“THE QUESTION IS: HOW DO WE PLAN FOR ADAPTATION CITY BEING BUILT WITH A 50- TO 100-YEAR LIFESPAN?”
Roberts: “That’s right, and I’d also suggest that, with increasingly global flows of people and capital, it’s important to consider resilience in economic and social terms, as well as the more obvious physical durability and issues related to climate change. As we’ve seen in recent years, economic shocks can have major effects on cities and these can often be much harder to recover from than natural disasters. And, as inequalities in wealth become greater in many cities, it’s important that we start to think about how this could generate conflict between different social groups and affect resilience.”
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Guy Mercer: “The impact of global influences is enormous and increasing every day. We need to take the global dimension into account when looking at a city, or we can’t look at the resilience. The ability of a city to adapt and be resilient is as much an issue about commerce as it is about people and where they want to live.”
What are the essentials that every resilient and adaptive city must have? Mercer: “Food, water, energy and shelter are just some vital ingredients that enable a city to thrive economically and socially. A resilient city would seek to feed people within its own effective boundaries and be less reliant on global food chains. “It will use local building materials for shelter and sustainable energy supplies to drive its economy and provide people with basic sustenance.
“By delivering essentials locally, cities make themselves less vulnerable to external economic and environmental issues. A secure flow of goods – in and out – such as water, sewerage, food etc, make up the basis of resilience.”
Finch: “I agree that we need to source locally, especially as this can help to reduce carbon emissions. But I think we need to remember that, because we’re living in a very globalised world, there are many external influences that will actually affect the ability of that city to adapt and thrive. It’s impossible for cities to build walls around themselves and think that they’ll be secure. Many cities have varying degrees of control over their own wealth, their own direction. So, unless we take the global dimension into account when looking at a city, we can’t look at the resilience.”
Mercer: ”The key factor here is making sure that we have reliable and diverse supply chains for a wide range of essentials: food, water, energy, building supplies etc.”
Finch: “That’s very true and, in order to understand what the city needs to be resilient (from an infrastructure context), we also need to understand how these things connect, because a city is made up of different components: transport, energy supplies, buildings etc. If one element goes down, it can have major implications. Understanding these dependencies is critical to understanding resilience. “Linked to this, I’d suggest that some
redundancy needs to be built into a system. This means that, if one element is compromised, other parts of the system can fill in for it. I think my one comment about what infrastructure needs to be in terms of being resilient and adaptive is ‘simple’. “We can’t know exactly what the
future will hold. If infrastructure is too over-designed and specific, it makes it very difficult to adapt for different ways of working when change happens, as it always does eventually.”
Roberts: “You’re absolutely right. The simplicity of infrastructure and its ability to be used in different ways leads to a real challenge in the way we approach design. It’s about saying: ‘How do we provide something that’s inherently simple so that it has an adaptive use?’
“RESILIENT CITIES SHOULDN’T ONLY BE ABOUT
DESIGNING AN INSURANCE POLICY AGAINST NEGATIVE SHOCKS – IT’S NOT JUST AN ADDITIONAL COST. IT’S AN OPPORTUNITY TO BUILD BETTER LIVING ENVIRONMENTS”
“This principle extends to buildings as well as infrastructure where requirements for the type and size of buildings can sometimes change incredibly quickly with economic and technological developments. If you consider Victorian housing stock in London, it has been remarkably adaptable to changes in society. It is a relatively simple design, but it has been able to accommodate huge changes in family size for over a century. This has undoubtedly played some part in supporting London’s resilience to economic and social change.”
Finch: “If you look at cities such as Toronto and Helsinki, they have much wider temperature fluctuations than London and very different climates. As a consequence, their infrastructure has to be much simpler and more flexible. It has to be resilient to being under snow for five months of the year. It’s all about the levels of tolerance that we design for. Designing for that tolerance may be more expensive, but how do you weigh up those upfront costs against the potential cost to a city of severe weather, the ferocity and frequency of which we cannot be sure?”
Mercer: ”Without a doubt, being adaptive or resilient will cost and the economic questions are complex. There are other elements (beyond infrastructure alone) that need to be understood in the context of an adaptive and resilient city. “For instance, recreational and open
spaces are good examples of land that has a clear economic value which is often not directly accounted for in terms of a financial yield per square metre or traditional rental income, yet they form an inherent part of a modern city. Parks are not considered examples of getting maximum return on investment, but they draw in value for other parts of the city’s economy and that value stands to be at risk if a city is subject to unforeseen shocks and stresses.”
How will adaptive and resilient cities look across the world? Finch: “I think the first question we need to ask is: what does each city need to be resilient to? So should we be looking at resilience to flooding or water shortages, which will affect food? Is it legislative changes, is it political unrest – is it major population growth?”
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