Resilience

Resilience is "the capacity or ability for a system to avoid, adapt to, or recover from shock or change." In a new report for the US Forest Service Urban and Community Forest Program, the Center for Resilient Cities argues that urban forestry is "simple climate protection technology," but that the USFS, like other federal agencies, is at just the earliest stages of planning for and adapting to threats posed by climate disruption.

The report suggests that urban forests may be central to designing and managing resilient cities in the 21st Century (though the report also notes the potential for conflict between urban forestry projects designed to cool a city and solar projects seeking to put solar power arrays on urban rooftops). At the same time, implicit in its critique of the Urban and Community Forestry Program and its lack of a clear message or plan for climate change is the indication that the Program itself may lack resilience.

This raises a crucial question as we enter a new chapter of US government leadership on global climate change: What can we do to ensure that we are building resilient government agencies that prize adaptaion, experimentation and concrete outcomes? In other words. how to create resilient agencies that are part of the solution? The President-elect makes clear that it is not about throwing money at the problem, but about clarity of purpose and leadership at every level.

Urban Parks: Why and Wherefore?

I am re-reading Jane Jacobs' "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" (it rings as true today page by page as it ever has--this is one wise book) and I am struck by her insistence that urban parks must be designed and maintained for a specific purpose: " to intensify and knit together" the network of city streets within a neighborhood, and not "to island off different uses from each other." Jacobs argues that the urban street must be lively and interesting so that from their casual interactions urban residents will provide the emergent and self-organizing care for their own neighborhood safety and stability that nobody else can provide. At the same time, she argues that the urban "district" must provide the political power to deal with threats from the outside. Finally, parks must serve to knit streets together into a neighborhood fabric.

This week, from the revered British medical journal the Lancet comes a reminder that urban green space is also critically linked to public health. A Scottish research team found that access to parks and other green space eases health disparities for poor communities. The study found that "low income was associated with an increased incidence of all-cause mortality of 93% of areas with the fewest forests, parks and playing fields but only 43% in the greenest areas."

Taken together, Jane Jacobs and the Lancet study suggest that urban green space design is a delicate balancing act--that well designed spaces can dramatically improve the lives of poor communities in cities, assuming that those green spaces attract residents and do not contribute to the fragmentation of the urban neighborhood fabric.

Word of the Year

According to a post today on the NY Times' Green, Inc. blog, the word "hypermiling" has been chosen as the word of the year for 2008 by the New Oxford American Dictionary.

We liked that word too, and I must say we have been hypermiling a bit ourselves since we first wrote about it in one of our posts from September. Remember not to hypermile through stop signs and red lights-unless it is a three way stop and there is nobody in sight.