In a season of climate change, we’re plagued by more than high winds and rising waters, massive blizzards and hail storms, damaging surges and colossal floods. Though more and more of us live through these frequent disasters, we can’t seem to find ways to focus on the key question they raise about everything from protecting our coast lines and river banks, to where to develop real estate and where to find next the tax base. Distracted from these very real but hard to solve problems roiling around us, our ecological strategies remain unfocused, kept under our radar by a general lack of clear communication and public discourse. Here Kevin Shanley, FASLA, is CEO of SWA Group and a long-time resident of Houston, provokes us to think deeper than the next tweet. –SSS

Kevin Shanley, FASLA / SWA Group

Jared Green: You were recently in Washington, D.C. speaking at the Renewable Natural Resources Foundation on improving the resiliency of our coasts in an effort to protect them from increasingly damaging storms and sea-level rise brought on by climate change. In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, this is an issue on the minds of just about everybody who lives on the coast. What were the lessons of this disaster?

Kevin Shanley: There are several lessons. There are real-world lessons and then “should-be” lessons. The real-world lesson is that everybody is at risk. These storms don’t just happen to Florida or Bangladesh. They can hit New York City. The storm could have hit Washington, D.C., with disastrous results. We’re not ready.

The other lesson we need to learn is quite important: we forget really quickly. Katrina happened, now eight years ago. Some structural changes were made to the levee system, but all of the really great plans to re-build New Orleans as a more sustainable community, a better community, a more integrated community came to nothing. In Houston in 2008, Hurricane Ike was a near miss. The SSPEED Center at Rice University is involved with this and has been working to make sure we don’t forget what happened with Ike. If Ike had come in, it would have been a disaster ten-fold Katrina. It didn’t, so we were lucky. It swerved about sixty miles to the east and it literally wiped the Bolivar Peninsula clean, virtually every structure on the peninsula was gone. It went up Chambers County, an agricultural community, and created huge damage, but relatively light because there’s nobody there, which is a lesson to learn.

Hurricane Ike damage at the Bolivar Peninsula / Bryan Carlile, Beck Geodetix

The challenge after Sandy is to ask ourselves what’s the next thing that’s going to distract everybody? In 2001, Houston was hit not with a hurricane but with a really amazing tropical storm called Allison. It dumped thirty inches of rain in twenty-four hours. It flooded seventy-five thousand homes and ninety five thousand cars. It was an amazing flood. It actually tracked all the way up to Canada. Post-Allison, many good things started to happen and a number actually did happen. There were bigger policy changes and changes that many of us were working on, but then in September 2001, guess what happened? The national attention, the local attention, everybody’s attention totally changed and a lot of policy-changing momentum was lost. Read more…

Health indicators are pointing in the wrong direction. Healthcare costs are rising to unprecedented levels. To address these challenges, it’s become imperative that our municipal policies and initiatives be reconsidered. How can design help? As I see it, design provides a key preventative strategy. Designers can improve public health outcomes and enhance our everyday environments. The lens of design can help us focus and re-conceptualize the public health impacts of our cities and buildings. Healthy communities will help stem our raging epidemic of obesity and the chronic diseases that result from our sedentary lifestyles and bad diets.

But when you think of health, you may be thinking of the medical industry and the illnesses it treats. It’s time to turn this idea on its head. Let’s start focusing, instead, on preventative strategies that reduce the incidence of sickness in the first place.

A key policy, health by design, can be integrated directly into our cities, and architects can play a central role in designing healthier buildings and communities. Many of the problems we face today can be solved by simply looking at the amenities people already want from their cities: developments close to transit, shopping, restaurants, social services, and community services. These are essential parts of a comprehensive, systems-level solution. Active lifestyles rely, in large part, on expanding the options for when, where, and how people can live, work, and play.

Cities and towns looking to help their people stay healthy, now have access to a helpful document, produced by the American Institute of Architects. Local Leaders: Healthier Communities Through Design is a roadmap to design techniques that encourage residents to increase their physical activity. I see this new publication as a key resource for government officials, design professionals, and other stakeholders collaborating to address America’s public health challenges.

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In June, 24-year-old Emma Blumstein was bicycling along Bedford Avenue in Brooklyn, in the bike lane, when a flatbed truck turned in front of her. She went under the wheels, and was killed.

In May, Mireya Gomez, 50, was bicycling along Roosevelt Avenue in Queens when a car traveling in the same direction struck and killed her.

In April, Mike Rogalle, 58, was walking along the sidewalk of Beekman Street in Manhattan when a GMC SUV jumped the curb and hit him from behind, killing him.

The drivers who killed these people didn’t face criminal charges, fines, or receive points on their licenses, according to news reports.

In New York City, drivers who harm those walking or bicycling usually suffer no penalties unless proven to be driving drunk or recklessly, even if they do something obviously against the rules like jump a curb. Sometimes drivers suffer no penalties even if they are drunk or reckless, because by policy New York City police only investigate accidents where someone dies or is on the verge of death.

As New York City prepares to unveil its bike-sharing plan, there has been increasing discussion of whether the laws governing the streets, as well as the enforcement of these laws, are reasonable. Late last month, a group led by Councilman Brad Lander called on the New York Police Department to change the way it investigates traffic accidents.

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NOAA Fisheries

The vision for oyster-tecture is to create a network of oyster reefs that interlink from Texas to Maine. When implemented at that scale, it would be larger than the Great Barrier Reef off the coast of Australia and would create an underwater wilderness without comparison. It would serve as a nursery, grocery store, and backbone for all marine life native to the eastern waters of North America. Such a network would mimic the conditions that existed before the shellfish populations collapsed. It would also kick-start the magic of large-scale ecological services that are aligned with continental conservation.

Viability

Along with the biological benefits, an oyster-tecture shellfish ecosystem would make up a continental-scale storm water management system that would spur tourism growth, public health, and a biologically rich living laboratory. With all of the benefits, you might think launching an oyster-tecture project would be easy. It’s anything but easy.

Oyster restoration is governed by individual states; so when you cross borders, the policies allowing restoration projects change. As you travel north, regulations get tougher. New York and New Jersey, for example, have all but outlawed oyster restoration – even academic projects are suspect. New York has actually loosened some of its grip in the last few years, but New Jersey is still hostile toward the idea of oysters for anything but purchase.

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The Mississippi floodplain after the floods, May 4, 2011. 

While the Mississippi River was flooding this spring and as the news coverage heated up, I tried to match the satellite before-and-after images to all the hyperbole I saw on TV.  It quickly became clear to me that there is a mismatch in what people are experiencing as individuals and what the river is experiencing.

The floodplain on April 29, 2011.

Take a look at the satellite images.  Observe the channels the river has carved back and forth on its natural floodplain.  And remember that the flooding today is well within the limits of the river’s historical bounds. To the river, this spring’s flood was not a remarkable event; it is simply part of the river’s natural lifecycle. Yes, this season’s high levels of runoff have been impacted by all our tinkering with the river’s basin through the years, but it has become clear, to everyone who cares to look, that in our diligence to change the contours of the river, we have cut it off from the floodplain that it needs to spread its copious waters.

Our historic approach for developing the river’s floodplain has been defined by short term goals.  We’ve built levees so we can farm its rich fertile soils; but these levees now prevent the river from replenishing that very fertility.  We moan about the farmers’ losses without considering the decades of gain the farmers have received from the fertile soil. We’ve built small communities and large cities in this same floodplain because the river provided an important transportation corridor, yet we aren’t willing to spend the money to relocate or harden critical infrastructure. Read more…

In spite of some starting troubles, it turns out that the recently concluded climate-change talks at Cancun might well be a landmark event in the politics of sustainability. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change has miraculously avoided the usual political blame game between developed and developing nations. The talks have ended in a near-unanimous agreement on climate change, including a commitment to reduce green house gas emissions and a fund to help vulnerable countries. But a network of 40 international environmental and business leaders, led by the Green Building Councils (GBCs), is calling for a closer look at how the built environment is implicated in the agreements at Cancun.

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