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Ecology Landscape Infrastructure Urbanism & Planning Arts and Culture Social Impact About About IDEASWA The Resilient City Global warming exists largely beyond our intellectual faculties as designers and practitioners. It has always done, and will continue to do so; the Anthropocene thesis illustrates this. As the canons of architecture and landscape architecture sober to this reality, we are reminded of the paradox, “the law locks up the man or woman who steals… Read more » Global warming exists largely beyond our intellectual faculties as designers and practitioners. It has always done, and will continue to do so; the Anthropocene thesis illustrates this. As the canons of architecture and landscape architecture sober to this reality, we are reminded of th e paradox, “the law locks up the man or woman who steals the goose from the common, but leaves the greater felon loose who steals the common from the goose.” As an operational discipline, we repeatedly adulterate systems that exist beyond our perceptive faculties. Like the goose who lacked the faculties to perceive its commons, we lack the capacity to fully understand the deterioration of our commons. Global warming is a wicked problem in that it is unique, irreducible, and irreversible—with no way to distinguish exactly when the problem arose and when it will cease. Even if we never send another carbon atom skyward, the events that have begun to manifest must continue to play out. Contemporary global warming verbiage is concerned with resilience— a policy term laden with the idea of resisting and bouncing back from extreme events and natural disasters, comparing environmental risk to national security. The Presidential Policy Directive (PPD21) on Critical Infrastructure Security and Resilience states that “the term resilience means the ability to prepare for and adapt to changing conditions and withstand and recover rapidly from disruptions. Resilience includes the ability to withstand and recover from deliberate attacks, accidents or naturally occurring threats or incidents”. Whereas we find that adaptive capacity, an emerging discourse for addressing global warming defined as the potential or capability of a system to adapt to (or alter to better suit climatic stimuli), speaks more to an interconnected whole and represents a more productive design directive to address the intersection between the city and shifting climate forces. Hard boundaries and defensive infrastructure exacerbate an already increasing dissonance between urbanization and environmental change, as in the example of sea level rise. Normative approaches to resilience are most simply critiqued through the contemporary anecdote that there are two types of dikes, ones that have failed and ones that will. If problems get the solutions they deserve based on the terms on which they are outlined as problems then it is unsurprising that our contemporary design toolkit and terminology is both reductive and ill-equipped to deal with the emerging climate catastrophe. The design of the future resilient city is predicated on its inherent adaptive capacity—something that cannot be achieved through hard and inflexible engineering solutions. Landscape architecture and urbanism are best positioned to address these problems given their vocabulary of flows, exchanges, and reciprocity, issues largely overlooked by architecture and conventional engineering. Contemporary design can no longer afford to subjugate ecology and climate change—design taxonomies of inflexible, object-oriented structures and systems are maladaptive and ultimately undermine the long-term adaptive capacity of urban systems. Resilient cities demand systems-oriented design thinking, in which complementary design systems contain the potential for transformation and are more closely entangled with emerging climate conditions. Resilient cities will emerge as finely tuned networks of reciprocity between urban and ecological systems. Resilient design abolishes mono-functionality and reductive aesthetics in favor of open ended design—programming that is multi-faceted, flexible and dynamic, shifting to thrive under new climatic and urban conditions. Finely calibrated, these interchanges between landscape infrastructure, urban systems and architectural design can create cities that are dynamic, flexible and continually activated by shifting ecological and social requirements. As a result, the foundation for the future resilient city is landscape urbanism, an organizational fabric of sophisticated landscape infrastructure and urban systems that work in tandem with ecology and architecture as complementary armatures. Hayden White and Elvis Wong are designers in the Laguna Beach studio. Collapse post Back to Top Leave a Reply Cancel Name (required) Mail (required) (will not be published) Website Tags: Elvis Wong Hayden White PPD21 resilient SWA Group Posted by Hayden White and Elvis Wong in Education , Landscape Urbanism , News on 18 June, 2019 Be the first to comment Share this post Facebook Twitter Preservation or Perversion? Conservation through the Ages Skara Brae, a historic dwelling situated in Scotland’s Orkney Islands, is at risk of subsidence from coastal erosion, due, in part, to climate change. Jim Dwyer’s recent article for The New York Times, “Saving Scotland’s Heritage from the Rising Seas,” shed light on the duality of the term “preservation”. Preservation has been deployed by climate… Read more » Skara Brae, a historic dwelling situated in Scotland’s Orkney Islands, is at risk of subsidence from coastal erosion, due, in part, to climate change. Jim Dwyer’s recent article for The New York Times, “ Saving Scotland’s Heritage from the Rising Seas ,” shed light on the duality of the term “preservation”. Preservation has been deployed by climate do-gooders and architectural historians alike, often at odds with each other as their logics are convoluted regarding what precisely is being preserved: knowledge, systems, migration, an image. More recently, as our cities demand reimagined space for urban growth and renewal, compounding armatures of climate change threaten some of their more historically precious artifacts. A duality emerges where the preservation of an aesthetic condition is valued over system properties; ultimately creating a dichotomy between the preservation of static or dynamic qualities. In architecture the term preservation is typically used for the “aesthetic, historic, scientific or social value” of something that provides for generations, and is defined by its “authenticity, ancientness, and beauty,” says Rem Koolhaas. Conservation, however, usually favors the structure and aesthetic of a thing or building. If we are to believe Victor Hugo’s attestation to the king of France that architecture does indeed contain the literature and cultural history of the city, then we might assume that preservation of buildings is in some way a modern preservation of knowledge; but we do not. Hugo thought that the history and culture of the city was imbedded in its architecture, and although we might conceive that the structure of the city once reflected the movement of people, or even an age—such as Edinburgh’s transition from old town to enlightened new town—we cannot help but find that city building of past decades did not reflect societal temporalities, but rather framed and even attempted to dictate them. We must ask ourselves, what are we preserving? A picture? Some stone? An idea? Oppression? In Koolhaas’s lecture transcript, Preservation is Overtaking Us , he describes the emergence of conservation at a time when anesthesia, photography, and the blueprint were invented. However, I would argue that preservation does no more than capture an object in time (photography), placing it in a state of suspended animation (anesthetic). The object is preserved in the city or landscape as an artifice of the ancient, suspended within an evolving apparatus of movement and dyn...