as it enables all other adaptive responses. Whether in the form of engineered bulwarks or restored wetlands, flood management infrastructure requires extensive areas of land for construction. Strategies of accommodation, such as the creation of floodable spaces within neighborhoods, also require land acquisition in dense urban settings. And governmental policies for avoidance are most feasibly directed to land amassed through a process of retreat, repurposing these spaces to climate adaptation in perpetuity. To be effective, planned retreat must be understood not as a process of land abandonment but as a process of land assembly. When retreat comes first, it can be leveraged as a tool to protect not only the households to be resettled from the most hazardous zones but as a means of safeguarding a larger population that remains in adjacent areas. When retreat comes last, the central aim of adaptation is unmet: to augment urban resilience in advance of the next climate event.

Concurrent with deployment of planned retreat as the leading edge of climate adaptation are two corollary imperatives: 1. Retreat must be undertaken in all cities; and 2. Retreat must give rise to amenity. No city today, in any reach of the planet, is immune from four climate-related threats: extreme heat, extreme flooding, extreme drought, and critical infrastructure failure. Each of these threats requires valuable urban land for adaptation. In some cities, coastal land is needed for flood management; in others non-coastal land is needed for collecting and storing rainwater, the expansion of tree canopy for cooling, or the siting of neighborhood micro-grids for localized energy production. In this sense, the repurposing of on-street parking for bioswales or the purchase of low-lying parcels to create floodable spaces can be understood as instances of planned retreat. No city can opt out of retreating; the only choice is to retreat by design or to retreat by disaster.

The land assembled through programs of planned retreat, often aside bodies of water or in dense urban districts, is too valuable to use for climate adaptation alone. As substantial public funds will be required for the compensation of households and businesses required to relocate out of impact zones, urban residents should expect a return on these investments both in the form of greater climate resilience and quality of life. As pioneered through the Dutch approach to flood management, lands newly acquired for a widening of natural floodplains in cities can also be put to use for new parklands, biking networks, floodable amphitheaters, and wildlife sanctuaries. The same is true for smaller segments of land repurposed for adaptation in dense urban cores. The recent movement toward parklets (New Yorks streeteries), dedicated transit and pedestrian networks compatible with green infrastructure (Atlantas BeltLine), and amphibious affordable housing in place of industrial docklands (Copenhagens Urban Rigger project) all represent a repurposing of valuable urban space for adaptive infrastructure coupled with desired public uses of these spaces. To gain public acceptance, retreat must give rise to amenity and affordability. I refer to this entwining of climate defense and urban revitalization as adaptive urbanism.

Through retreat, we can make room for the river, yes but we can also make room for a broader ecology that has ever quietly and invisibly sustained human settlement to this moment: water, sunlight, plant life, the recycling of nutrients, a greater symbiosis with other species.

Cities occupy less than 2% of the Earths land surface, yet they are home to over half of the global population. At the same time, cities are both highly vulnerable to climate hazards and the most common form of human settlement. However, compared to rural areas, cities have a greater potential to shape their climate future. They can adopt radical climate adaptation strategies that are, dispersive, reparative, nonnormative, and, physically deconstructive.

CityQuotes

1.Without error-correction all information processing, and hence all knowledge-creation, is necessarily bounded. Error-correction is the beginning of infinity.- David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

2.“Optimism is, in the first instance, a way of explaining failure, not prophesying success. It says that there is no fundamental barrier, no law of nature or supernatural decree, preventing progress. Whenever we try to improve things and fail, it is not because the spiteful (or unfathomably benevolent) gods are thwarting us or punishing us for trying, or because we have reached a limit on the capacity of reason to make improvements, or because it is best that we fail, but always because we did not know enough, in time. But optimism is also a stance towards the future, because nearly all failures, and nearly all successes, are yet to come.” - David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

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