ResilientCity - ResilientCity Blog

Submission Date Extended Because of Server Problems

Wed, 14 Jul 2010 21:07:49 PST

SUBMISSION DEADLINE EXTENDED TO JUNE 11th 2010 at 8:00pm EST.

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

ResilientCity.org Design Ideas Competition Now Closed!

Fri, 11 Jun 2010 21:52:55 PST

Craig Applegath, Moderator ResilientCity.org

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

COMPETITION REGISTRATION IS NOW CLOSED!

Sat, 15 May 2010 11:59:01 PST

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

One Left before The Design Ideas Registration Closes!

Thu, 13 May 2010 21:58:42 PST

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

Three Key Strategies for Building Urban Resilience

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 21:08:50 PST

Craig Applegath, Moderator ResilientCity.org /BIO

'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:

Reduction of a city's overall energy requirements
Increasing a city's key infrastructure capacity
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 COMPETITION IS NOW OPEN!

Sun, 14 Feb 2010 20:56:53 PST

Craig Applegath, Moderator ResilientCity.org /BIO

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>>

Year in Review and Year Ahead

Sun, 14 Feb 2010 20:54:17 PST

Craig Applegath, Moderator ResilientCity.org /BIO

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:

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.
As a means of accomplishing this, make the Design Ideas Competition the site's main focus and 'infrastructure' for this conversation.
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

ResilientCity.org Site Renovations

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 21:32:35 PST

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.

So...When is Next ResilientCity.org Design Ideas Competition?

Tue, 29 Dec 2009 19:04:58 PST

Craig Applegath / BIO

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

What does climate change mean to you? Investigating local impacts of a global phenomenon.

Sun, 06 Dec 2009 12:17:12 PST

In the span of less than a decade, global warming has gone from virtually unknown to a household word. Climate change has become a popular environmental movement, a political hot potato, the focus of major international cooperation efforts, and created billion dollar world markets.

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

What Do Designers Like Us Have to Offer the Local Food Initiatives?

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 21:05:01 PST

As the Grand Prize winners of the recent ResilientCity.org Design Ideas Competition, we were asked to contribute a blog posting that expanded upon or further developed some of the ideas that we explored in our competition entry.

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

The Next ResilientCity.org Design Ideas Competition!

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 20:22:57 PST

Over the past few weeks I have heard from a number of you asking whether we plan to hold another ResilientCity.org design ideas competition, and if so, what will beits focus or challenge?

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

350.org Day of Actions!

Sun, 25 Oct 2009 14:54:19 PST

Many of you have been following the work and ideas of writer and environmentalist Bill McKibben. Bill has written extensively on the environmental impacts of CO2 and climate change, but arguably his most important contribution of late has been his creation and leadership of the 350.org movement and its heralding of the all important number 350 - the sustainable maximum number of ppms of CO2equivalents in our atmosphere.

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

ResilientCity Planning and Design Strategies Development

Sun, 04 Oct 2009 22:10:18 PST

We are now in the process of developing a set of planning and design strategies for increasing the resilience of cities. The strategies that we are developing include:

Urban Design Strategies:

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

Building Design Strategies:

Increasing Robustness of Building Construction
Increasing levels of Building Envelope Insulation in New Buildings
Re-cladding of Existing Buildings to Increase Building Insulation
Increasing use of local and regional construction materials
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

ResilientCity Design Competition Winners!

Sat, 26 Sep 2009 22:52:26 PST

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

Competition Update

Sat, 19 Sep 2009 13:55:05 PST

The ResilientCity.org Design Ideas Jury met yesterday and reviewed all of the competition entries. There were a number of very thoughtful and well executed entries. There were two winners and a number of honorable mentions determined by the Jury.

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.

ResilientCity Design Competition a Wrap!

Wed, 02 Sep 2009 21:52:46 PST

Thank you for your great responses!!!!

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.

Welcome to ResilientCity.org!

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 08:21:32 PST

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.

Choosing Your Starfish

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 08:20:08 PST

Acouple of weeks agoI had the pleasure of making a presentation at the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada's Festival of Architecture in Montreal. The theme of the conferencewas new visions for the future, and I set out to show how we might make our cities more resilient in the face of an unholy trinity: Climate Change, Peak Oil and Global Population Growth.

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.

ResilientCity - ResilientCity Blog

Submission Date Extended Because of Server Problems

SUBMISSION DEADLINE EXTENDED TO JUNE 11th 2010 at 8:00pm EST.

ResilientCity.org Design Ideas Competition Now Closed!

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

COMPETITION REGISTRATION IS NOW CLOSED!

One Left before The Design Ideas Registration Closes!

Three Key Strategies for Building Urban Resilience

Craig Applegath, Moderator ResilientCity.org /BIO

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

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

THE 2010 RESILIENTCITY COMPETITION IS NOW OPEN!

Craig Applegath, Moderator ResilientCity.org /BIO

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

Year in Review and Year Ahead

Craig Applegath, Moderator ResilientCity.org /BIO

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

YEAR IN REVIEW

THE COMING YEAR

ANNOUNCING THE 2010 RESILIENTCITY COMPETITION!

ResilientCity.org Site Renovations

Craig Applegath, Moderator ResilientCity.org /BIO

So...When is Next ResilientCity.org Design Ideas Competition?

Craig Applegath / BIO

Yes, There Will There Be Another Design Ideas Competition!

And So We Have

No More Pre-definedDesign Scenarios

New Theme For This Year's Ideas Competition

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

New Video Entry Prize!

So When Will The 2010 Ideas Competition Launch?

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

What does climate change mean to you? Investigating local impacts of a global phenomenon.

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

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

What Do Designers Like Us Have to Offer the Local Food Initiatives?

The Next ResilientCity.org Design Ideas Competition!

350.org Day of Actions!

ResilientCity Planning and Design Strategies Development

ResilientCity Design Competition Winners!

Competition Update

ResilientCity Design Competition a Wrap!

Thank you for your great responses!!!!

Welcome to ResilientCity.org!

Choosing Your Starfish

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