in case you hadn’t noticed and in case
you hadn’t noticed it’s probably not
getting better as the weather gets worse
and worse and as our relationship with
our most precious natural resource not
oil water as it gets more and more
extreme so we have too much water or too
little water and now often in the same
place as storms get more severe and less
predictable a word that you’re going to
be hearing more and more often from
planners policy officials well some
policy officials
it is resilience what does it mean to be
resilient now it turns out that we
really like our superheroes to be
resilient a classic superhero
like my friend Hercules here suffers
near-death experiences but bounces back
stronger than ever to accomplish
incredible feats and conquer monsters
that’s the superhero almost everyone
archetype Lee but what does it mean for
a city for a community for a region to
be resilient notoriously complex as
cities are and often more like the
monster than the superhero well it turns
out that throughout history great cities
have exhibited incredible resilience
multiple times the city of London the
historic heart of London burnt almost
completely to the ground in four days in
September of 1666 and less than a
century later like the superhero it was
back bigger and better than ever already
one of the biggest cities that the world
had ever known and destined for further
industrial and Imperial greatness London
it turns out was getting to the top of
its game and so was naturally resilient
but when Hurricane Katrina in August of
2005 hit the Gulf Coast after
devastating the Caribbean it was a
somewhat different story in cities like
Biloxi and notoriously New Orleans what
that catastrophe did was not to reveal
the hidden strength the resilience of a
community but to expose for all the sea
in their rawness the underlying strata
the inequality the injustice the unmet
challenges of a particular community so
seven years later Hurricane sandy
dealt another blow this time to the most
populous and arguably critical region of
the United States the Northeast and it
is often said in the disaster response
business that it takes not one but two
catastrophes for everybody to finally
sit up and take notice and of course it
doesn’t hurt to flood lower Manhattan it
tends to get certain people’s attention
suddenly we were having at a more urgent
level a conversation that was quietly
going on for a very long time the
awareness of how much of the world’s
population how much of the world’s
critical infrastructure how much of our
resources human and otherwise was
concentrated heavily in the coastal
areas of the world and this was true par
excellence along our own Northeast
Corridor if you didn’t actually live on
the coast you were an armed most likely
totally dependent on power structures
transportation structures health
services that are heavily concentrated
along that coast so we’re all in this
situation together and images like this
started to show up for cities around the
world projecting how much of the cities
that we know the communities that we
inhabit would be flooded in the case of
that dreaded hypothetical hundred year
storm now our response was hard
wired into our culture since the
industrial era we’ve tended to treat big
problems with even bigger solutions if
we can build a bridge between Staten
Island and queens can’t we build a flood
barrier that keeps out that storm surge
well this is our natural response but
once upon a time
traditional civilizations had a more
balanced relationship with water and its
vagaries ancient Egypt the source of
nourishment the source of fertility was
of course the seasonal flooding of the
Nile River it was both a threat but also
a blessing in Venice even today when the
acqua alta comes the high water they
simply get out the temporary walkways
and tourists and local residents keep
their feet dry for as long as the water
is in the Piazza but in most of the
world certainly in recent years the
instinct is to punish the bad water to
put the river in prison after the flood
to build levees to build flood walls to
build big infrastructure that attempts
at least to make the problem go away to
make it so that when we wake up the next
morning we feel safe again we feel
protected the water is out of mind and
largely by the way out of sight as well
and then it fails and suddenly we wake
up to the devastating interconnectedness
of all these systems healthcare
emergency services transportation the
lights that we read by that fuel are
increasingly electronic and digital life
so when in 2012 the lights went off in
New York they at least temporarily went
on in Washington DC and then Secretary
of Housing and Urban Development Shaun
Donovan with the support of the former
dutch director of spatial planning and
water management it’s a Dutch thing
announced and launched a program a
competition actually challenging the
design professions architecture
Landscape Architecture planning
engineering to come up with innovative
solutions promoting resilience real
resilience not by just rebuilding and
responding to the latest catastrophe but
actually dynamically putting in place
innovative ideas that anticipated and
provided for the next one that
competition ran for part of a year I was
a member of a team that submitted a
proposal the proposals were exhibited
and judged and then some of them were in
fact actually funded not at a level that
would make that kind of storm event an
entirely survivable thing but in an
appropriately experimental mode not
surprisingly the biggest funding went to
the New York region which had been so
hard hit by Sandy and to some extent the
Jersey Shore and the most press
attention went to the big engineering
solutions of course how about building a
set of new barrier island
across New York Harbor spectacular how
about building an architectural II
active wall of new cultural institutions
around lower Manhattan in spiral the
problem is that cities like New York
lower Manhattan largely take care of
themselves Chicago for example wykel
London in a previous century burnt to
the ground completely in 1871 but within
two decades the city was back bigger and
better than ever
why because again it had built into it
the essential ingredients of resilience
not just protection from fires or storms
but a robust economy an entrepreneurial
community social and civic institutions
which responded in a proactive and
positive way all of those things
lower Manhattan will take care of itself
eventually it is it has exhibited
extraordinary and inspiring resilience
in the face as you know of very dramatic
catastrophes in recent years but what
about a city like Bridgeport Connecticut
which before it ever got hit by
Hurricane Irene in 2011 and then sandy
again in 2012 had suffered the biggest
catastrophe of all deindustrialization
loss of its economic base loss of its
sense of identity built around industry
and innovation gone and then to add
insult to injury it finds itself one of
the poorest cities in the United States
smack in the middle of one of the
richest economies
one of the richest counties now those of
you who have commercial or residential
real estate experience can do the back
of the envelope map when trouble comes
when you have to respond or rebuild
who’s going to take care of themselves
and who needs outside assistance so
Bridgeport’s storms like New Orleans
storms revealed underlying stresses and
when we started to study the problem it
got even more dramatic this is the
hundred year flood map and you can see
how much of Bridgeport in a 12 foot
surge and you see our friend there
leaning against the elevation indicator
in the South End neighborhood where
we’re working how much of it is really
vulnerable and exposed beautiful little
apparently stable but in fact quite
marginal and delicate and fragile
residential enclaves like seaside
village periodically flood in fact it
turns out that seaside village beautiful
as it is was built on landfill as
emergency wartime workers housing in the
First World War and when it rains or
storms seaside village gets it from
every direction it gets it from the
ocean it gets it from the creek it gets
it from the sky of course and the upland
water that’s coming down on it but it
also gets it from below it has a high
water table it’s built on a very soft
fill so flooding is not just a simple
problem of stopping the storm it’s a
comprehensive problem and it turns out
that cities had a kind of native
intelligence if you look at all maps at
places like Bridgeport and New Orleans
surprise people built on the high ground
not in the salt marshes we’ve only done
that
in the 20th and continuing into the 21st
century so it seems natural to say well
just retreat to the high ground of
course if you don’t already live on the
low ground like so many of the
challenged residents of Bridgeport and
other coastal communities the other
natural response which is wonderful if
you have the resources is build the big
wall it’s not just immigrants build the
Dutch style wall now we’ve learned a lot
from the Dutch but in North America with
our thousands of miles of complicated
coastline our diverse communities are
political disagreements think about the
politics of coastal protection and
recent political events the coasts the
middle of the country the coasts that
solution is not at least immediately
available to us and so as we began work
in Bridgeport we had a much softer idea
an idea that was about adaptation and
evolution rather than fortification and
resistance it was forced upon us by the
reality of the situation by economic
necessity by the limited amount of
resources that we were working with but
also by the nature of the place one of
the south ends great assets was a
beautiful 1867 Olmstead Park homesteads
only Waterfront Park Seaside Park which
had been extended over time to two and a
half miles of coastal public land this
was a natural buffer what we said to
ourselves if we could take that green
edge and extend it over time
comprehensively
to protect and buffer from wave surge
as much of the complicated coastline of
a city like Bridgeport as possible what
if we could even extend it into the
neighborhoods as a system of new public
space and parks that managed water both
stormwater and water from surge that
manage that rather than simply trying to
resist it it’s a complicated system and
like any complicated design it’s not at
its most effective and particularly not
at its most resilient when it’s somebody
else’s project so this kind of work we
think of necessity and by its very
nature involves community engagement
involves listening to the local
community but in the long run involves
empowering the local community because
they are the ones who are going to have
to live going forward and manage going
forward and take ownership of a new
landscape designed now not just to
resist storms and water and catastrophe
but to respond to it dynamically to
manage it to store it for when in dry
periods we actually need it and that
operates at a number of very local
scales water now is something that we
don’t simply put into pipes out of sight
out of mind
or fence off with gigantic pieces of
engineering but they we manage at all
levels through new kinds of public space
through new kinds of streets that hold
and manage water rather than simply
immediately deposit it into our
overburden storm sewer systems and even
in our own backyards this is a an
approach which operates and a number of
different scale
that need like the storms and their
damage itself to interact in complex and
as I’ve said dynamic ways at the
neighborhood scale certainly it’s local
communities that need to understand now
the specific threats and vulnerabilities
and risks that they face but also at the
scale of the region we’re all in this
together particularly in New England
we’re all part of a large and complex
coastal system at the end of the day
whether we like it or not the tide is
rising these big storms are coming again
they will most certainly come thank you
[Applause] [Music]