The Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC) held a very successful workshop over the past couple of days. It's goal was to provide citizens from Canada, Mexico and the USA, NGOs, government and academics to come together to discuss how individual communities across North America are tackling environmental challenges and how policymakers are working to support their efforts.

I will shortly post some of the key findings and photos from the workshop facilitated by The Moment. The final output of the session will be a 'book' of resilience guidelines, strategies and approaches. You should also be able to find them posted on http://www.facebook.com/CECconnectsometime later this week.

What stood out most in my mind about this workshop was the thoughtfulness of the participants, and the very high quality of the presentations, and most importantly, the high quality of resilience strategies and approaches developed by the 'expert' work groups over the two days.

Craig

Please let me know what you think of the toolkit. When we created it we saw it as a great resource for facilitating resilience workshops and discussions.

Craig

Craig Applegath, Moderator

1. Planning for Growth and Density: Why Growth? The third great migration of rural populations (see Doug Sanders book Arrival Cities, for more on this) to cities around the world, as well as the ongoing overall growth of global population, will both put pressures on many cities to grow, but in doing so will also provide the engine for positive economic growth and urban development. It will therefore be important for cities to be able to respond positively to this pressure. Why Density? Increasing density is a very effective strategy to lower per capita costs of infrastructure capital and operating costs, as well as an important way of reducing per capita use of all types of energy - including energy for transportation, and heating and cooling of buildings (see Edward Glaeser's book, Triumph of The City for more on this). Thus, increasing density increases a city's resilience to future shocks and stresses associated with future energy price increases associated with either peak oil or increasing demands from developing nations.

2. Energy Performance: Why? The energy performance of various components of a city's infrastructure and building fabric is a key determinant in a city's resilience capacity. Reducing a city's per capita energy consumption is an important means of reducing the future impact of any shocks or stresses associated with rising future energy costs. This is an extension of category 1.

3. Local Food Production: Why? Northern cities are very dependent on food supply transported great distances by truck from the Southern cities. Future energy price increases will therefore directly impact the cost of food - both as a result of the increasing cost to make the food because of agriculture's heavy reliance on oil for all aspects of the food growing cycle, but also as result of the cost to transport food from south to north (see more on this in Jeff Rubin's book, Your World Is About to Get A Whole Lot Smaller). Moreover, potential disruptions in food production as a result of climate change or sharp increases in energy could potentially disrupt the supply of food to cities. Therefore, developing means of producing food locally is an important resilience capacity building strategy.

4. Modularization and Redundancy of Key Infrastructure Systems: Why? Key infrastructure systems such as power systems, water systems, sewage waste processing systems, and communications systems are all vital to the healthy functioning of a city. The serious incapacitation or failure of any one of these systems would have both serious health and economic consequences. However, most of our important infrastructure systems are currently both at the end of their useful service life (with the exception of our communications systems), and in their current configurations and use, have almost no redundancy and no modularization (i.e., they are not independent enough from other components in case of failure.) Therefore, any significant damage to one part of our key infrastructure systems has the potential to create cascading failures through its adjacent parts. The best example of this was the North Eastern power outage in the summer of 2003. Therefore, re-developing our key infrastructure systems to provide for both modularity and redundancy will be key to building resilience capacity in or cities.

5. Integrated Metabolism: Why? Integrated metabolism refers to the integration of the infrastructures that provide metabolic service to a city, including its water system, its energy system, its food system, and its sewage system. Contemporary cities use infrastructure systems conceived of and in some cases implemented in the 19th Century. Power, water, food and waste infrastructure systems are all separate, and do not take advantage of the inherent natural biological and energy connections between them. The purpose of integrating these systems is to reduce the per capita inputs required to produce the same amounts of electrical power, potable water, and, and also reduce the per capita amount of non-usable organic waste. This would be accomplished by linking all of these systems together in modular networks that would allow that water used in the production and consumption of food to be reclaimed from sewage, that power could be generated from the digestion of waste, and that byproducts of this cycle would feed back into the food production as a source of nutrients. This sort of integrated infrastructure is scalable, modular, and could provide for the necessary independence in case of catastrophic failure or any part of the network.

6. Infrastructure and Building Fabric 'Hardening': Why? Well respected Canadian climatologist Professor Gordon McBean of the University of Western Ontario recently noted that as a result of atmospheric warming, over the next 20 to 30 years we could expect that 20 year storm events would become 2 year storm events. In Toronto we could expect to see more ice storms and more rains that would produce flash flooding. Also, the warming trends suggest a Northerly migration of tornado zones from the south and mid western USA that would increase the likelihood of tornado events in southern Canada. The warming trend, which he indicates is traceable to the 'CO2 signal' will continue as long as CO2 levels continue to rise - which they are predicted to do for the next 50 years. Therefore, it will be important to develop strategies to increase the 'hardness' and durability of our key infrastructure and building assets in the face of the increasing frequency and intensity of weather events.

The term 'arrival city' was coined by Doug Saunders, in his new book of the same name. Through the eyes of individuals who are part of the migrations, Saunders' book explores the realities of arrival cities and that how cities might more effectively accommodate this migration. He explains how these migrations can either be very beneficial, to both cities and the migrants, or, alternatively, if not understood and effectively accommodated, they can produce failure, hardship and potentially violence. Saunders argues that migration will not only help many western cities address the future employment problems associated with an aging demographic, but will also bring new vitality and industry to cities. But how these arrival cities are integrated into cities, and how their residents are accepted will be an important part of their potential for success or failure, and an important part of a city's ability to either increase its resilience to future shocks and stresses.

Seen at the macro level, the 'third great migration' will certainly create great stresses for cities, and potentially a number of future shocks. Building a conceptual framework for understanding the implications of the migration, and how cities can make a positive thing out of it, may be a very good focus for the next ResilientCity.org Design Ideas Competition.

We are thinking that we will launch the competition sometime this March. Let us know what you think. What do you think the goal of such a competition should be? To explore effective planning strategies for the migration that will increase urban resilience? To explore existing arrival city settlements and find case studies of successes? Tell us what you think.

I am often asked: ' what exactly does Resilience mean?' When I first was asked this question, a couple of years ago - when the concept of resilience was newer and less well understood - I would simply repeat our ResilientCity.org working definition, and try to work through an explanation the ideas contained in it.

However, I have changed tack.

Now when asked, 'what does Resilience mean?' I simply say that Resilience is a good word to capture the idea of how to future proof our cities and their built fabric in the face of future shocks and stresses from climate change and peak oil. For some reason, this explanation seems more satisfying to most people and seems to 'click' into peoples consciousness in a way that discussing a city's 'capacities to help absorb future shocks and stresses to its social, economic, and technical systems and infrastructures...' does not.

More interestingly, the combination of those two words, 'future' and 'proofing', seems to create an altogether deeper resonance than I had anticipated. I guess this should be no surprise given the fact that we are all fascinated by what the future holds for us - often morbidly so - and equally interested in the notion that we could somehow imagine making ourselves or our cities proof against the future.

But does this shorthand metaphor bear up under the responsibility that it seems to imply? Can we really increase the resilience of our cities to the point where we have 'future proofed' them? Any credible historian or political scientist would of course argue that such an idea was shear nonsense, that the world is far too complex, and the number of possible future scenarios for any city far too vast to reasonably imagine that the notion of 'future proofing' was anything more than hyperbole.

And yet, if the notion of future proofing is seen as an ongoing process, rather than a definitive end result, then maybe the notion has more substance. The acts of 'future proofing' may not lead to a complete 'proofing', but the actions involved could indeed reduce potential future shocks and impacts, and thus brings us full circle to the more robust, but maybe less resonant, concept of resilience.

So in the end, I will continue to feel reasonably comfortable using the phrase 'future proofing' as the short-form for the concept of 'resilience', as long as we all agree that any deeper examination would follow a path back to the idea of resilience.

Craig Applegath,

Moderator, ResilientCity.org

The participants in both workshops (Thursday and Friday's workshops) did a great job at exploring and developing ideas on how to develop resilience at for both cities and buildings. They also explored how to build leadership capacity for assisting their communities and cities in implementing planning and design strategies for increasing the capacity for resilience. (See box below with the three World Caf questions explored).

A number of quite insightful ideaa and strategies were developed, which I collected from the Caf gallery where they had been posted at the end of the workshops. I understand that the OAA will be posting these, and I will be posting them on ResilientCity.org as well.

A number of the key strategies that I typically write and speak about emerged, such as increasing density of cities, encouraging mixed use to increase the opportunity for people to live close to where they work and encourage walking, and increasing transit capacity and transit oriented development. However, one insight emerged that I thought was quite insightful. Phil Goldsmith, a well respected expert in renewing and preserving historical buildings, remarked that all we need do to plan and design the cities and buildings is look to how they were planned an designed in the late 19th century - when oil and the automobile did not dominate the design of our cities and suburbs.

The other interesting theme in the discussion of Leadership was the concern about how to get a younger generation of architects and planners interested. One of the participants commented that once things get 'scary' the younger generation will begin to pay attention, and they won't be very happy with what the mess that the preceding had left them!

I will highlight a number of these strategies in a future blogs. Stay tuned.

Thanks again to all those who participated!

Craig

After extensive deliberation of the 20 finalist entries in this years' ResilientCity.org Design Ideas Competition, theLiving with the Water Paradoxproposal by Nok Ratanavong, Sang Ok Kim, and James Kim was selected as the winner.

The Jury was of the opinion that this entry was the most effective at integrating the key principles of urban resilience into a compelling vision for how to increase the resilience of the Fish Market and surrounding area in Sydney, Australia. Although many of the entries provided important insights and developed thoughtful ideas for increasing urban resilience, Living with the Water Paradox stood out both for its understanding of how to build resilience, and for its imaginative application of resilient planning and design principles to addressing the wider implications of Australia's deepening ecological crisis.

The Jury was impressed by many of the key insights contained in the proposal. Chief among them was its synthesis of potential planning and design responses to the threats posed by climate change, especially flooding and drought. There have already been significant water rationing and flood events in Australia, and these disturbances are only expected to worsen in frequency and intensity as climate change progresses. Jury moderator Craig Applegath commented that the winning proposal is effective because it uses the issue of water as a starting point to grapple with the larger issues of urban resilience. 'It works because it considers how disturbances to the water system will ripple throughout the city, and what can be done to prepare the city's functions to cope with those shocks and stresses,' he said.

The proposal's defining feature is a comprehensive, district-scale system of interventions that link water to waste, food, and energy. The system responds to the higher risk of storm surges by harvesting rainwater and surface runoff. As part of the proposed strategy, rain water is used in conjunction with desalinated water to support local decentralized food production in front yard and rooftop gardens, and for water features that enhance the appearance and function of public spaces. 'As desertification continues to move into Australia's wheat belt, this entry's proposal to give people options for eating directly from urban plots becomes both more pressing and more attractive,' said jury member Peter Howard. The proposal calls for urban farming research into drought and flood resistant plants and growing methods through community-owned cooperatives. Waste food is returned to food production as compost, while waste methane is used to generate electricity. In order to reduce carbon dependency and prepare for a post-carbon future, electrical power supply is further augmented by micro-hydro stations as well as by small-scale solar and wind installations that support desalination, food and aquaculture production, and waste processing.

'This proposal is successful in part because it breaks with the tendency to see core functions at purely the city or regional scale,' said jury member Michael Haggerty. The jury agreed that decentralized and redundant micro facilities are likely to increase the capacity for resilience because they can help to reduce incidences of cascading failures, would not require large investments of capital or an aggregation of new resources or technologies, and carry the added benefit of being easier to maintain. Jury member Douglas Pollard added that, 'although this proposal does not invent an entirely new vision, it does knit together enough small moves to make a vision that is coherent and realistic.'

While the Jury felt the proposal would have benefited from a closer examination of the strategies that could be used for adapting to other key threats, such as the rising sea level and an increase in the number and intensity of bushfires, it concluded that Living with the Water Paradox was overall the most integrated approach to building resilience as well as the most illustrative of the complexity that is emblematic of this competition.

Best Insight or Most Innovative Idea Prize: 'Full of Fuel'

The Jury decided that in addition to a first price, it wished to award a prize to the most innovative insight or idea. It was clear to the members of the jury that the Full of Fuel proposal by Anthony Joyeux should be named for this prize. This entry provided some valuable clues about the future of the post-carbon urban landscape, with a focus on Lyon, France.

The members of the Jury appreciated both the pragmatic and poetic qualities of reimagining and repurposing the infrastructure of the carbon economy for a post-carbon world. Full of Fuel offered a clear and distinct perspective on the city as a place of opportunity. Peter Howard said that, 'Full of Fuel offers up an interesting contrast to some of the other, more performance-based proposals. This one is predicated on a more subtle strategy of encouraging people to use the city in a different way.' Michael Haggerty added that, 'reimagining gas stations as sites of community programs and action could have a really positive influence on people's mobility and their relation to the public realm.' The Jury believed the proposal could be a generative act that kicks off the process of building cycling and pedestrian networks and creating a stronger sense of place and community. Other redeeming qualities of this proposal were its redundancy, interconnectedness, and adaptability to other contexts.

While it might have been interesting to push the idea even further to incorporate other features of the carbon-based built environment, in the end the Jury was convinced to award the prize for insight and innovation to Anthony's proposal.

Best Video Prize

The Jury did not feel that there was a wide enough range of videos submitted to fairly determine a winner in this category. However, it was decided to award each submission an appreciation prize for their efforts. Entrants will each receive a flip video camera.

Honorable Mentions: 'Manifestations for a City' and 'FIH in Fairview Mall'

The Jury was of the opinion that two of the competition blogs deserved honourable mention because of the important insights they contributed to the understanding of how the capacity for resilience could be developed.

The Jury found that Digant Shah's proposal, Manifestations for a City, for Nagpur, India, benefited from a thorough overview of the city's historical and present-day context, a detailed approach to solid waste and waste water management, and a clear sense of the potential for resilient strategies to foster ecological restoration and urban renewal.

The Jury commented that Digant provided an excellent strategy for decentralizing infrastructure, downloading it to the neighbourhood scale in a more affordable and ecologically sound fashion, thereby regenerating the urban landscape and helping to create a stronger sense of place for Nagpur's residents.

'This is one of the best treatments of a city's evolution up to the present day,' said moderator Craig Applegath. Overall, the Jury felt that it might have been even stronger had it delved further into the implications of future discontinuities in Nagpur stemming from climate change and peak oil. Consideration of other urban systems, such as energy and food, and their relationship to the city's water and waste system might have shifted the proposal away from being mainly about urban renewal, to being more about urban resilience. It might have also benefited from a more comprehensive test against existing patterns of use and water management that considered space constraints and other barriers.

Douglas Pollard noted that this proposal could readily be deployed in slums and other concentrated areas of urban poor where there are high levels of sub-economic activity and social capital for operating the water and waste management system, without significant investments of capital. 'A proposal like this could have a huge impact for a very large number of people,' he said. Overall, the Jury recognized this as one of the strongest entries for its potential to improve the health and quality of life of significant numbers of people as well as its aesthetic and social contributions to human settlement.

The FIH in Fairview Mall proposal by Bronwyn White also received praise from the Jury for helping to redefine the concept of a mall. The thoroughly researched proposal won high marks for creatively adapting existing methods of local food production in a way that was both relevant and applicable to a wide spectrum of situations.

Bronwyn's proposal shows how, contrary to conventional wisdom and patterns of development, revitalization in malls can be more substantial than simply inviting in brand-name retail megastores. The Jury found that using the mall as a focal point for uniting all of the dimensions and uses of food in one space, from production and preparation to sale and consumption, would likely have positive socioeconomic outcomes. The opportunity for the Food Innovation Hubs (FIH) idea to be scaled and adapted to other failing malls also impressed the Jury, which believed that these hubs could kick start the development of regional food networks. 'By taking some technologies that already exist on the shelf, like growing food on roofs and walls, and because of its relevance to a wide spectrum of situations, this proposal deserves high marks,' said jury member Douglas Pollard.

Recognizing that people do not normally associate malls with food production, the Jury would have liked to see more elaboration of plans to conduct public outreach and redefine the property and its use, although the proposal's Education Center was a step in the right direction. In general the members of Jury felt that the proposal did a terrific job of focusing on food, although if the focus had been widened to explore a greater heterogeneity of uses and functions, especially those that could support food production such as energy generation and grey water recovery, then it might have been even stronger. As large spaces, malls have a great potential to be converted to multi use. 'Including other services like daycare, and even some residential, might help to make the mall into the truly resilient hub this proposal hopes it can become,' said Michael Haggerty.

Concluding Insights

The Jury felt that all of the finalist submissions were very thoughtful and impressive, and that, as a whole, contributed a great deal to the emerging discourse on urban resilience. Some of the key insights that emerged in the Jury's discussion of these submissions included the following points:

- Integration: While the Jury sought entries that took an integrated approach to resilience as much as possible, it also determined that expecting complete and fully integrated solutions places a high burden on the entrants, due to the inherently iterative and emergent properties of resilience.

- Context: The Jury found that it was important for entrants to establish the context in which their proposals were made. The Jury was most impressed by those proposals that had an appreciation of the complexity of context as well as the uncertainty of future contexts in a world beset by climate change, peak oil, and other, as yet unknown challenges. Craig Applegath commented that, 'this competition is akin to a test of our understanding of the world. The real complexities of the world in which we have to create form in many ways still lie beyond our ability to grapple with them.' These proposals help us get a little closer to understanding and working with that underlying complexity and uncertainty.

- Emblematic: The point of the competition was not so much about finding a winner that illustrates exactly how to 'do' resilience. Instead it was hoped that this competition, as a thought-provoking exercise, might accelerate or catalyze our understanding of complexity and uncertainty, with a view to finding some strategies that are resonant and are emblematic of how the process of building the capacity for urban resilience might unfold in a variety of different contexts (places, scales, forms, etc.). Therefore the Jury was attracted to proposals that were emblematic of a good strategy or set of strategies.

- Form: Whereas during the last century building design was often a process driven by function - an approach summed up by the phrase 'form follows function' - resilience might require a different approach in which a series of possibilities are projected forward in time, to which space and form must be ready to adapt in order to meet the unique challenges of each possibility. One Jury member offered up the paraphrase 'form follows many functions' to describe the generic, adaptable qualities that could help to define the future of resilient design.

- Scalable + Replicable: Other criteria the Jury used to assess entries were whether the proposals were replicable in other places, and whether they were scalable to fit other contexts.

Many thanks to our 2010 Jury!

Denese Bottrell Marketing Content Strategist, Thoughtful Content, Inc.

Gregory Green Documentary filmmaker, and director of End of Suburbia

Michael Haggerty Urban planner, and Co-winner of the 2009 ResilientCity.org Design Ideas Competition

Peter Howard Biologist, and Sustainability Policy Consultant Manager with the PricewaterhouseCoopers Climate Change and Sustainability practice

Douglas Pollard Senior Analyst in International Relations with CMHC International, and a member of the City of Ottawa Urban Design Review Panel

Pamela Robinson Assistant professor, Ryerson University School of Urban and Regional Planning

Jonathan Yazer Public policy writer, and co-author of 'Resilient Edmonton: Why and How?'

Moderator:

Craig Applegath Founder of ResilientCity.org and principal at DIALOG

A selection was made, and over the next week we will be notifying the winner and preparing the blog and press announcement.

So stay tuned for the final announcement early next week!

Craig Applegath, Moderator, ResilientCity.org

Don Watson has just published a book on best practices and lessons learned for creating buildings and communities that are more resilient in the face of severe weather, climate change and flooding. See more about this topical book at:http://ca.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0470475641.html .

Here is a description of the book from the Wiley website:

Architects, urban planners and urban designers, as well as water resources engineers and landscape architects will discover thatDesign for Flooding presents the best practices and lessons to create buildings and communities that are more resilient in the face of severe weather, climate change, and the prospect of rising sea level. Design for Flooding covers technical and institutional issues'along with new design and business opportunities'built upon fundamentals of climate and weather, stormwater and floodplain management; best practices of flood-resistant design and adaption to sea level rise; multidisciplinary design that integrates sound ecological and engineering principles; and innovative design and construction to protect and improve water security

Craig

This got me thinking about developing scenarios about what cities will have to prepare for in order to test the resilience strategies that we had been talking about at the conference.

It then occurred to me that we should take advantage of the ability of Web 2.0 to allow us to crowd-source these scenarios in a productive (and maybe even entertaining way).

What do you think? How about a virtual mini-charrette to crowd source ideas on potential scenarios for future shocks and stresses that our cities will have to build resilience to? Do you have any suggestions about how to run this?

My first thought would be to simply ask for everyone to suggest the best way to set it up, then run it for a couple of weeks, and see what we get. What about some sort of token reward to the most creative and compelling scenario? It could be judged by everyone who participated. Maybe on Survey Monkey? How about a Flip video cam as the reward for the most compelling scenario?

Looking for your input on this idea. Go to our ResilientCity.org Ideas and Discussion Group on Facebook to participate athttp://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=122659943447&topic=15351

Thanks!

Craig Applegath, Moderator, ResiientCity.org

The final 20 blogs are all VERY good, with some truly inspired and inspiring ideas. I think you will be very impressed by both the quality of thought and imagination that went into these proposals. It will indeed be very difficult to select a 'best' blog from so many excellent blogs.

The jury is now in the process of finding a date when we can all get together to do the final selection process. Once we have met and made the selection, we will announce the winner.

Thanks again for your patience in our selection process. (because we are a strictly volunteer organization, we have to work in with everyone's very busy real-world schedules).

Best regards,

Craig

Craig Applegath, Moderator, ResilientCity.org

We have good news and bad news: The good news is that the our competition jurors are very impressed by both the ideas and the quality of many of the competition submissions. The bad news is that given the large number of submissions, it has taken much longer than we had anticipated to properly review all of these great submissions!

Our jurors have now reviewed all of the submissions and narrowed the selection down to a short-list of 10 finalists. After the holiday season is over, we will be gathering the jury together by web conference to discuss and select which entry is the most effective in meeting the terms of the competition.

We then hope to be able to announce the juried winner early in the New Year. At that time we also announce the Peoples' Choice award - which has been very popular.

Thanks again for your patience, and all the best in the holiday season!

Craig

Following on from my last blog post of October 24, and my initial thoughts on the APPI 2010 Conference, one of the very productive breakout groups that I took part in was energized by a very insightful observation made by Hani Quan, one of the APPI Conference facilitators who had joined our group. The group had formed up to tackle the question of how the key conference insights could best be recorded, digested, and then made useful to Alberta Planners. Hani observed that it had been his experience in previous sessions, that as participants worked through the various 'burning questions', they would inevitably have to deal with the three overlapping concerns of 'process', 'content', and 'relationships', and that the most productive and useful ideas would emerge where all three of these three concerns overlapped.

So using this Process / Content / Relationships triad as a lens, I have outlined below, in a very distilled fashion, the processes, content and relationships that had the greatest resonance for me at the conference, and had, to my mind, the greatest potential to help the planning community work through the important questions that now face us as we look for opportunities and strategies for planning and designing more resilient cities.

Process:

The central theme of he conference focused on 'building resilient people and resilient communities ... in a world that is constantly changing.' To explore this theme the APPI conference leaders took the bold step of departing from the usual conference format, and instead of organizing the conference around the typical 'talking head' style lectures, they threw the conference wide-open to their membership by holding an 'un-conference' - a conference using a combination of Open Space Technology and World Cafe to explore all of the 'burning questions' that conference participants really cared about.

For those unfamiliar with it, Open Space Technology is a process originally conceived of by Harrison Owen and designed to allow organizations, groups and communities to explore important questions, issues or problems through a self-organizing set of discussions. Its method allows leadership and structure to emerge from the group, and has the intent of stimulating meaningful planning, and initiating inspired performance. (source: The Art of Hosting, http://www.artofhosting.org/thepractice/coremethods/openspace/ ).
This was definitely a risky approach by the APPI conference organizers, but as it turned out, one that produced a great many thoughtful explorations, and a great many insights into both the question of resilience, but also of what the APPI members really cared about.

Content:

What sort of ideas emerged from this conference? The conference was rich in ideas, strategies, and possible avenues for further exploration. Of the close to 60 'burning questions' that emerged over the two and a half days of Open Space breakout groups, to my mind the questions that shed the most light on the issues of urban and community resilience included:

• How do we plan and design our cities to make them more RESILIENT to the future shocks and stresses associated with climate change and peak oil?
• Is Transit Oriented Development the future of urban planning? If not, are electric cars the solution to auto-centric cities?
• How can we see the city as a whole living system?
• Affordable housing. How? Why? What? Who? Where?
• How do we take the global understanding that humankind is in peril to planning at the local community level for a sustainable future?
• Roadblocks to sustainable communities. Why is the shift so hard?
• How can we promote better urban design in 'extreme' suburban context? Is it really worth it?
• 'Complete communities' How do we put the theory into practice?
• How best can we plan for non-renewable resources?
• Is there a place for nature in the built environment?
• How can we be more innovative as planners or how can we be more effective diversity bees?
• What is the future of/for agricultural land in Alberta?
• How do we more actively engage the public in the planning process?

The content of these breakout groups is now being posted on the APPI Conference Wiki so if any of these questions interest you, you should further explore them at http://conf2010spokenherd.wikispaces.com/

Relationships:

The Conference Leadership Team* did a great job of organizing the APPI 2010 Conference, and I think that one of the reasons they were so successful in pulling off their Open Space 'un-conference' was that they really understood and honoured the importance of how chemistry and relationships between attendees would have the potential to make the conference succeed, or potentially sewer it. As it turned out the shear goodwill and positive energy of the conference leaders might have allowed any conference structure to succeed, but it was particularly effective in making this Open Space conference work. I was also very impressed by the openness and goodwill of most all of the attendees who not only generated a compelling set of burning questions, but also developed equally thoughtful responses.

My net take-away from this conference was that it was a complete success in both its method, and its results. It is to be hoped that the APPI will take this success and look for future opportunities to leverage the questions and ideas that emerged out this conference as they continue to explore 'building resilient people and resilient communities ... in a world that is constantly changing.' Congratulations to the organizers and all who attended for making it such a great event.

Note:
* The leadership team who organized and led this year's APPI Conference included:

- Beth Sanders (POPULUS Community Planning Inc.)
- Dnyanesh Deshpande (City of Edmonton)
- Hani Quan (City of Edmonton)
- Jeremy Schiff (Municipal Affairs)
- Marilyn Hamilton (Integral City)
- Michelle Hartlaub (City of Edmonton)
- Njeri Mbajiorgu (Municipal Affairs)
- Peter Lehner (Plasser West)
- Rick Stuckenberg (Stuckenberg and Associates)

Craig Applegath, Moderator ResilientCity.org

This past week I had the pleasure of attending the Alberta Professional Planners Institute (APPI) Annual Conference, held in Lake Louise. I had been generously invited to attend and to contribute ideas related to my research into urban resilience in the face of global warming and economic decline. The conference had been convened by the APPI to explore the current planners' reality that, '...in our complex web of economic, social, cultural and environmental challenges in our communities, we feel unsettled and overwhelmed, and yet we are also energized by a sense of possibility.' (APPI Conference Agenda) The possibility that we might actually be able to make our communities more resilient to the stresses and future problems our communities and cities face was the very timely theme of the conference, and the conference organizers were bold enough to hold a 'un-conference' conference using Open Space Technologyto more fully explore the linked questions: What if we aren't planning to survive??... and who is planning our future anyway?

At the opening reception of the conference, we were all asked to answer the question: 'Who is planning our future anyway?', and to then post our answers on the large cartoon 'elephant in the room' hanging on the wall. Most of the answers posted by participants were quite insightful, but of course with a few ironic and humorous posts like 'certainly not our politicians!'

As a scanned all of the posted comments, it occurred to me that perhaps the question of 'who' might not be as important as the question of 'what'.

When you think about society's current lack of progress on so many important fronts, it seems to me not so much a problem of poor or corrupt planning by any particular individual, (or even group of elites) but rather, the result of the more banal, but nevertheless extremely powerful inertia of past decisions, reinforced by ever more obsolete paradigms.

The interesting question for me at this conference would therefore be: could this conference overcome this very same inertia, and in doing so expose, and hopefully explore, some of the important planning and design issues that planners will necessarily face in the coming decades?

In my next blog post I will outline what I found at the APPI 2010 Conference, and some of the key insights I gained.

Craig Applegath

A few of you have sent email asking about the Design Ideas Competition, and what is happening with the judging of this years entries.

Well, we are now finally underway with the judging and we hope to be done by the end of October. You may be wondering why it seems to be taking so long. The simple answer is that the competition and judging is staffed by volunteers, who have to work the reading and judging into their already packed schedules. The good news is that we have another great team of judges this year and in my next blog entry I will tell you all about them.

This year we are also holding a People's Choice Award everyone can vote on. If you haven't already, I encourage you to go to the Survey Monkey link and evaluate your favourite entries.

Thanks for your continuing interest in the competition and in the idea of resilience.

Craig

The 2010 ResilientCity.org Design Ideas Competition Is Now Closed!

Thank you to all of you who submitted competition entries!

From the competition entries I have scanned, I am very impressed by the quality of the blogs. Entrants have been both very passionate and very thoughtful in their explorations.

So let me ask all of the entrants a question: Once we have completed the competition and awarded the prizes, where do you think we should go next? There are a number of contributors who are still very interested in continuing to build out the content of the reference sections of the website, as well as to continue to hold design idea competitions. But what about the possibility of the website serving as a hub for people who are interested in resilience and resilient design? What about using ResilientCity.org to connect us to each other?

If so, what form could it take? A wiki of resources? A place to post your local resilience activities? A Ning gathering spot?

What kinds of opportunities strike you as relevant and worthwhile?

I would love to hear where you think we could/ should go! To respond you can either use the blog comment feature or send me an email through our contact page.

Again, to all of those of you who participated in the 2010 ResilientCity.org Design Ideas Competiton, thanks for your interest and efforts. The world needs more people like you!

Craig Applegath, Moderator ResilientCity.org

I would first like to thank everyone for their participation in this year's Design Ideas Competition. But I would also like to appologize for the problems we have been having with our web servers in the past few days. Our web host has assured us that the problems will be fixed shortly, and they will be sending out an email to all registrants to confirm that the problems have been fixed.

We have also extended the submission deadline until June 11th to provide you with enough additional time to get your entries posted. However, if problems continue, please be assured that we will extend the deadline again to make sure that you are able to get your submissions posted.

Thanks again for your patience, and don't worry, we will do everything we can to make sure you can get your blogs posted before we close the submissions.

Good luck! The future is counting on your creativity!

Craig Applegath, Moderator, ResilientCity.org

Registration for the ResilientCity.org Design Ideas Competition closed last night at12:00pm EST!

Thanks to all those who have registered! We have received over 180 registrations with some really interesting and thoughtful proposed projects, se we are very much looking forward to seeing your submission blogs!

Given the large number of registrations that were made in the last couple of days, it is going to take us a couple of days to process them and get you out your confirmation email along with your user name and password so that you can access your competition blog page. However, we are going to do our very best to get back to you by Tuesday so that you will have plenty of time to test out your blog page and become comfortable using it before the final submission date/time of May 30th at 12:00 am EST.

As mentioned in my previous blog, I would urge you to try to get your competition entry blog posted before the deadline date so that you do not run into an internet traffic jam when trying to upload your blog at the very last moment. We suggest you aim to load your blog at least one day before the final closing time to give yourself plenty of time to make sure your blog is up and working.

We look forward to receiving and reading/watching your entry!

Craig

Craig Applegath, Moderator ResilientCity.org

Registration for the ResilientCity.org Design Ideas Competition Closes tomorrow May 14th at the end of the day 12:00pm EST.

We have received over 150 registrations with some wonderfully interesting and thoughtful proposed projects. We are very much looking forward to seeing your submission blogs!

However, we have also had a number of people emailing us to say that they have not recieved the registration confirmation email. It usually takes us between one and two weeks to get this email out to registrants, but after registration closes tomorrow, we will do our very best to get this email to you with a few days - to give you the time you will need to explore how the blog interface works before you load up your blog by May 30th. If you don't hear from us please use the Contact Us email to let us know that you have not received your confirmation email.

We would also urge you to try to get your competition entry blog posted before the deadline date so that you do not run into an internet traffic jam when trying to upload your blog at the very last moment. We suggest you aim to load your blog at least one day before the final closing time to give yourself plenty of time to make sure your blog is up and working.

We look forward to receiving and reading/watching your entry!

Craig

'Resilience is the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and reorganize while undergoing change, so as to still remain essentially the same function, structure, identity, and feedbacks.'

Source: B. Walker et al, 'Resilience, Adaptability and
Transformability in Social-ecological Systems',
Ecology and Society 9 (2) p. 5

Last week I got a call from Gregory Green - the director of the documentary The End of Suburbia, as well as a judge on this year's Design Ideas Competition - to discuss his upcoming documentary about resilient cities. Gregory has a great sense of curiosity about the world, so it is always a pleasure to chat with him about our mutual interest in resilient cities. In the course of our conversation, he asked me a very interesting question: 'If you had to choose just three strategies to significantly increase the capacity for resilience of our cities to the future impacts of Peak Oil and Climate Change, what would they be?' A very prescient question - given that every city's resources are always limited, and real trade-offs always have to be made if a city's capacity for resilience is to be increased.

This blog is therefore an attempt to think through and answer Gregory's question.

When thinking about how best to answer this question, it was clear from the outset that defining clear criteria for selecting these strategies would be the heart of the exercise. The following chosen criteria are based on my past experience as an architect and urban designer in dealing with complex problems that have no one right answer or solution:

1. The strategies should have an impact that is in reasonable proportion to the resources that must be invested to achieve the intended result.

2. The strategies must be achievable with currently existing and easily accessible science and technology.

3. The strategies must be scalable and be able to be used at a small community scale, but also have the ability to be used at a larger regional scale.

4. The strategies must be able to be implemented without significant political upheaval.

5. The strategies must serve to contribute positively to the economic and cultural health of the community and city where they are implemented.

6. The selection of the best strategies should be consistent with the Pareto Principle or 80/20 rule - that is, that the chosen strategies should, if compared to all the other strategies, be the 20% of strategies that produce 80% of the positive benefits.

Based on the above six criteria, I would propose that the following three strategies will be the most effective for building substantial additional resilience capacity into our communities and cities:

1. Reduction of a city's overall energy requirements
   
   
2. Increasing a city's key infrastructure capacity
   
   
3. Re-localization of key functions into a city
   
   

1. Reduce our city's energy requirements: Our cities' growing demand for energy, and especially fossil fuel energy, both in absolute and per capita terms, not only contributes to the problem of global warming, but, in the not too distant future, will become increasingly unsupportable as the emerging reality of peak oil economics begins to drive up oil prices to levels that will significantly impair the economic health of our now highly energy dependent urban and regional economies. Our ability to develop viable and economically sound strategies for reducing our cities' demand for energy will be crucial for building the capacity for resilience to the future impacts of peak oil, while at the same time reducing the present negative impact of our cities on our global environment. I believe that in order to accomplish this, we will need to develop realistic strategies for both increasing the proportion of renewable energy our cities produce and use, and more importantly, develop strategies for reducing the current level of demand for energy through such key measures as:

• Reducing the energy demand of our existing urban fabric: through the implementation of much more comprehensive and aggressive programs for energy conservation such as the re-skinning our cities' building fabric on a citywide scale. It is important to remember that close to 50% of all energy consumed in our cities is consumed in the heating and cooling buildings! Two very good examples putting this strategy into action are the Zero Footprint Building Re-Skinning Competitionand the City of Toronto's Mayor's Tower Renewal Project.

• Reducing our consumption of fossil fuels for transportation:by reducing our use and dependence on automobiles as our cities' primary means of circulation by increasing urban density; by increasing our cities' mass transportation capacity; and by increasing the proportion of mixed-use redevelopment in order to reduce logistics costs for movement of goods and services. A very inspiring and instructive example of a city significantly reducing the use and dependence of automobiles is the City of Chattanooga's implementation of a free electric bus transit system to provide access to all of its downtown core from strategically located parking garages at the periphery of the city. (See a case study of the Chattanooga Electric Bus System )

2. Increase the capacity and effectiveness of our key infrastructure systems: In the developed world, our key infrastructure systems are reaching or have reached the end of their serviceable life. Electrical power generation and transmission grids; potable water and waste water systems; and public transportation systems are all now at capacity or beyond capacity and service life. There is therefore currently not a lot of resilience left in these systems - they are all frail and failing.

Moreover, our cities' current economies seem barely able to afford the costs of operating and maintaining these existing systems in their present state, let alone redeveloping them in any comprehensive way. But there is a bigger problem looming. When we are forced to wean ourselves off of fossil fuels, as the economic realities of peak oil begin to kick in, there will be even less economic capacity to allow for the redevelop of these systems. We must therefore begin to look for strategies for re-developing these important infrastructure systems before our economies begin to feel the bite of peak oil. Some of the important re-development opportunities that now present themselves include:

• Electric Power Infrastructure Re-development: The development of 'smart' power transmission grids to not only add the necessary new capacity to current aging and insufficient infrastructure, but to also facilitate the new world of electrical power supply and use where any user may also be a supplier. Also, given that renewable power sources, such as wind, solar thermal, and geothermal, are very often geographically separated from their end users, the development of high efficiency (low transmission power loss) direct current (DC) transmission corridors will also have to be developed at a continental scale.
  
  
• Potable Water Supply Re-development: In many North American and European cities, existing water supply systems have reached the end of their functional life. As the impacts of future climate change causes droughts and reductions in water supplies in many locations around the world, cities will have to develop strategies for both water conservation, but also wastewater and grey water purification and reuse. These strategies should also be interlinked with new strategies for dealing with wastewater. A good example of how this might be accomplished can be found at John Todd's website at http://toddecological.com/ .

3. Develop strategies for re-localizing key functions that are currently predicated on cheap oil: As the economic pressures of Peak Oil reduce the economic logic of shipping food and manufactured goods great distances, the pressure to re-localize the key functions of food production and manufacturing will have huge implications for how our cities are planned and operated:

• Re-localizing Food: We have to develop effective strategies for feeding our cities through local agricultural production to successfully respond to the impacts of rising transportation costs and agricultural production costs that will result from the rising cost of oil resulting from the economic logic of peak oil. A very innovative and future looking example of re-localizing food supply can be seen in Gordon Graff's High Rise 'Sky Farm' proposal, where the production of food is brought right into the city in the form of a highrise building designed as a completely integrated organic farm able to support 40,000 people. (see an article about Gordon's Sky Farm at Treehugger). More conventional strategies for conserving and re-developing farmland that used to surround most cities will become important for developing an overall food re-localization strategy for our cities.
  

Sky Farm Proposal by Gordon Graff 2009 (by permission of Author)

• Re-localizing Manufacturing:Over the next decade, as the economic logic of peak oil begins to be felt around the world, cities will begin see the off-shored jobs returning from Asia and other parts of the developing world as rising shipping costs due to increased fuel costs kill the bottom-line advantage of off-shoring manufacturing to the lower cost labour markets. We will therefore need to develop city planning and design strategies to re-industrialize our cities in economically effective, and environmentally responsible ways. For an excellent treatment of this complexities of this issue see Jeff Rubin's new book, Why Your World is About to Get a Lot Smaller.

Now Is The Time To Re-develop Our Infrastructure! The above three key strategies of reducing our cities' overall energy requirements; increasing and re-developing infrastructure capacity; and re-localizing key functions, form what I believe to be the core components of what will be the most effective means of increasing the critically capacity necessary for the development of resilience to the future impacts of peak oil and global warming. Most importantly, because all three of these strategies will require significant public and private investment, our cities will have a much better chance of building addition capacity now while our economy is relatively unimpaired by the soon-to-come negative economic impacts of peak oil, rather than if we wait until these harsh economic impacts begin to be felt in the future. The question is: will we?

I would be very interested to hear your thoughts on this blog. The ideas expressed are core to my thinking about resiliency, and I hope will be helpful to those of you who are currently developing your ideas for the 2010 ResilientCity.org Design Ideas Competition.

The 2010 ResilientCity.org Design Ideas Competition Is Now Open!

The 2010 ResilientCity.org Design Ideas Competition is an exciting opportunity for architects, city planners, urban designers, engineers, and landscape architects, including students, graduate students and interns of these disciplines around the world to contribute ideas about creating more resilient cities.

Purpose

The purpose of the competition will be for you to explore ideas and opportunities for increasing the resilience of your city to the present and future impacts of climate change and peak oil. To this end, the 2010 competition's theme will be:

'Building Urban Resilience where you are with what you have.'

Like last year's competition there will be a $1,000 CAN prize for best planning and design idea, but there will be an additional prize of $1,000 CAN for the best video mini-documentary.

New this Year!

This year, instead of asking you to put forward planning and design proposals for one of either two urban design scenarios, or one of two building design scenarios, the scope of the competition is now wide open for you to come forward with ideas for your own scenarios for increasing the resilience of the city you live in. In doing this, you are free to explore and develop broad based planning and urban design strategies for your city as a whole, or you could focus in on developing strategies for increasing resilience through specific building design strategies.

However broadly or narrowly you wish to cast your ideas net, your aim should be to develop ideas that are consistent with the competition's theme of 'Building Urban Resilience where you are with what you have.' But we should note that in doing so, you should not understand the phrase 'with what you have' to restrict you to how much money you have, or how much political power you have, but rather what talents and ideas you have!

New Video-Doc Category

Like last year's Design Ideas Competition, this year's competition will provide you with the opportunity to put forward plans and strategies developed in the form of drawings, words and sketches. However this year, you will also have the opportunity to submit your ideas in the form of a video mini-doc (up to 10 min max length), either separately or in combination with your drawing and text-based submissions.

No Entry Fee!

This year there will be no registration fee! We have dropped the registration fee this year because we wanted the ideas competition to be open to as many people around the world as possible, and were concerned that, even though small, an entry fee might discourage entrants in cities and countries were their exchange rates would make $20 CAN a prohibitive sum for students and small scale practitioners.

Ideas Competition Blog

During this year's competition we be encouraging competition participants to collaborate with one another through a Competition Forum Blog. This blog will be set up with the purpose of answering questions about the competition and offering participants the opportunity to discuss their project ideas and connect with others doing the competition.

I very much look forward to this year's Ideas Competition as a great opportunity to further explore how we can make our cities more resilient to the present and future stresses of global climate change and peak oil. We look forward to your thoughts and suggestions on this year's competition! For more information about this year's Design Ideas Competition click here>>

Craig Applegath, Moderator ResilientCity.org /BIO

As you may have noticed when you arrived at our website, we are in the process of renovating the site's graphics and structure.

In addition to the bright new banner that does a great job of announcing that change is underway, we will be overhauling the structure of the site to bring more content to the landing page, but more importantly, to increase the visibility of content related to the Ideas Competition and Blog.

The main purpose of the site renovations will be to create a website that focuses its energy on exploring and creating new ideas about resiliency, rather than simply discussing the problems associated with Climate Change and Peak Oil.

We anticipate that these renovations will take another couple of weeks to complete, so don't be surprised if things look a little different each time you visit the site.

We very much look forward to hearing your thoughts on our renovations. Please post us an email or post a comment at this blog.

Craig Applegath, Moderator ResilientCity.org /BIO

Read More: ResilientCity.org Goals, 2009 Ideas Deign Competion Results, Michael Haggerty and Raj Kottamasu, Robert Shepherd

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

No blog site is complete without a New Year's Day blog post including a year in review and goals for the coming year!

YEAR IN REVIEW

The past year has been both exciting and very productive! We launched the ResilientCity.org website in May of 2009 to encourage the planning and design community to get serious about increasing the resilience of our cities in the face of climate change and peak oil. Although we started with the simple first year goal of planting the flag by setting up the website with some useful resources on it, by the end of December '09, we had attracted 9302 unique visitors to the website, who made 57,213 page visits!

This is a surprisingly large number of visits for such a new site, but the interest in the site was probably indicative of both an emerging zeitgeist related to subject of resilience, and keen interest in the ResilientCity Design Ideas competition. By its close, the Design Ideas Competition had attracted dozens of registrations and entries received from around the globe. Entries included design proposals for cities in India, Mexico, Israel, Tibet, Germany, as well as the USA and Canada. The entries presented credible and implementable solutions that could be utilized today to move our cities towards greater resiliency.

The grand prize winner, 'From the Ground Up', by Michael Haggerty and Raj Kottamasu, of Brooklyn, NY, USA, examined how to create food self-sufficiency in the urban neighbourhood of Westside in Newark, New Jersey, while the winner of the Urban Design Category was 'Food=Utility', by Robert Shepherd at Grey Studio, in San Francisco, Ca. Shepherd's entry presented a very inspired proposal to reclassify food and access to food, now considered as a commercial venture, turning it into a public utility.

This year also saw the launch of the ResilientCity Blog, a blog that focused on ways to create more resilient cities through more effective planning and design.

THE COMING YEAR

Where are we going in 2010, and what do we want to accomplish?
These were the two questions that a group of ResilientCity Contributors asked ourselves at an impromptu Ideas Workshop we held this past December. After much discussion we agreed that we would aim to accomplish the following three big-picture goals over the next year:

1. Continue to make ResilientCity.org a viable space on the web for learning, understanding, and engagement-an evolving conversation rather than a static set of facts.
2. As a means of accomplishing this, make the Design Ideas Competition the site's main focus and 'infrastructure' for this conversation.
3. Use the ResilientCity Blog as a vehicle for connecting with readers/views to discuss the ideas and issues that are being explored in the Design Ideas Competition.

ANNOUNCING THE 2010 RESILIENTCITY COMPETITION!

I think the new Design Ideas Competition will be an exciting opportunity to allow architects, planners, urban designers, engineers, and landscape architects around the world to explore the opportunities to develop greater resilience in their cities. To this end, the 2010 competition's theme will be 'Increasing resilience where you are with what you have', and it will have a number of new features that should both increase the quality level of discourse about resilience, and make the competition more interesting. These include adding a video documentary category for submission, as well as encouraging the competition entrants to collaborate with one another through blog and Twitter postings.

In addition to these big picture initiatives, we also plan to renovate the structure of the site to make the site's content more accessible. We plan to change the landing page to be more of a dashboard that will give viewers access to the site's key content areas including the Design Ideas Competition and Blog, as well as providing access to recent tweets, and links to key news items of interest.

I very much look forward to this year as a year to further explore how we can make our cities more resilient to the stresses of global climate change and peak oil, both through the 2010 Design Ideas Competition, and through the Blog. We look forward to your thoughts and suggestions on both content and the website itself. Have a happy and more resilient New Year!

Craig Applegath, Moderator

Craig Applegath / BIO

Read More: ResilientCity.org Goals, 2009 Ideas Deign Competion Results, ResilientCity.org Resources, Resilient Design Principles, Urban Design Principles.

Yes, There Will There Be Another Design Ideas Competition!

Back in November of 2009 we posted a blog answering a question we had been hearing from a number of website readers: 'Is there going to be another ResilientCity.org Ideas Competition, and if so, what will its focus be?'

The answer was: 'yes we are', and the focus would be something 'we would be thinking about over the next couple of months'.

And So We Have

Over the past couple of months since that post, the ResilientCity.org network of contributors have been exploring the question of the Ideas Competition's focus and timing. At a contributors workshop we held this past December 18th we agreed that the next Ideas Competition 'should be much more open than the last completion in terms of the possible design and planning scenarios that could be explored', but at the same time, it was agreed that 'there should still be a strong focus on the goal of exploring how best to create more resilient cities.'

No More Pre-definedDesign Scenarios

How should this be accomplished? Our workshop group concluded that in order to achieve this goal, and encourage the widest possible exploration of the concept of resilience, in the 2010 Ideas Competition, we would no longer be setting out any specific planning and design scenarios. Instead, we would ask participants simply to put forward compelling planning and design ideas that best demonstrate how they would propose to increase the urban resilience in the cities where they live.

New Theme For This Year's Ideas Competition

The Workshop group agreed that the next competition would benefit from having a theme that would help tie all of the entries together at the time of their judging, and then exhibition on this website. The 'theme' for this year's competition is: 'Building Urban Resilience where you live, with what you have.'

This theme emerged out of our discussion about how to help focus participants on better anchoring their planning ideas in the reality of the everyday life of the cities they live in. Although the competition jury will be looking for creativity and imagination in the competition entries, they will also be looking for the entries to be grounded in the realities of a real city. To this end, and as mentioned above, one of the new requirements in this year's competition is the requirement for idea entries to be based in the city where the entrant lives.

No More Entry Fees, But Now You Will Have To Tell Us About Your Project!

Another new feature for this year's competition is idea or creating an ongoing conversation about the ideas that people are exploring in their completion entries. In order to get over people's natural tendency to keep their ideas to themselves, we are thinking that we will introduce the opportunity for competitors to show that they have collaborated through the ResilientCity.org blog and/or twitter during the competition, and as a result be awarded points for doing so by the jury!

We also thought that it would be a good idea to drop the entry fee this year, and instead require that all entrants send us at least one proposed blog entry that describes what project they are undertaking, and the key issues they are exploring. We felt that this requirement would increase both the scope and quality of discussion of how to create more resilient cities, and increase the overall quality of all entries.

New Video Entry Prize!

Like last year, we will be posting a $1,000 CAN first prize for the best planning and design idea submission submitted as a set of two A1 sized PDFs composed of some combination of plans, drawings, sketches and words.
For this year's competition we have created a new entry category for the submission of mini-documentary videos. These would be 5 to 10 minute videos in a format that could be uploaded to our website and YouTube. This entry will also have a $1,000 first prize.

So When Will The 2010 Ideas Competition Launch?

We are hoping to get the official announcement of the completion on the ResilientCity.org website in the first week of January.

You Should Be On Twitter To Get All The Latest Competition Updates

We plan to use Twitter as a way to keep all contestants informed about the competition as well as to answer questions during the competition. You can follow us on the ResilientCity Twitter site we have just set up at @ResilientCity.

We are really looking forward to a great competition and look forward to hearing from you with your thoughts about our new competition. So start following us on Twitter at @ResilientCity.

Craig Applegath, Moderator

However, despite the popularity of the issue, climate change information is generally global, rather than local. It is difficult to understand or determine the influences of climate change on specific locations or communities. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ('IPCC') creates reports highlighting the major global impacts of climate change, but as a reader of these reports, it is difficult to determine how this is relevant to me. How will the impacts of a global average temperature increase change my community?

As a long term resident of Toronto, Canada, I set out to find out for myself. What has happened to average temperatures in Toronto? As it turns out, it is actually quite easy to determine this - Toronto has a number of Environment Canada weather stations that have historical records of temperature data. I undertook a simple analysis of the available data to see what, if anything, climate change has meant to Toronto. All data used in the following analysis was obtained directly from weather station data, downloadable from http://www.climate.weatheroffice.ec.gc.ca/.

First, I decided to look at the mean temperatures in Toronto. Toronto has a number of weather stations; this analysis uses data from Pearson International Airport. This station was used because data is available for the longest continuous period of time of any weather station in Toronto, from 1940-2008. The results are presented in the graph below. Mean minimum and maximum temperatures are calculated by taking the daily minimum or maximum temperature recorded and averaging these numbers for the year.

Figure 1.1 - Mean average, maximum, and minimum temperatures and regression lines for Toronto's Pearson International Airport, 1940-2008.

The above graph shows the actual recorded mean annual temperatures as dotted lines, with a linear regression line showing the trend. The equation for the regression line is included in the graph.

The data shows that on average, since 1940, Toronto has been experiencing an increase in mean temperature equivalent to 0.0159 degrees Celsius per year. Monthly minimum temperatures have been rising at a slightly higher rate, 0.0228 degrees Celsius per year, while monthly maximum temperatures have been increasing at a slightly lower rate of 0.0088 degrees Celsius per year.

In addition, the rate of increase appears to be rising. The table below presents the 10 years with the highest mean temperatures:

Table 1.1 - Rank of 10 years with the hottest mean temperature.

Of the ten hottest years, seven occurred in the last decade of data collection (1998-2008). None occurred in the first decade of data collection (1940-1950). The average temperature in the first decade of available data (1940-1950) was 7.4 degrees Celsius, while the average temperature in the last decade (1998-2008) was 9.0 degrees Celsius.

What does this prove? Well, it proves that mean temperatures in Toronto have been rising according to data collected at Pearson International Airport. This does not definitively prove that climate change is real, man-made, or caused by greenhouse gas emissions. Cities in general tend to be warmer than the countryside (the 'urban heat island effect') and it would be difficult to determine if Toronto's average temperatures are increasing due to climate change, increasing development and sprawl, or a combination of both. However, based on data from Pearson International Airport, it is apparent that Toronto's climate is changing.

By Peter Howard

To do so, we thought that we would reflect on what we learned from our presentation of our competition entry 'From the Ground Up', at a benefit for a youth farming program. Our co-presenters included other Brooklyn residents involved in local food initiatives. The event gave us the chance to consider what urban designers can offer people who are already making viable agriculture projects happen in our city. We saw three basic possible contributions a proposal like ours can make.

1. From Urban Agriculture to Food Systems

Designers can help by creating a framework for urban agriculture at scales bigger than individual project sites. Urban agriculture systems include food production, processing, distribution, and consumption as well as waste management. Individuals involved in urban food initiatives necessarily tend to understand and manage small parts of this process as they relate to operations. Urban planners and designers have the opportunity to consider the system as a whole - how resources flow from one process to the next, and how to match that flow with local needs. Our proposal imagined how neighborhood spaces could systematically welcome various food programs.

2. Putting Food Systems into Design Language

Designers can use the tools of architecture and planning to advocate for urban food systems to decision makers. This is a service designers offer every day to clients of other sorts. We were surprised to find very few official planning or design documents addressing neighborhood food systems comprehensively. Design language is a common and persuasive vocabulary used to communicate ideas about systemic change - to agency officials, funders, community developers, and the public. We expect and believe design language should become a well-deployed tool in the development of urban food systems.

3. Connecting Food with Neighborhood Systems

Leveraging an understanding of local concerns and infrastructure, designers can connect urban agriculture to other neighborhood systems. How can urban agriculture be a part of energy generation, waste management, transportation, or job creation? Our proposal suggested, for example, how food production could improve the public realm. Crime and safety are major concerns in Newark and affect perceptions of the city. We think by activating neighborhood spaces and buildings with food initiatives, we can create a safer network of active public spaces. The more connections established between food systems and local infrastructures and institutions, the more resilient urban agriculture will become. The capacity of food systems to withstand changes - including displacement by higher value land uses - will grow.

A visit to Brick City Urban Farm in Newark gave inspiration to our proposal. The farm is located on a 15,000 square-foot vacant lot on loan from a non-profit affordable housing developer. Two residents of Integrity House, a nearby rehabilitation center, are paid to maintain the farm daily. Neighborhood residents drop by to pick fresh vegetables - collards are most popular - and the farm supplies several suburban restaurants. The farm is surrounded by a simple chain-link fence, and nothing has ever been stolen.

Brick City Urban Farm is unplanned from a design perspective, but even so, the farm has improved the neighborhood public realm, responded to community needs, and connected the neighborhood to the regional economy. As designers and planners, we can help give form to these kinds of activities, and assist their organizers by strategically aligning them with neighborhood and city-scale development.

Michael Haggerty and Raj Kottamasu

ResilientCity.org Design Ideas Compettion Winners

To the first part of the question, the answer is a definiteyes! Given the great success of themostrecent competition in generating verycreative and thoughtful ideas on how to makeourcities more resilient, we thought it would be a very worthwhile to hold a second competition.

To the second part of the question regardingthe focus of the competition, we would like to turn the question back to you, andask for your input on what you think the next competition challenge should be.

Should it be another design ideas completion, or should we shift gears and hold completion for papers on resiliency? Or should we do both in tandem, or sequentially? What kind of topics would have the greatest relevance and resonance? What questions or challenges would make you want to spend time developing ideas and designs? What was it about the last competition that you liked or did not like? What should we repeat, or not repeat? Should we be broader or more specific in our focus? Should we have only one challenge, or more (like the last competition)?

From the first completion we learned that there are a lot of ideas out there about what constitutes urban resilience, and that people are thinking deeply on this subject. Whatever type of competition question we ask, and format we select, we will want it to help us (and you!) come to a better and clearer understanding of the issues we need to tackle, and the methods we need to adopt to deal with creating more resilient cities in the future.

Please contact us with your thoughts, either through the Contact Page or as comment post on this Blog.

Craig
Moderator, ResilientCity.org

Craig Applegath is a founding member and moderator of ResilientCity.org, and an Architect and Principal at Cohos Evamy Integratedesign in Toronto

As a supporting member of the 350.org website I received the following letter today that I thought I should share with you

Craig
Moderator, ResilientCity.org

Craig Applegath is a founding member and moderator of ResilientCity.org, and an Architect and Principal at Cohos Evamy Integratedesign in Toronto

------------------------

Letter from Bill McKibben / Sat 24/10/2009 9:35 PM

Dear friend,

Today in New York was one of the most amazing experiences of my life.

As I stood in Times Square and watched images flood in from every corner of the world on the big screens, I finally saw what a climate movement looked like -- and it looked diverse and creative and beautiful.

Please head to www.350.org and spend a few minutes watching the pictures. We need you to feel the strength of this movement, and to see how creative and committed this movement is, all across the planet.

It was so sweet to watch the day move around the globe, with thousands upon thousands of pictures appearing, sometimes a dozen a minute! There were photos of climbers high on the glaciers of Switzerland holding 350 banners, of bicycle parades from Copenhagen to San Francisco, of organizers in Papua New Guinea beating their church gong 350 times while churches in Barcelona rang their bells 350 times. Photos of activists protesting coal plants and celebrating wind farms, of students in 350 shirts repairing their flooded homes in Manila, and of thousands of people marching in the streets of Bogota and Kathmandu. Photos of people from different races and classes, religions and nationalities, coming together around a simple and powerful number to save our planet. Thousands took to the streets in Addis Ababa and Mexico City; we had huge parades in places like Togo and Seattle.

You were by far the biggest news story on Google, on CNN, on the front pages of newspapers around the planet. And these pictures were seen around the world, in newspapers from Beijing to Boston, on TV stations from New Delhi to New York, and on blogs, social networks, and websites across the internet.

Together, we've shown the world that a global climate movement is possible and set a bold new agenda for the upcoming United Nations Climate Meetings in Copenhagen this December. The 350 target is the new bottom line for climate action and world leaders must now meet that target.

We thought we would be tired after many sleepless nights planning this day, but in fact we're more energized than ever. We're preparing to deliver the photos and messages from your events to every national delegation to the United Nations on Monday, and planning to hand the photos to high-level ministers at upcoming climate negotiations in Barcelona and Copenhagen. So if you haven't uploaded your best pictures from the event yet, please do so right away by sending us an e-mail to photos@350.org with your photos attached, with your City, Country as the subject and the body as the action description.

Thank you more than we can possibly say. We'll (of course) be asking you to do lots more in the weeks ahead -- but today, lean back, relax, look through pictures at 350.org, and savor your accomplishment. You were part of what many journalists called 'the most widespread day of political action the world has ever seen.'

Together with millions around the world, you made a real difference already -- get ready to make much more in the days, weeks and months to come.

With hope,

Bill McKibben and the whole 350.org Team

Urban Design Strategies:

1. Increasing Urban Density
2. Increasing Public Mass Transit
3. Increasing Pedestrian Circulation
4. Increasing Bicycle Use
5. Planning for Mixed Use
6. Planning for Integration with Local Environmental Eco-Systems
7. Planning for the Re-localization and Self-sufficiency of Food Production and Distribution
8. Planning for the Re-localization and Self-sufficiency of Electrical Power Generation and Distribution
9. Planning for the Implementation of Low-cost Residential Accommodation for Environmental Refugees
10. Conservation of Nutrient Cycles in our Food and Waste Systems

Building Design Strategies:

1. Increasing Robustness of Building Construction
2. Increasing levels of Building Envelope Insulation in New Buildings
3. Re-cladding of Existing Buildings to Increase Building Insulation
4. Increasing use of local and regional construction materials
5. Increasing use of construction techniques and material that can be assembled by hand without machinesgies

If you have any thoughts on these, or would like to contribute some examples of instances where you think these strategies have been very effectively implemented, we would very much appreciated hearing from you. Please get back to us on this blog or through our Contact Form.

Thanks in advance!

Craig
Moderator, ResilientCity.org

Craig Applegath is a founding member and moderator of ResilientCity.org, and an Architect and Principal at Cohos Evamy Integratedesign in Toronto

Thanks for your patience in waiting for the results of the first ResilientCity.org Design Ideas Competition!

Four months ago, the ResilientCity.org was launched to create a focus for debate and stimulate new ideas about the way we plan cities and design buildings. Then we launched our Design Ideas Competition to both encourage exploration of ResilientCity planning and design, as well as to generate useful exemplars for the Resources section of the website.

Our design competition resulted in more than 50registrations and 22 formal entries received from around the globe, including proposals centered on cities in India, Mexico, Israel, Tibet, Germany, as well as the USA and Canada. Many of the entries presented very credible and implementable solutions that could be utilized today to move our cities towards greater resiliency.

The grand prize winner, 'From the Ground Up', by Michael Haggerty and Raj Kottamasu, of Brooklyn, NY, USA, examined how to create food self-sufficiency in the urban neighbourhood of Westside in Newark, New Jersey. Their neighborhood plan looks at how to provide a hierarchy of food production and processing facilities through adaptation of various kinds of ground. These are connected by a new green corridor system that is a space of congregation, distribution, and exchange. The proposal emphasizes, in particular, the 'Resilient City Design Principles' of Systems diversity, Systems redundancy, Local self-sufficiency, and Waste = Food. According to our jury, 'The winner did a thorough job of understanding and interpreting all the principles of resiliency, and presented them in a highly legible fashion. The solutions used cultural, social and economic elements to effectively integrate a new food supply source into an economically viable model.' Indeed, this was a very bottom-up, grassroots approach, very do-able in a neighbourhood context.

The winner of the Urban Design Category was 'Food=Utility', by Robert Shepherd at Grey Studio, in San Francisco, Ca. This entry presented a very inspired proposal to reclassify food and access to food, now considered as a commercial venture, turning it into a public utility. This concept would allow available public land to become arable, private land to be capitalized, and just-in-time processing methods that promote local and regional food access. With such a proposal, the rezoning of land becomes a key tool to changing the way food is produced and distributed. As the author states: 'The project Food=Utility is a speculative proposal for reclassifying food and access to food; from a commercial prospect to a public utility. This proposal came in part, from an interest in using zoning models to produce planning strategies, which are generative rather than static, and from the recognition that zoning models based on commercial development models are insufficient for dealing with the problems associated with food and food access.' This concept was the most innovative one, and well thought out, but the jury felt that it might have pushed the exploration of its concepts a bit further.

In architectural category of submissions, the Jury awarded two honourable mentions. The first was the 'Hydronic Deformation' proposal by L. Garofalo and A. Adderley, a project that explored how an existing curtain-wall clad high-rise building might be re-clad with a network of metal tubing that would circulate warm water to pre-condition air around the building, as well as to serve as a scaffolding for growing hanging vines for shading the window surfaces in summer months. The second was the 'Urban Villas' project by Alexander Eisenschmidt of Chicago, Illinois, that explored the opportunity to create a low-rise mixed use urban block in the town of Quedlinburg, Germany.

The purpose of this competition was to stimulate dialogue, to get people thinking and talking about ways to meet the challenges of designing cities for a future faced with large population growth, significant climatic changes and more self-sufficient energy sources. To get people asking: How will our cities have to change to survive and thrive in this new environment? What responsibilities do urban designers, city planners and architects have to make the necessary changes? By this measure I think the competition was a great success!

I want to thank each and every person who responded to our call for entries. As those of you who have been involved in brainstorming sessions know, all ideas are good ideas when they are part of a process of generating creative thought. Please look at the competition entries on the website, and think about how you might build on them, or what they inspire you to develop. Post your thoughts and let's create some dynamic dialogue to push the ResilientCities.org discussion to the next level.

Craig
Moderator, ResilientCity.org

Craig Applegath is a founding member and moderator of ResilientCity.org, and an Architect and Principal at Cohos Evamy Integratedesign in Toronto

We will be posting the results of the competition this coming Thursday September 30th, the same day that they will be exhibited at the IDEX / Green Building Festival Exposition in Toronto from September 24 to 25.

Thanks again to all of the contestants who submitted. Your efforts and ideas were appreciated!

Craig
Moderator, ResilientCity.org

Craig Applegath is a founding member and moderator of ResilientCity.org, and an Architect and Principal at Cohos Evamy Integratedesign in Toronto.

The first ResilientCity.org Design Ideas Competition is now a wrap, and we are starting to sort through the dozens on interesting and thoughful entries. It looks like all of the entrants put a lot of thought and passion into their submissions, and I can assure you that the jury will be putting an equal amount of care into reviewing and judging the responses.

The other good news is that the Green Building Festival in conjunction with IDEX will be hosting an exhibition of the 5 best entries at IDEX this year. For more information about the GBF/IDEX go to http://www.greenbuildingfest.com.

Thank you again for your interest, passion and commitment to creating more resilient cities!

Stay tuned for an update on the results.

Craig
Moderator, ResilientCity.org

Craig Applegathis a founding member and moderator of ResilientCity.org, and an Architect and Principal at Cohos Evamy Integratedesign in Toronto.

In preparing my talk it was clear that the most difficult thing about this topic is the magnitude of the problems. Indeed, once you have mapped them out, it's hard to see solutions that are adequate.
I was rescued from this dilemma by a friend who told me the starfish story. It wonderfully captures the need for taking action, even in the face of overwhelming odds.

A woman vacationing on the west coast of Vancouver Island was walking down a deserted beach at sunset. She saw another woman in the distance, repeatedly bending down, picking things up, and throwing them into the water.

As she got closer, the first woman realized that the other woman was picking up starfish that had washed up on the beach. Puzzled, she asked her what she was doing.

'I'm saving these starfish. You see, it's low tide right now, and if I don't throw them back, they'll die from lack of oxygen.'

'But there must be thousands of starfish on this beach!' said the first woman. 'You can't possibly get to all of them. Can't you see that throwing them back can't possibly make a difference?'

The second woman smiled, picked up another starfish, threw it back, and replied, 'Made a difference to that one!'

The problems posed by the combination of climate change, peak oil and population growth do indeed seem overwhelming, and it's hard to imagine how we will deal with them. But as the starfish story points out, the difficulty of our situation should not prevent us from trying to make a difference.

So what should we be doing? Here are three suggestions:

1. Reduce our Energy Use: Most of our environmental problems stem from too many people on the planet using too much energy - of all sorts, for all sorts of reasons. As planners, architects and engineers, our first priority must be to devise ways to significantly reduce the consumption of energy by buildings and cities. To accomplish this we should:

o Use materials and products that require less energy for their manufacture and construction.

o Design new buildings to be highly energy efficient.

o Find ways to re-clad existing buildings to be more energy efficient

o Increase the density of our urban neighbourhoods to reduce travel distance and use of cars

2. Plan and Design for Local Self-sufficiency and Re-localization: The descent down the far side of the peak oil curve will mean that as oil prices rise, the globalization of trade will become less feasible [see Jeff Rubin's new book: Why Your World Is About To Get A Whole Lot Smaller ]. It will be crucial for us to increase the future resiliency of our cities by re-localizing the production of food and manufacture of goods. For an idea of how we might do this have a look at Gordon Graff's ideas for high-rise urban farming at http://www.treehugger.com/files/2008/07/skyfarm-gordon-graff.php.

3. Design for Durability and Robustness: Climate change is making itself felt, with ever- increasing numbers of category 4 and 5 weather events. [See the World Watch Institute's latest reporton this at Devastating Natural Disasters Continue Steady Rise]. As we move forward, we must assume that the standards and techniques we are now using against wind and water damage will soon be obsolete. We must foresee a time when buildings will need to deal with much more intense and energetic weather.

Although there are many other ways to make cities more resilient, these three are my picks, and they will also reduce the contribution of CO2 and related greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.

I'll be interested to hear your thoughts. What would you suggest we do to deal with the un-holy trinity of Climate Change, Peak Oil and Global Population Growth.

Let me know by posting a comment on this blog.

Craig Applegath, Moderator ResilientCity.org

Craig is a founding member and moderatorof ResilientCity.org, and an Architect and Principal at Cohos Evamy Integratedesign in Toronto. See his full biography.

Welcome to ResilientCity.org!The idea for this website came from a burning question (sorry about the pun!) that kept coming up whenever my colleagues and I took out our much-used crystal ball and looked into the future: Given our unique roles, what are we doing to deal with the dangerously underestimated combination of Global Warming and Peak Oil?

After many conversations, many international Skype calls, a fair bit of soul-searching, and countless emails, the answer is finally taking shape'and we invite anyone in the design field (and specifically architects, engineers, landscape architects and urban planners) to join us on a very important journey.

It may seem a bit formal to have a mission, but we felt that we needed a clear idea of what we have to achieve. Namely, It's to establish a clear, balanced and increasingly accepted message:

- That Global Warming and Peak Oil are real, and will have a life-altering impact on our way of life.

- That we will no longer have cheap oil to power our society, or provide many of the oil-based products that we take for granted.

- That over the next 20 years, starting without delay, we must re-build our wasteful high-carbon cities as resilient, low-carbon places to enjoy.

Following on from this, we have three goals:

- To highlight the combined challenge of Global Warming and Peak Oil, and the radical change this will bring to how we design buildings and plan cities.

- To stimulate a massive shift in thinking, leading to appropriately 'resilient' design and building strategies. Somewhere on this page it would be good to have some blurb in a box about the Resilient City or, if that would be too long, a link.

- To compile a freely available set of planning and design resources ' including web links, research references, and design exemplars.

We are at the beginning of an ambitious journey. But whatever we ultimately achieve, the journey itself will have made a difference.

One thing is for sure, though. We will only be successful if a wide range of design minds bring their ideas to the table'and the website shows how you can become involved in imagining, planning, and designing a new future.

We're looking for a lively discussion about the what, how, when and why of creating the resilient cities that we so urgently need, and this will include:

- Your input to the urban planning and building design strategies that we are posting;

- Your comment on the transition strategies that will get us from a carbon-intensive addiction to a post-carbon world;

- Your ideas for post-carbon transportation and food production - essential components of the resilient city.

Whatever area of design you are in, you probably went into it because you wanted to make a difference. I don't think any of us imagined the future that is now rushing towards us, but the need for our ideas could not be more pressing. We look forward to your suggestions and feedback. We also urge you to enter our Ideas Design Competition. Radical thinking welcome! Please see our Competition Page to find out more.

Sincerely,
Craig Applegath, ResilientCity.org Moderator

Craig is a founding member and the moderator of ResilientCity.org, and an Architect and Principal at Cohos Evamy Integratedesign in Toronto. See his full biography.