Elvis Wong | IDEAS

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 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.

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Posted by Hayden White and Elvis Wong
in Education, Landscape Urbanism, News
on 18 June, 2019

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After several years of extreme drought, last winter’s heavy rains quickly replenished many reservoirs and aquifers throughout the state. This wet season ended with months of record-high temperatures that dried out a surplus of vegetative fuel, and was followed by strong winds along the steep, hilly topography of many California suburbs. The result was one… Read more »

California has had a long history of wildfires, often caused by recurrent climatic symptoms: long, intense periods of dry, then wet, then dry weather that has now been exacerbated by the effects of climate change. Couple that with an aggressive development history in highly fire-prone areas, the frequency of fires has more than quadrupled in the past three decades. In 2017 alone, California suffered a total of 8,442 fires that burned over one million acres of land, destroyed at least 9,000 structures and cost more than $3.3 billion in damage. Now compare these figures to the 1999 fire season, where about 6,000 wildfires consumed 273,000 acres of land, destroyed over 300 structures, and cost around $500 million worth of damage. The results are daunting.

Just as low-lying coastal communities have become increasingly vulnerable to sea level rise, flooding and hurricane events, communities in close proximity to or surrounded by wildlands (within the wildland-urban interface) are also becoming increasingly prone to uncontrollable urban fires. And while land planning and management strategies such as prescribed burning and remote sensing have been implemented to preemptively reduce these risks, what more can be done specifically in the context of urban environments? What roles can landscape architects, planners and urban designers play in creating more fire-resilient communities?

One such role may involve defensible space design at the neighborhood scale, where every home is designed with fire-resistant building materials, plant species and fire breaks to provide containment. Another may involve performative husbandry at the city scale, where goats are adaptively managed to graze on excess vegetation and reduce fuel loads (with the added side benefit of more goat cheese). Perhaps even new technologies such as weather modifiers, emergency reservoirs, and automated environmental monitoring systems can be integrated at the regional scale to gradually encourage landscape adaptations over time.

None of these scenarios alone can address all the complexities associated with urban fire risk but a redundant toolkit of strategies that is spatially and temporally distributed across our urban environments may significantly decentralize and shift the scale of our vulnerabilities. As planning and design professionals with the power to affect change, I believe it is our responsibility to provide new paradigms for mitigating urban fire risk – no matter how large or small. The American Society of Landscape Architects recently announced the launch of the Blue Ribbon Panel, which will advocate for climate change policy and resilient design. The Managing Principal of our Los Angeles studio, Ying-yu Hung, is a member of this significant panel. But this message is for all the rest of us: There is no better time than now to mobilize our profession in the exploration and implementation of alternative methods to adaptively design and plan for safer, fire-resistant communities in the future.

Elvis Wong is a designer in the Laguna Beach studio. Image of Santa Rosa, California, courtesy of the California National Guard.

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