Urban Disaster Resilience

New Dimensions from International Practice in the Built Environment

David Sanderson, Jerold Kayden, Julia Leis, David Sanderson, Jerold S. Kayden, Julia Leis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317533948
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Accelerating urbanization worldwide means more urban-centered disasters. Floods, earthquakes, storms and conflicts affecting densely populated areas produce significant losses in lives, livelihoods and the built environment, especially in comparison to rural areas. Poor urban dwellers, almost always the most vulnerable, too often bear the brunt. Aid agencies and urban professionals have been slowly adapting to these new conditions, but older models and practices hinder the most effective engagements.

Drawing directly from the experiences of urban disasters in the Philippines, Chile, India, Thailand, Iraq, Haiti and Nepal, among other countries, Urban Disaster Resilience brings to light new collaborations and techniques for addressing the challenges of urban disasters in the coming years. Chapters range from country-specific case studies to more synthetic frameworks in order to promote innovative thinking and practical solutions.

Edited by David Sanderson, Jerold S. Kayden and Julia Leis, this book is a crucial read for humanitarian and disaster specialists, urban planners and designers, architects, landscape architects, housing and economic development professionals, real estate developers, private business managers and students interested in the subject, whether based in non-governmental organizations, local, state or national governments, international agencies, private firms, or the academy.

Part I
Urban planning, design and cities

Chapter 1
Designing resilient cities and neighborhoods

Georgia Butina Watson

Introduction

Many cities across the globe are offering a wealth of socio-economic and cultural opportunities that are an important factor in supporting the livelihood of much of the existing population as well as in attracting new residents. At the same time some cities and their regions are experiencing negative impacts of climate change, rapid urban growth, fragmented urban form, lack of proper infrastructure and the lack of social and governance structures (Zetter and Butina Watson, 2006).

Today some 3.6 billion people live in towns and cities and it is projected that by 2050 the total urban population is likely to increase to 6.3 billion, or nearly 70 percent of the global population (UN, 2012). This urban growth phenomenon puts a huge pressure on the existing and newly developing urban systems as cities are expanding faster than the planned provision of housing, urban infrastructure and many other facilities. As a result some urban areas have become very fragile and are unable to sustain an adequate quality of life. Many large urban systems also generate high levels of pollution which contribute negatively to climate change and as a result to an increased occurrence of disasters caused by hazards such as flooding.

Negative impacts and human sufferings are most obvious in poorer countries where resources are limited and where policy, planning and delivery mechanisms are weak or are still developing. Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and humanitarian agencies struggle to meet all the demands, both in resource as well as in expertise terms. So, how can we plan and design cities and neighborhoods that can survive large negative impacts of disasters? What kind of future visions are needed and desirable to provide resilient solutions to offer safer and longer-lasting urban form and socio-economic and governance structures?

This chapter first discusses what is meant by the resilient city or resilient neighborhood and what are their key characteristics. The discussion is centered in contemporary planning and urban design concepts and is supported by examples of cities that have ‘bounced back’ quickly and successfully after a particular type of disaster. The second part of the chapter introduces the methodology developed as part of a research project, Retrofit 2050 (composed of multidisciplinary experts from six British universities: Cardiff, Cambridge, Reading, Oxford Brookes, Salford and Durham), which includes ‘urban futures’ visioning, pathways and roadmaps, and backcasting, that could assist urban planners, designers and other professionals to create more resilient cities. Backcasting is a method for creating ‘futures’ visions, then looking back to the present to see how these ‘futures’ visions may be achieved by developing strategies and by setting specific targets and milestones from the present forward. The last part of the chapter proposes some general and specific principles and a methodology that could be of value to urban professionals, governments, civil societies and NGOs when designing or retrofitting cities and neighborhoods, to enable cities to achieve a higher degree of resilience and cope more successfully with adverse natural and human adversities.

Defining resilient cities

There are many definitions of what a resilient city is. One definition most commonly used is that resilience is ‘the capacity of urban systems to accommodate change over time and to withstand and rebound from disruptive challenges’ (Coaffee, 2013). Miletti defines resilience as the ability of local areas ‘to withstand an extreme natural event without suffering devastating losses, damage, diminished productivity or quality of life and without a large amount of assistance from outside the community’ (Miletti, 1999, cited in Godschalk, 2003: 136). A resilient city is also a sustainable network of physical systems and human communities. Physical systems generally refer to both the natural environment and the constructed urban form components of the city (Butina Watson and Bentley, 2007). Natural systems mean geology, topography, water courses, fields, green spaces, and flora and fauna. Physical form components, or the ‘urban morphology’ of the city, consist of major infrastructure such as roads and streets, the system of urban open spaces, blocks and plots, buildings and the relevant associated pattern of uses across all different morphological scales (Moudon, 1997; Butina Watson and Bentley, 2007). They are the bones and the skeleton of the city (Rossi, 1986), its arteries and life veins. On the other hand, the communities that live in them are the vital ‘brains’ of the city where key decisions are made. Therefore, in addition to natural and physical form, resilient systems must also have resilient communities. Resilient cities need to be strong and flexible rather than brittle and fragile. If they are brittle and fragile, they can break and cause even bigger hazards and eventual disasters.

One key component in making cities more resilient is to examine their constituent parts. There are some recent concepts such as landscape urbanism (Waldheim, 2013) that can help in understanding the relationship between green and built form components. Green urban spaces are needed in the city for public use, but are also important for climatic and other reasons. Green spaces provide the elasticity for the city; they can also create areas after disasters to accommodate temporary resources, medical help and other facilities. De Sola Morales (1999) states that what is needed is a form of ‘urban acupuncture’; a targeted urban intervention to allow urban systems to be readjusted and reorganized. Walker and Salt (2006) also talk about ‘redundancy,’ ‘latency’ and having ‘room to move’ as some of the key characteristics of urban resilience. They also state that resilience is composed of a number of characteristics that are closely linked to the ideas of good urban form principles. They suggest that important resilient attributes include diversity, modularity, tight feedbacks, innovation and overlap in governance, ecosystem services, social capital and allowing for variability. Modularity is particularly important as it enables neighborhoods to have different characteristics, allowing for different response, so that in critical situations not all systems fail. In terms of social composition, Lister (2007) states that it is important to have small, clearly defined neighborhoods, with strong identity, that correspond to social and governance structures. Such communities can regroup quickly and respond faster to emergency situations; in a sense, they tend to have stronger social capital.

Among other attributes commonly cited in urban design work are the qualities of permeability, variety of forms and functions, legibility and vitality, known as the ‘responsive environments’ principles (Bentley et al., 1985; Butina Watson, 2014) as well as Lynch’s concepts of legibility and good city form (Lynch, 1960, 1981). Permeability is important as it defines accessibility to resources, people and facilities. Both Jacobs (1961) and Moudon (1989) suggest the design of small urban blocks of mixed use that allow easy connection. Legibility is important as it provides a sense of orientation, critical in any disaster-affected areas. Vitality refers to the availability of water, energy and other resources. Moudon also suggests that these qualities connect resilience with urbanism as they explain the spatial dimension of urban resilience. It is also important to note, however, that there are a number of dimensions or levels of resilience, and they are evolving and can be altered over time.

Allan et al. (2013) state that these attributes can help in analyzing places in terms of their potential for resilience; they can be the lens through which we see and understand how different components of urban form and socio-spatial components respond under pressure. This lens can also be applied at different scales of morphological levels from buildings to urban blocks to neighborhoods and city/region scales. Allan et al. also suggest that it is useful to study previous case studies, to see how different morphological structures, forms of governance and socio-spatial dimensions responded to a particular type of disaster.

Vale and Campanella (2005) claim that if we look at historical precedents most cities display a degree of resilience as they have withstood and have been adapted to many natural and human interventions. In urban design terms some observers also refer to such cities as being robust, or having the ability to accommodate different uses, people and other urban components over time. They have a good level of adaptability or, as some refer to it, ‘future proofing.’

A good historic example is the city of London in the UK that is more than two millennia old. It has survived a number of disasters, including the 1666 Great Fire, various floods and sustained bombing during the Second World War. In each incident, the city ‘bounced back.’ After the Great Fire, the buildings were burnt down, but the Roman and Mediaeval streets, the city’s infrastructure and many of its key buildings and facilities survived, the latter because of good quality materials. London also suffered many floods and through innovative engineering and management schemes it has protected its residents and its assets. By dredging the bottom of the River Thames and by installing the Thames Barrier, the water is successfully contained and tamed in the city’s historic urban areas.

Particularly drastic was the bombing of London during the Second World War, with many buildings destroyed, demolished following extensive damage or burnt down. City parks and the underground railway tunnels provided shelter during the worst incidents of bombing, whilst front gardens became urban allotments, used to grow vegetables and feed its residents. Post-war large-scale reconstruction programs followed the original street layouts and over time London has acquired its present townscape and identity so much admired today. In parallel, voids left in the city after the bombing created new open spaces and memorial gardens (see Plate 1).

These transformations correspond to what urban morphologists refer to as ‘the rules of the tissue’ which suggests that roads, streets and other large infrastructure systems have the most permanence over time. The same applies to large open spaces such as parks, planted boulevards, river banks, canals and other green systems including the use of greenbelts as practiced in many UK cities. These systems are the life veins of the community through which water, energy, food, medical assistance and the overall mobility of people and goods are channeled. Of course, if not properly managed such systems can also become hazards in themselves as seen in some recent floods in Thailand, Vietnam and the UK (see Figure 1.1). Equally, greenbelts can attract illegal settlers, as seen in some parts of the UK, unless they are protected by strong policies and enforcement.

Figure 1.1 Floods in the UK

Photo: David Hedges

Even in such extreme cases of urban disasters we can see that urban areas respond differently to different kinds of shocks and hazards. Many, such as in Mexico City, bounce back to their relative normality after an earthquake, while others, such as Italy’s ancient Pompeii following a volcanic eruption, do not. Sometimes post-disaster interventions can generate new opportunities, as in the case of the collapsed urban motorway in Seoul, South Korea. In response to the fracture of one of its motorway corridors, the local solution was to take advantage of the situation and turn the route into a linear urban green system which is used very much by its residents today (see Plate 2). Several cities also created their own solutions to the rigid structures of the urban motorways, by depressing or otherwise removing them and substituting a sequence of green open spaces, as in Boston, USA or Madrid, Spain, for example. On the other hand, the reuse of an abandoned rail track in New York, known as the High Line, into a popular green walkway has created a new and exciting opportunity, much admired across the world.

Disasters and resilience

With regard to disasters caused by natural phenomena, the type and nature of resilience of some urban places demonstrates that local areas can have the ability to withstand extreme natural events without suffering devastating losses, damage, diminished productivity or quality of life. Foster (1997) argues that cities and their neighborhoods need to be able to respond quickly and it is therefore necessary to design cities, or to retrofit them, to cope effectively with contingencies. Berkeley in California and Tulsa in Oklahoma are two US examples of urban innovation and risk reduction programs. Berkeley experienced earthquake and fire and invested resources in rebuilding its key infrastructure such as schools and other municipal buildings of strong materials to be able to sustain any future shocks. Through government loans, residential buildings were retrofitted to resist fire and earthquake shakes (Godschalk, 2003). Exposed to tornadoes, thunderstorms and flooding and in response to the naturally induced disasters, Tulsa created floodplains and drainage systems to channel the excess water. Similar initiatives were used in 2014 in the floods of some UK cities including Winchester and Oxford. Such floodplains can be turned into wetlands that can promote special flora and fauna and by planting willow trees along the river banks, they can slow down the rushing of water and naturally regulate the water flow and water levels. Coastal sandbanks are also being created around New York, USA and Conception in Chile to absorb the hurricane shocks.

Particularly innovative have been interventions in the aftermath of the 2011 earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand. Immediately after the earthquake open space became ‘pop-up’ living rooms, kitchens, markets and communal gathering spaces, while people particularly gravitated to the city’s damaged central business district (CBD) area, to its natural urban heart. There were also container facilities installed, to provide cafes, restaurants, health centers and other amenities that could replicate what was lost during the earthquake. An award winning competition entry (see Plate 3) following the earthquake illustrates how design ideas can help in healing the city. Voids left behind by demolished buildings have been connected into a large urban memorial park, stretching across the whole city, while locally there are pathways that connect individual n...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Epigraph
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Contributors
• Foreword
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I Urban planning, design and cities
• Part II People, places, complex systems and regulation
• Part III Urban markets, micro-enterprise, insurance and technology
• Epilogue
• Index