Sustainability

Hurricane Katrina

Climate Adaptation Audits: 10 steps to evaluate risks and adapt to climate calamities

Climate Action Plan, Urban Planning

How can communities plan to become more adaptable and resilient in the face of climate calamities, such as wildfires, hurricanes, drought, heat waves, and floods? One idea is to start with an audit. Using Jeff Speck’s successful 10-part “walkability plan” as a template, I wrote a list of steps that a community could use for a “climate adaptation audit.”

The 10 steps below are grounded in the principles of New Urbanism, which are based on the design of cities and towns that have survived for centuries. Compact, walkable places are more resilient, but they also need to respond to modern conditions and the science of climate change. 

The ten audit points aim to give towns and neighborhoods a chance to make living on earth attractive to a broader range of people. These are all applicable to any location, and a community that checks all of these boxes should be “climate calamity ready.” Using this audit, residents can see what they need to prepare for and how to align resources.

  1. Inform the public of climate adaptation activities, encourage citizens to become involved in the planning process, and engage in broader professional discussions and information at local, national, and international levels. 
  2. Understand your local context’s climate risks to be used as baseline data for a Climate Adaptation plan (use the Place Initiative tools Community Assessment Guide). 
  3. Determine local consensus on a long-term vision, choosing to either permanently retreat, temporarily evacuate, and/or harden against climate calamities. Facilitate cooperation among citizens, public interest groups, non-governmental organizations, and governmental agencies to shepherd plans and policies toward envisioned outcomes (to retreat, evacuate, or harden from/against weather/fire/water/earth). 
  4. Apply New Urbanism’s best practices to determine if new/future development is best directed in the form of infill, town extension, and/or a new town to shape continual development at a human-scale in response to the region’s changing social and economic needs. (Diagramming new urbanist principles, outcomes, and results is needed to improve calamity resiliency).
  5. Enable place-based policies, standards, guidelines, and plans that employ the highest standards of New Urbanism best practices (mixed-use, walkable, transit-supported) urban design and planning to define and advance the local municipality’s interest in long-term social and economic viability. 
  6. Set a by-right approval process in place for projects and applications for approval that are consistent with civic policies and interests (a non-discretionary approval process reduces the power of bad actors to reject projects that address climate resiliency).
  7. Set a straightforward discretionary review process for proposals and applications that are subject to council or supervisor approval to determine whether they are consistent with the civic policies and interests. 
  8. If retreat or evacuation from identified climate calamities is required, determine the type of calamity, its context, emergency routes, destinations (and alternatives), and who is responsible (fire marshal, city manager/mayor). For example, if there is a wildfire in a mountain context, with clear (lighted/reflective) signage for routes to safety (state highways, local roadways), and design the route for this climax condition, such as fire truck access and directional lane adjustments. 
  9. If hardening from climate calamities, identify the type of calamity, its context, types of response (and alternatives), and who is responsible (building and development services manager). For example, if there is a wildfire in a mountainous area, build with fire-safe codes, with overlapping zones of defense around clustered compounds, allowing for firefighting from the roadway. Make space for wildland firefighting (no new sprawl) and structure firefighting in clustered compounds. Do the same for flooding, sea level rise, and extreme weather conditions (See Martin Dreiling’s 2010 Fire Mitigation in the Wildland Urban Interface SmartCode module). 
  10. Choose a capital Improvement Plan that prioritizes the path of least resistance to determine where spending the least money would make the most difference and build from there. For example, fund, maintain, and operate tactical “communication command control centers” to be deployed immediately for disaster recovery.

While communities have been planning for climate resilience for some time, the idea of a step-by-step audit grounded in sound urban principles makes a great deal of sense. Please let me know your thoughts. 

Note: A recent CNU webinar on “Climate-ready communities” discussed state and provincial policies and tools. The author, an attendee, suggested the “climate adaptation audit” tool, and it generated interest.

Whatever...

One Size Fits One… (and it’s the worst one)

Transit, Urban Design, Urban Planning, walkability

The ubiquitous space, shape, but highly volatile speed of the car is much larger and faster than the universal space, shape, and speed of a human. Yet we continue, since post WW2, design and build everything and everywhere for space, shape, and volatile speed of the car. Streets widen, ground floors are parking lots, people are pushed towards the edges, and cars dominate our landscape. This is what ruins downtowns and isolates small towns. Cars are a suburban mobility tool.

That’s not say we need to ban cars. They do somethings great, such as get lumber, while not as good at others, such as exercising. The fact is that cars are best served for disparate suburban expanses. Walking, transit/buses, and bicycles work best in more urban areas. Cars work great in shorter-commutes and throughout suburbia. Trains, airplanes, and ships work best for long commutes.

The New Urbanism was new because it worked to humanize the car in cities, small towns, and new towns. We’re now moving into the Next Urbanism (and I write about this throughout this blog and speak about on podcasts, such as Kevin Klinkenberg’s Messy City). And as humans, we should be designing and building everything everywhere to accommodate for humans first, letting the right mobility serve us throughout the spectrum of urban to rural contexts.

Downtowns (regional centers) are marginalized by our 1.5 cars per person maxim (Spend 5-minutes walking around Downtown San Diego). Small towns are isolated by freeway by-passes, which need both regionally accessible cars and local people to be economically viable (think Ramona, Julian, and Jacumba, if in San Diego). The industrial era invention of cars and suburban sprawl go hand-in-hand, the built each other. Unfortunately, both cars and suburbs are inhumane and detrimental to our economy, environment, and cultural cohesion (See Sabre Springs).

The next urbanism means making downtowns less car-oriented, small-towns car-supported, and car-happy suburbia having sub-regional centers that are more urban/humane. This place, a small district in Tempe, AZ, Cul-de-Sac, is an example of the Next Urbanism… building more urban, sub-regional centers in the vast sprawl of suburbs surrounding downtown’s regional center. And, by the way, Opticos Design, Inc. is one our best architecture and coding companies.

Walkability Doesn’t End at the Front Door…

Urban Design, walkability

In the city making profession, we use the quarter-mile, or 5-minute walk, as a standard measurement of distance for planning neighborhoods and cities. It is a traditional baseline for a ‘comfortable’ walk before people will choose another mode of transportation1. A half-mile walk, or 10-minute walk, is another standard used to measure walking distance to comfortably access transit facilities.

These distances were first codified in the 1929 regional plan for New York and its 5-minute walking radius diagram by Clarence Perry (top image below). In San Diego 60-years later, Peter Calthorpe’s original Transit-Oriented Development to plan around our Light Rail Stations popularized the walking distance measurement in planning documents throughout the nation2 (bottom image below). And today, walkscore, is used to measure quality-of-life in neighborhoods and cities throughout the world.

An average person has a stride length of approximately 2.1 to 2.5 feet. That means that it takes over 500 steps to walk a horizontal distance of a quarter-mile, or for 5-minutes. Health experts recommend 7,000 – 10,000 steps per day to maintain an average adult level of fitness. And with 2,000 steps being about one-mile, or a 20-minute walk, 10,000 steps is about 5-miles or a little over one and half hours of walking per day.

Those who walk to access daily needs most often are also those who don’t usually drive, children and the elderly. The 5-minute walk to/from a place in the neighborhood is a comfortable walk somewhere for an elderly person pushing a baby stroller, about 1,000 steps. Or for average adults, its a quick visit to the corner market for a daily need or having lunch/dinner with friends nearby without driving and taking up more space for you, your home, plus your car at every shop, office, or home you visit in your own neighborhood. Notice this time and ease of walking only works in neighborhoods with a traditional urban pattern and most definitely not in drive-thru suburbia. In short, it’s a more socially equitable way for more people to access their own neighborhood and their daily needs beyond their home.

Unfortunately, this is where most of our city’s policies, guidelines, regulations, and cultural expectations for walking end. Even our first round of Active Transportation Plans across the nation, see the County of San Diego’s ATP I worked on here, stop at the front door of every building (except New York City’s very good Active Transportation Guidelines that incorporate the placement of a building’s stairs).

It is well-document that walking and bicycling are healthier for us as individuals. It is also well documented that reducing the amount of vehicle trips, miles, and idling time and replacing them with walking, biking, and transportation trips reduces the amount of greenhouse gasses (GhG) emitted into our atmosphere. The burning of oil and gas in vehicle engines is by far the largest contributor to global climate change, accounting for about 30 per cent of our GhG emissions3.

Buildings account for another 30 percent of total U.S. GhG emissions. This is mostly due to their extreme electricity use, for heating/cooling air conditioning and elevators. The taller the building, the more GhG emissions. (LEED serves the purposes of measuring these emissions, but it stops measuring at the the building’s exit door. LEED ND bridges this divide, but it too is an individual certification lacking authority.)

Today’s YIMBY movement advocates strongly for tall, dense, buildings as housing scarcity for individuals has been deemed a more important problem than reducing GhG. This is due to the fallacy that higher-density can only be achieved by higher/taller buildings. That said, YIMBY’s also advocate for urbanism, and the value of walkable, bikable, and transit accessible places. Walkability doesn’t end at the front door of the building.

What does a walkable place mean? It means that you are able to comfortably walk across, horizontally, your neighborhood streets and blocks. The buildings that front onto the streets are connected, compact, and offer a mix of things to do. Then it means that when you walk back home from the corner store, and enter the front door, you are able to walk up, vertically, to your home/flat/unit. This leads to asking what is the value of walkable places?

LEON KRIER WAS RIGHT (As Always…)

It takes almost 33% more effort to climb a flight of stairs, about 15 steps. So walking one floor of stairs is about the same as taking 45 steps on level ground. Walking up a 5-story building, approximately 75 vertical steps, is equal in effort to walking up five flights of stairs, or the same as 225 horizontal steps. Walk up and down a 5-story building, 500 steps, takes the same amount of energy as walking 5-minutes at grade.

Based on the walking classifications from the Compendium of Physical Activity, a 170-pound person would burn approximately 80 calories walking one mile at a slow pace (2.0 mph), so a quarter-mile walk, 500 steps, equals 20 calories burned. This study found that walking up and down five flights of stairs daily is enough to increase heart protection and reduce disease (see here too). 

Traditional, mid-rise buildings are between 4 to 6-stories tall. This height is based on traditional construction technology using locally sourced materials of wood and/or masonry and has been used throughout the world for centuries. It also based on how far people are willing and able to walk, vertically before they choose an elevator and hermetically seal themselves off from the weather in glass and air conditioning (GhG generator). And just as importantly, as demonstrated above, this distance is equal to about how far people are willing walk horizontally before they choose a vehicle (GhG generator).

It was Luxembourg’s Leon Krier whose transformative traditional architecture and urbanism polemic in the 1970’s and 80’s shaped America’s New Urbanism of the 90’s and 00’s. His radical at-the-time advocacy led to the traditional mixed-use, walkable, transit-supported urbanism being the standard practice of today. His work can be found across the Google, and here during in our Covid Conversations.

DO THE MATH!

Walkability is both healthier for the individual and our collective climate. It’s just math! A traditional walkup building set in a traditional neighborhood pattern is able to reduce GhG emissions by +60%. And an inactive lifestyle contributes to 1 in 10 premature deaths. About 110,000 deaths annually could be preventable if US adults increased moderate-to-vigorous physical activity by even 10 minutes per day. Unfortunately, the YIMBYs, NIMBYs, and self-referential modern designers still advocate for an unsustainable, drivable, man-as-a-machine lifestyle that’ll leads us to a WALL-E world…

“The Moose out front should of told you, folks (to think less about consumerism and instead focus on protecting our humanity)!”

(The park is our planet as predicted in WALL-E, and the moose in front of Walley World is Leon Krier)

IN SEARCH OF EQUILIBRIUM…

Social Justice, Urban Design, Urban Planning

Contemporary North American urban design tools provide a pathway for a more sustainable future by their ability to balance the competing economic, environmental, and social equity interests at the region, city, neighborhood, block, and lot scales. These Covid years appear to have accelerated development patterns that have been gradually shifting over the past three decades towards more sustainable outcomes. The United States cultural shift towards more urban living is well documented (Ed Glaeser, Triumph of the City, 2012). And contemporary urban development expectations are being built today as originally formulated by the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU) practitioners in the early 1990s (Peter Katz, The New Urbanism, 1993).

These three pillars of sustainability, environmental, economic, and equity, provide a structure for measuring or testing North America’s design trajectory today. The United States’ historical values, attitudes, and prejudices that built our 20th-century traditions, culture, cities, and buildings are being re-examined and deconstructed in today’s social equity and justice moment. We acknowledged the environmental pillar in the 60s and 70s. We learned to understand the economics of sustainability in the 90s and 00s. And this past decade we are immersed in a meaningful and healthy understanding of social equity.

In the past, our culture (music, socializing, celebrations, food, worshipping) had secure foundations in public buildings, streets, squares, and plazas (churches, concert halls, theaters, pubs, and markets), and less so within the private home. Then the generation of the mid-20th century added the new by-products of the industrial revolution with television, cars, the highway, and suburbia to these public and private places (drive-in theaters, drive-thru diners, freeway overpass protests, tv movies, tv evangelists, tv news, home theaters, home cafes, home entertainment, backyard pools), which shifted our culture towards a more private life.

Today, we are adding smart phone technology to these public and private spaces while shifting again, but this time away from insular private suburban culture and transitioning towards a more balanced public and private life. These smart phones are our 21st-century version of urban renewal, allowing us to re-inhabit and re-animate public buildings, streets, squares, and plazas cheaper, faster, and with more friends and family. Within a century, everything in our culture changed with how we share music, socialize, celebrate, eat, worship, and take selfies with smartphone technology in our daily lives and cultural norms. Importantly, due to the global pandemic, the design responses to shaping our cities, towns, and building are dramatically changing again.