At the ICLEI Resilient
Cities 2014 conference in Bonn, Germany, I had the opportunity to interview
Stephen Cook, who is an Associate Director at Ove Arup and Partners, Ltd. I asked Stephen to outline what he thinks the
most significant challenges are facing cities in the 21st
century. His reply focused on the
problem of energy transition and its relation to optimal urban density, the
need for green infrastructure beyond the simple provision of green spaces, and
the role of community.
Where do you begin where do you end? I think in terms of a design and
infrastructure point of view, where the first point that comes to mind is
energy. In recent history electrification
happens far away from the city and it gets carried in. That may continue to
work, but to switch from a fossil fuel based system to something much more
renewable, and low carbon, cities will have to engage with how they can
generate energy locally, and how they make use of the energy that they
have. How do you get a city to operate
in a way that is safe and efficient that is using energy that is broadly in
line with the amount it can generate? Is
there a limit to density, or an optimal density for a city?
Another critical area is green infrastructure that is not
being dealt with by cities today. Green
space is seen as an amenity, not as part of the functioning of the city, as a
way to reduce urban heat island effect and help with water drainage. When there is going to be so much pressure on
land from immigration, for cities to hold the line and even expand green areas
and even create corridors, it is going to be a big challange to find a way to
make that work and defend that and somehow capture the value of green space.
I spent a couple of weeks in New Orleans in November as part
of Rockefeller Foundation research. New
Orleans was a city disastrously flooded in 2005 and because of their post-disaster
mentality they understand how exposed they are to flood risk. They have recently produced a plan that is
very focused on creating green space and to do that on a much more holistic way
than they have in the past, which was to pump flood waters out and keep it
out. Rotterdam is another example. The ICLEI conference panels last year showed
that Rotterdam is managing water in different ways that is a new paradigm then
what’s been before in terms of defense and storage.
The other thing that comes to mind that derives from what
Arup’s been doing with the Rockefeller Foundation is on the community
side. When you really think about the
resilience of cities --for all the time I spend on thinking about
infrastructure and cities and how to make them work better-- it seems to me
intuitively that the real basic survival of the city is most often linked to
the connectedness of people. The extent
to which a city is resilient depends on having communities that are strong and
supportive, and having city governments that are communicating, where knowledge
and understanding are shared in ways that people in a disaster event know what
to do, and afterwards they are able to access resources locally, those kinds of
human level support systems that are low energy and sustainable. Yet, many cities are utterly failing to put
community as their first area of focus.
There is the great example of someone who used to work on
our team, who used to work as the London Mayor’s environmental advisor, and is
now with C40. He would often give the
example of New York and London and their response to floods. London is containable due to the river, so
that’s the solution. They use a system
of locks on the Thames. In New York you
do not have that, you have much more exposure to the sea, so their response has
been public information and preparedness.
So, when Sandy hit, it was clearly a disaster when the flooding happened,
but actually the behavior and the knowledge of the people in the city was high
and they knew what to do in an emergency.
The knowledge of Londoners is actually pretty poor about what to do in
an emergency, because they are essentially defended by their infrastructure.
I think that cities that are thinking of the social and
community part of resilience as a core part for providing services, are the
cities that will be the cities that find themselves to a low-energy place. Those cities that are putting their first
emphasis on technology and infrastructure and hard capital solutions may find
that if their communities are not informed and engaged they will come to some
difficult places and that may exhibit itself in all sorts of ways.
If I came down to one thing, it would be about community and
the relationship between the people and those in power and the way in which
information and knowledge are shared between people and those in power. That communication creates the human platform
for the infrastructure, and as you get more density you need that
infrastructure functioning. But if you
do it the other way around you have a much less resilient outcome in the long
term as those events occur and they will.
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