Making Los Angeles Resilient
Lisa Novick has a very good blog on what Los Angeles should do to boost it’s resilience on the Huff Post Los Angeles. The blog includes a nice definition of resilience: “Resilience is defined as the capacity of a system to absorb shock and still maintain its identity and function. Resilient systems — business, social, ecological, you name it — all have redundancy so that, when a shock or increased stress occurs, there will be back up. There will be some elasticity: someone or something will be able to step in and perform when the usual relationships fail.” Novick also...
Read MoreRe-imagining Manhattan
You might have missed this in your holiday busy-ness, as we did: In December, Atlantic Cities reported on a project by a team of architect and planners from the University of Michigan to rethink Manhattan in the light of the clear danger of damage from future versions of Hurricane Sandy: From the edges to the center of the island, the Michigan team’s concept plan alternates marshes, tidal defense berms, floating neighborhoods, hydroponic farms and new parks to protect against flooding. It also retrofits flood plains with a new datum above the water line for service, emergency and power...
Read MoreNew York City Task Force Convened to Respond to Superstorm Sandy
Superstorm Sandy took a major toll on New York City, but if a newly created task force succeeds, the impact of future such events should be lessened. At the request of City Council Speaker Christine Quinn and Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the Urban Green Council (New York City’s chapter of the U.S. Green Building Council) has convened a special Building Resiliency Task Force to take an in-depth look at how to better prepare the city’s buildings for future storms and infrastructure failures. The Task Force is comprised of four committees and three working groups. The committees are Commercial...
Read MoreGas Lines Point to a Need for Resilience
By now we’ve all seen the photos of houses buried in sand along the Jersey Shore, burned-out homes in Queens, and submerged subway stations in Manhattan. Those spectacular images were in the first wave of news from Superstorm Sandy this week. The secondary, lingering effects might not be as dramatic, but they are nonetheless very significant. And they demonstrate, ever so clearly, our need for greater resilience. As of yesterday, November 1st, there were still 4.5 million customers without power in New York, New Jersey, and surrounding states, and it appears that many of those outages may...
Read MoreHurricane Sandy and the Case for Resilient Design
While most of us in the Northeast were making last-minute preparations for the massive storm on Monday, I was sitting in Hartford’s Bradley Airport, about to catch one of the last flights out before the airport closed down. Ironically, I was on my way to sunny Florida to give a long-planned keynote presentation on resilient design at the Sustainable Communities Workshop in Sarasota. Despite my pangs of guilt for leaving home and not being there to pull out my chainsaw should the need arise, getting the word out on resilient design remains a top priority for me, and I stuck with my plans. It...
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