Conference

Equitable Resilience: A Necessary and Under-investigated Aspect of Sustainable Urban Systems

This integrative session is framed around three topics and challenges: 1) state-of-the-debate in equitable resilience theory and practice; 2) implications of multi-hazard vulnerability and preparedness for environmental planning and design; and 3) strengths, weaknesses, and potential for political ecology approaches to equitably resilient design. Co-chairs: Larry Vale, Miho Mazereeuw, and Jim Wescoat

Equitable resilience in theory and practice. The first theme will provide an overview of the state-of-the debate in equitable resilience theory and practice. This topic introduces participants to the theme of equitable resilience. It traces the origins of the term, its current usage, and where it is headed. It asks what frontiers of equitable resilience need to be investigated next? The group will discuss challenges of defining equitable resilience -- can it be defined at all? -- and how its theorization can affect actionable work with vulnerable communities. It engages critiques of current attempts at both defining and doing equitable resilience from multiple perspectives (e.g. critiques of resilience as yet another line of neoliberalism). Reconciling a constructivist position with these criticisms and with community realities on the-ground is a major challenge for this discussion. Multi-hazard vulnerability and preparedness in environmental planning and design. The second theme focuses on multi-hazard mitigation, which goes beyond the 20th century single-hazard reactionary approach. This discussion will consider what new hazards haven’t been adequately understood or integrated into assessments and whether we over plan or under plan for specific hazards. It will discuss the tools, methods, and approaches necessary to adequately assess, rank, and plan for the broad spectrum of hazards facing cities. What gaps between science, society, and design remain? It will also consider the current shift towards disaster preparedness within the insurance industry, government agencies, and non-profits. Have these efforts substantively improved the resilience of cities? Understanding emerging hazards and the new policies and designs required to combat them is the challenge for this topic.

Political ecology of equitably resilient design. The third theme focuses on multiple scales of equitable resilience through the lens of political ecology – a field that arguably has had limited engagement with design to date. This discussion will review the origins of political ecology; its logic and strengths for addressing complex multi-scale problems; and its potential for greater creative engagement with methods of environmental planning and design.

Readings
Vale, Lawrence. "Resilient cities: Clarifying concept or catch-all cliche?." The City Reader. Routledge, 2015. 662-672.

Mazereeuw, Miho, and Elizabeth Yarina. 2017. “Emergency Preparedness Hub: Designing Decentralized Systems for Disaster Resilience.” Journal of Architectural Education 71(1): 65–72.

Anguelovski, Isabelle, Linda Shi, Eric Chu, Daniel Gallagher, Kian Goh, Zachary Lamb, Kara Reeve, and Hannah Teicher. 2016. “Equity Impacts of Urban Land Use Planning for Climate Adaptation: Critical Perspectives from the Global North and South.” Journal of Planning Education and Research 36 (3): 333–48.

Steil, Justin. 2018. “Antisubordination Planning.” Journal of Planning Education and Research, December, 0739456X1881573. https://doi.org/10.1177/0739456X18815739.

Wescoat, JL Jr. “Political ecology of environmental risks and hazards,” Routledge Handbook of Political Ecology. Eds. T. Perreault, G. Bridge, and J. McCarthy, Routledge, 2015, pp. 293-302.

Equity is sometimes defined in terms of opportunities to access the complex couplings of data, infrastructure, technology, and resources that affect social well-being. Data and technology play increasing roles in improving the justice of resource access and allocation. Information is also crucial for helping citizens anticipate, plan, and respond to impacts of climate change. Ensuring equitable opportunities and outcomes for vulnerable populations during the transition to sustainable and resilient cities depends in large measure upon access to the benefits of technologies, data, space and resources across the rural-urban gradient. Co-chairs: Sarah Williams, Sheila Kennedy, Alan Berger, Rafi Segal, and Larry Sass.

Access to Data. Trends in data access are very much going in the wrong direction. Climate and environmental data are increasingly controlled and monetized by private entities, even though they are often generated by citizens using public infrastructure. Costly access to data affects how research is designed, arguably to the detriment of vulnerable populations in favor of more affluent organizations and social groups. Understanding risks and adaptation planning by vulnerable populations is weakened, leading to worse outcomes for communities already at higher risk from the legacy of environmental and spatial injustice.

Access to Technology. Ensuring access to information and resources depends upon an affordable and widely available mix of low, medium, and high-fi technologies when planning for equitable resilience. The technologies of architecture, planning, and urban design range from building materials to regional infrastructural systems. Knowing what technologies and infrastructures can be relied upon during disasters in vulnerable communities is a critical issue. Knowing what technologies may need to be brought in to help facilitate recovery, and what institutions are best suited to do so, is also vital.

Access to Space and Resources. It has long been known that resilience depends upon access to fundamental natural resources such as water, land, energy, housing, food, etc. However, only rarely have societies ensured equitable access to these resources. Access to safe drinking water supplies within the service areas of late 20th c. U.S. cities came close in some cities – though that may be devolving in the 21st century as witnessed by drinking water crises in Flint, MI, Newark, NJ, and countless rural towns. By comparison, land holdings are increasingly concentrated, with the exception of hazardous lands, which are systematically left for poor and marginalized social groups. These issues need to be framed in spatial design terms.

Readings
Cutter, Susan L., Lindsey Barnes, Melissa Berry, Christopher Burton, Elijah Evans, Eric Tate, and Jennifer Webb. 2008. “A Place-Based Model for Understanding Community Resilience to Natural Disasters.” Global Environmental Change, Local evidence on vulnerabilities and adaptations to global environmental change, 18 (4): 598–606. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2008.07.013.

Ford, James D., Simon E. Tilleard, Lea Berrang-Ford, Malcolm Araos, Robbert Biesbroek, Alexandra C. Lesnikowski, Graham K. MacDonald, Angel Hsu, Chen Chen, and Livia Bizikova. 2016. “Opinion: Big Data Has Big Potential for Applications to Climate Change Adaptation.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113 (39): 10729–32. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1614023113.

Landry, Jean-Noé, Keira Webster, Bianca Wylie, and Pamela Robinson. n.d. “How Can We Improve Urban Resilience with Open Data?,” 56.

Overpeck, Jonathan T., Gerald A. Meehl, Sandrine Bony, and David R. Easterling. 2011. “Climate Data Challenges in the 21st Century.” Science 331 (6018): 700–702. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1197869.

Ross, Tracey. 2013. “A Disaster in the Making: Addressing the Vulnerability of Low-Income Communities to Extreme Weather.” Center for American Progress.

Using conversations from the first three sessions, this session will seek to define a clear trajectory for future research that addresses these questions about the convergence of ER and SUS. It will consider ER-SUS solutions at the planning scale and the individual project scale-it will study the problem from top-down, side-by-side, and bottom-up perspectives. This panel acknowledges the equal importance of first principle, research-based approaches and self-reported, community-based needs assessments. The goal is to integrate and link across domains, scales, actors, and conceptual framings. Co-chairs: Mary Anne Ocampo, Les Norford, Jim Wescoat.

Filling out the conversation on ER-SUS, two new themes will be introduced during this panel: 1) First principles for ER-SUS, and 2) The praxis of ER-SUS. These themes complement the side-by-side, Ecology-Society-and-Design approach introduced in panel 1 and developed in panels 2, and 3. They strive to ensure that the cultures of research and practice as well as the themes of ER and SUS converge first principles for ER-SUS asks how the laws of thermodynamics, ecology, economics, and of complex adaptive-systems can lead to cities that are or are not sustainable, adaptive, resilient, or equitable. Is there a development path that can simultaneously decrease the need for energy and materials while increasing multi-hazard resilience and collective quality of life? If not, what are the trade-offs, and for whom?

Second, Praxis considers the ways in which theory and knowledge are transferred to and from academia, through the political-ecology of real-world action, and to the consultants and design firms that strive for ER-SUS solutions on the ground. This theme reflects on the role of design to improve the ER-SUS functioning of cities and the role of practitioners within the larger ER-SUS framework. It reflects upon and strives to go beyond MIT’s traditions of reflective practice. It highlights and sharpens ethical obligations towards citizens, and societies as well as clients and disciplines. The need to disrupt business-as-usual in student education and on-the-job training must also be considered to anticipate the increasing need for ER-SUS based designs in future projects.

Readings
Ahern, Jack. 2011. “From Fail-Safe to Safe-to-Fail: Sustainability and Resilience in the New Urban World.” Landscape and Urban Planning, Landscape and Urban Planning at 100, 100 (4): 341–43. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landurbplan.2011.02.021.

Bettencourt, Luis, and Geoffrey West. 2010. “A Unified Theory of Urban Living.” Nature 467 (7318): 912–13. https://doi.org/10.1038/467912a.

Fiksel, Joseph. 2006. “Sustainability and Resilience: Toward a Systems Approach.” Sustainability: Science, Practice and Policy 2 (2): 14–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/15487733.2006.11907980.

Gray, Stephen F., and Mary Anne Ocampo. 2018. “RESILIENT IMAGINARIES: SOCIO-ECOLOGICAL URBAN DESIGN IN METRO MANILA, THE PHILIPPINES.” Landscape Architecture Frontiers 6 (4): 98–113. https://doi.org/10.15302/J-LAF-20180410.

Kennedy, Christopher. 2012. “A Mathematical Description of Urban Metabolism.” In Sustainability Science, 275–91. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-3188-6_13.

Marchese, Dayton, Erin Reynolds, Matthew E. Bates, Heather Morgan, Susan Spierre Clark, and Igor Linkov. 2018. “Resilience and Sustainability: Similarities and Differences in Environmental Management Applications.” Science of The Total Environment 613–614 (February): 1275–83. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2017.09.086.

Ramaswami, Anu, Armistead G. Russell, Patricia J. Culligan, Karnamadakala Rahul Sharma, and Emani Kumar. 2016. “Meta-Principles for Developing Smart, Sustainable, and Healthy Cities.” Science 352 (6288): 940–43. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aaf7160.

Steil, Justin. 2018. “Antisubordination Planning.” Journal of Planning Education and Research, December, 0739456X1881573. https://doi.org/10.1177/0739456X18815739.