Urban - Haggard Earth

Details: Written by: Glenn and Rick; Category: Urban; Hits: 246

Slow water: can we tame urban floods by going with the flow? As we face increased flooding, China’s sponge cities are taking a new course. But can they steer the country away from concrete megadams? Guardian Erica Gies Tue 7 Jun 2022 After epic floods in India, South Africa, Germany, New York and Canada killed hundreds in the past year, droughts are now parching landscapes and wilting crops across the western US, the Horn of Africa and Iraq. The responses have included calls for higher levees, bigger drains and longer aqueducts. But these concrete interventions aimed at controlling water are failing. Climate extremes are revealing a hard truth: our development choices – urban sprawl, industrial agriculture and even the concrete infrastructure designed to control water – are exacerbating our problems. Because sooner or later, water always wins. Water might seem malleable and cooperative, willing to flow where we direct it. But as human development expands and the climate changes, water is increasingly swamping cities or dropping to unreachable depths below farms, often making life precarious. Signs of water’s persistence abound. Supposedly vanquished waterways pop up in inconvenient places. Seasonal creeks emerging in basements are evidence that those houses encroach on buried streams, while homes built on wetlands are the first to flood.

When our attempts at control fail, we are reminded that water has its own agenda. Water finds its chosen path through a landscape, moulding it and being directed by it in turn. To reduce the impact of today’s more frequent and severe droughts and floods, a new global cohort of “water detectives” – restoration ecologists, hydrogeologists, biologists, anthropologists, urban planners, landscape architects and engineers – are asking a critical question: what does water want? Figuring out what water wants – and accommodating those desires within our human landscapes – is now a crucial survival strategy. The water detectives start by uncovering what water did before generations of humans so radically transformed our landscapes and waterways. How did water interact with local rocks, soils, ecosystems and climates before we scrambled them? As those detectives make more discoveries, we can begin to understand why certain areas flood repeatedly, or how our tendency to speed water off the land deprives us of urgently needed local rainfall. Then we can start to think creatively about how to solve these problems, by making space for water within our existing habitats.

The answers that the detectives are finding – in cities, fields, swamps, marshes, floodplains, mountains and forests – are that we should be conserving or repairing natural systems, or mimicking nature to restore some natural functions – and not building more concrete infrastructure. These reparative approaches go by various names: nature-based systems, green infrastructure, low-impact development, water-sensitive urban design. In China, the “sponge cities” initiative aims to make urban regions better able to absorb rainfall and release it when needed. Because these kinds of solutions are based on working with or simulating natural systems, they offer benefits beyond just reducing floods and droughts. They can help us address the dramatic declines of animal species. They can help us adapt to climate change, or even slow its progression. Protecting biodiversity and storing carbon dioxide are not just peripheral effects of solving water problems – they are integral to healthy natural systems.

So what does water want? In its liquid state, with sufficient quantity or gravity, water can rush across the land in torrential rivers or tumble in awe-inspiring waterfalls. But it is also inclined to linger to a degree that might surprise many of us, because the infrastructure of the modern world has erased so many of water’s slow phases, instead confining it, containing it, or speeding it away. These slow stages are particularly vulnerable to human interference, because they tend to occur in flatter places – once floodplains and wetlands – that we blocked or drained so that we could settle. But when water slows and stalls on land, that’s when the magic happens, providing habitat and food for many forms of life above and below. The key to greater resilience, say the water detectives, is to find ways to let water be water, to reclaim space for it to interact with the land. Innovative water management projects aim to slow water on land in some approximation of natural patterns. For that reason, I’ve come to think of this movement as “Slow Water”. Like the Slow Food movement – founded in Italy in the late 20th century, in opposition to fast food and all its ills – Slow Water approaches are bespoke: they work with local landscapes, climates and cultures rather than try to control or change them.....read on https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jun/07/slow-water-urban-floods-drought-china-sponge-cities

Details: Written by: Glenn and Rick; Category: Urban; Hits: 266

CANADA Sustainable housing can create a pathway to climate resilience. The Nation Observer

Inderjit Dhiman | Opinion | June 12th 2024 Earlier this year, Change Course, Stand.earth and Canada’s National Observer launched the first annual Climate Finance Scholarship Contest, an opportunity for young people across Canada to showcase and share visionary, solutions-oriented essays that reimagined the role of Canada's Big Six banks and other powerful financial institutions in our communities. Each of the two contest winners won $2,500 scholarships for written or multimedia submissions. Mimi O’Handley used her winning essay to challenge financial institutions to reinvest in solutions to help combat the climate crisis. Our second winner, Diana Yoon, proposed an innovative model that financial institutions could consider. We are also featuring three other top entries, beginning with Annabelle Liao, who argued institutions must work harder to make their investments more sustainable. In her essay, Mariam Kapanadze weighed in with specific suggestions financial institutions could heed to reduce their carbon footprints. In the final essay, Inderjit Dhiman focuses on housing and its connection to climate change.

Democratic economies are often discussed in the context of power over economic vehicles and production. However, an often-ignored aspect of democratized economies is the ability of the public to engage in these power structures. Canada’s housing shortage is resulting in a crisis where people are unable to participate in a democratic economy. The unaffordability of the housing market is driven by a lack of supply and growing demand and further exacerbated by climate change. Forced migration due to environmental degradation will become more frequent, creating a strain on the already lagging housing market.

To meet the demand, more than three million homes are required to be built, which will increase greenhouse gas emissions from housing development. Traditional approaches to the climate change issue have centered around production limitations and alternative technology. Housing construction and the impact of city planning are often neglected in discussions about creating a climate-safe economy. The housing crisis must be addressed with sustainability as a key consideration. Sustainable Financing.......Financing is required to quell the housing problem within Canada. Canadian banks have a unique opportunity to spur development with sustainability and solutions that centre climate impact. Banks must factor the external cost of carbon into financing housing projects. The project's emission profile, efficiency and social housing credentials should be key factors for obtaining concessional financing. Banks must adopt and comply with best practices in sustainability aligned due diligence. Key factors such as energy efficiency, transportation and density efficiency and housing equity must be disclosed......read on Effectiveness and Equity of Sustainable Housing Finance......Sustainable-focused financing has been shown to create significant changes in the carbon footprint of the recipient. Energy-efficient homes are needed to decouple consumption emissions of the housing sector to ensure a climate-safe economy is realized. Sustainable housing has the potential to reduce emissions footprints by 40 per centin Canada, where heating is essential and city density is comparatively low.

The Greenwashing Dilemma With a sustainable requirement for initial financing comes the potential for developers to overestimate the sustainability of a project while underestimating its negative impacts. The Canadian Securities Administration presented a study on disclosure of environmental, social and governance claims, noting precautions needed when evaluating sustainability disclosures, asserting that projections must be fact-basedand not simply estimations on impact. These estimates must be backed with thorough plans, with continuous disclosure of milestones the banks should expect throughout the project........read on https://www.nationalobserver.com/2024/06/12/opinion/sustainable-housing-affordability-crisis-climate-solutions?utm_source=National+Observer&utm_campaign=03731cdc63-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2024_06_14_06_49_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_-063ef0c9f3-%5BLIST_EMAIL_ID%5D

Details: Written by: Glenn and Rick; Category: Urban; Hits: 181

How to reduce the damage done by gentrification. We cannot let our cities descend into islands of privilege amid seas of disadvantage. With the right policies and investments, a better future is possible. Guardian Ian Goldin and Tom Lee-Devlin 29 June 2023 Cities are now home to more than half of the global population, a share that will rise to two-thirds by 2050. That means the forces shaping life in cities now also shape our world as a whole. Cities throughout history have been the great incubators of human progress, through their power to bring us closer together – something we need now more than ever. Many of the answers to our greatest challenges are to be found in reforming our cities, but if we fail to take action, cities will magnify the perils that lie ahead. The populist politics of recent years has been tinged with resentment against global metropolises such as London and New York. These cities have boomed while others have struggled. But while the gulf between thriving cities and everywhere else has widened, so too has the disparity within these cities. Inequality has risen in most metropolitan areas in the US since 1980, but it has risen fastest in large, thriving cities such as New York, San Francisco and Chicago, where it is now much higher than the national average. Wages for high-skilled knowledge workers in these places have soared, but pay for the low-skilled service workers supporting them has languished, a gulf that is compounded by the rapidly rising cost of living in these cities.

These global metropolises have increasingly come to resemble ivory towers, with a highly concentrated core of prosperity served by a sprawling periphery of disadvantage. Urban centres have seen increasing employment, falling crime and significant improvements in the performance of public services. Warehouses and factories from Kings Cross in London to Brooklyn in New York have been converted into upmarket apartments for well-educated (and typically white) professionals. Former working-class housing has been renovated or redeveloped. Trendy cafes and bars have appeared, along with high-end fitness studios and organic food stores. Formerly affordable, working-class areas have seen significant gentrification. To be clear, the growth in the population size of inner cities has been modest compared to suburbanisation. In fact, a new ring of sprawl dubbed the “exurb” has emerged. What has changed is the socioeconomic makeup of the concentric circles of cities. Whereas once the well-off fled for suburbia, today in many cities they are heading back to the urban core, while poverty is increasingly moving out to the suburbs. The journalist Alan Ehrenhalt has aptly described this process as “the great inversion”. The increased attractiveness of many urban centres can be seen in the shifting profile of house prices within the concentric circles of cities. One study of the top 20 cities in the US over time found a major shift in recent decades in the relationship between house prices and distance from the city centre: while in 1980 house prices increased the further away a property was from the central business district, by 2010, that relationship had inverted. The premium on housing in urban centres has further increased since then: median home prices in the five inner boroughs of New York City increased at four times the rate of the rest of the metropolitan area between the start of 2010 and the start of 2020. The faster growth of suburban house prices during the pandemic has already tapered off, leaving the long-term picture largely unchanged.

What has led highly paid professionals to swap a freestanding house and garden in the suburbs for high-density living in urban centres? Multiple factors have been at work.For an emerging educated elite that blended the aesthetic of the counterculture with the economic advantages bestowed on them by the transition to a knowledge economy, the mark of success is not a double-garage home in the suburbs, but a home in an inner-city neighbourhood surrounded by creativity, culture and convenience. Indeed, the lifecycle of gentrification in recent decades has tended to follow a predictable pattern: first come the artists, then the real estate developers and then the professionals. This same story has played out everywhere from London’s Shoreditch to New York’s SoHo to Sydney’s Surry Hills. The great inversion has taken an immense toll on many of society’s most disadvantaged. As wealthy urbanites move in, the existing poor residents are pushed away. For those who happen to own their properties in gentrifying neighbourhoods, this process can create a windfall financial gain. Unfortunately, the most disadvantaged in these areas tend to be renters, who find themselves confronted with rapidly rising housing costs. While the effects of gentrification may be more muted in cases where the neighbourhood in question was once made up primarily of industrial and commercial real estate, the stock of such property has rapidly been exhausted in New York, Chicago and London. The result is a combination of increasingly concentrated disadvantage in a small number of inner-city neighbourhoods.....the Long Read....continue on https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2023/jun/29/how-to-reduce-the-damage-done-by-gentrification.......and then there's Vienna- explore the site......

Transformations are a common task......As the climate and innovation agency of the City of Vienna, we promote sustainable change processes in the city. We collaborate with partners from different sectors to shape the future of the city. Transformation is a process that can only take place through dialogue. At UIV Urban Innovation Vienna, we support the development of strategies, but also their implementation by supporting and coordinating steering structures, advisory committees and platforms. As Smart City Ambassadors, when supporting international delegations or on themed city walks, we make the transformation understandable and tangible.Public events are an important tool for bringing people together and opening up echo chambers. Whether solution-oriented workshops, inspiring discussions or conferences with impact: we regularly organize events for our customers both inside and outside the City of Vienna that enable encounters, promote exchange and inspire action....explore the website and check out solutions https://urbaninnovation.at/platforms-and-communities/

Details: Written by: Glenn and Rick; Category: Urban; Hits: 145

Why Climate Action Must Start with Housing......Housing has the most direct impact on people’s health and livelihoods. Equitable housing integrated with low-carbon and affordable key services like water, sanitation, energy and accessible transportation is critical to ensuring the least amount of harm from climate change and opportunities for a prosperous future for all. Yet housing is rarely discussed in international climate forums; and informal settlements (slums) located in developing and vulnerable countries are completely ignored. In low-income countries, 64% of urban dwellerslive in slums. By 2050, over 200 million climate migrantsare expected to move to urban areas, who often settle in informal settlements, while seeking jobs. Adequate housing and urban services may be a fiscal challenge, but it also provides opportunities for a just, climate-friendly transition that can help achieve sustainable development goals when done right. The 2023 UN Climate Change Conference (COP28) made strides in the right direction by setting the Loss and Damage Fund in motion, holding the first of its kind Local Climate Action Summit and hosting the first ever Health Day. Additionally, the first Buildings and Climate Global Form, held in March 2024, released adeclaration, which acknowledges that climate change is impacting access to basic urban services and housing for those living in informal settlements. But this isn’t enough. Disasters and extreme weather events that are increased by climate change can exacerbate existing vulnerabilities due to overcrowding, unsafe housing, inadequate infrastructure and poor healthcare facilities. At 1.5 degrees C (2.7 degrees F) warming, without adaptation, an additional 350 million people living in cities and urban areas will experience the effects of severe drought, including water scarcity. At 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F) warming, that number grows to around 410 million. With climate impacts escalating every day, research shows we need transformative adaption policies in cities to reduce impacts on the most vulnerable communities. Solutions are possible. WRI and its partners are working with communities through the REHOUSE (Resilient, Equitable Housing Opportunities and Urban Services) partnership to find scalable ways in which equitable housing and urban services make cities more climate resilient.Here are four innovative approaches we learned by working with vulnerable communities throughout Asia and Africa......

1) Address Challenges Posed by Rapid Urbanization ........Ninety percent of urban growth by 2050 is projected to occur in Asia and Africa, where vulnerability to climate risks is also the highest.Improving access to adequate housing and urban services can simultaneously address the compounded challenges of rapid urbanization, the urban services divide and vulnerability to climate risks. A participatory housing project in Iloilo City, Philippines and a water access expansion project in Tanzania illustrate how to foster inclusive and climate-resilient development......read on

2) Reduce Vulnerability and Engage Communities in Disaster Preparedness..... Building and retrofitting housing and infrastructure to be climate-resilient — as projects in Bangladesh have done — and engaging communities in disaster preparedness efforts — as a program in Indonesia did— can save money and lives as climate change intensifies natural disasters. Connected infrastructure is vital for people to evacuate in the event of a flood, an urban development initiative by BRAC, an organization focused on people and poverty, collaborated across cities to construct 3.1 miles of roads and 118.9 miles of elevated sidewalks using sturdy materials at the highest flood level in low-income communities.......read on

3) Implement Local Solutions for Increased Resilience to Heat and Floods......Excessive heat and increased flooding from worsening climate change will hit the urban poor the hardest, causing health, financial and water-related challenges. Local solutions addressing cooling and flooding already exist but need to be expanded. For example, in Ahmedabad, India, women community leaders who live in informal settlements are being trained on climate resilience measures to combat extreme heat, while in Surat, an early-warning alarm system was put into place......read on

4) Improve Access to Clean and Sustainable Energy through Community Participation.......Housing is the integrator of many urban services such as energy, water and sanitation. Improving access to these services improves health, raises productivity and saves time and money. For example, in Africa, an energy program was designed to improve access to clean renewable energy through community participation......read on

Experiences From an Energy Justice Program in Africa.......The Energy Justice Programme (EJP) and the Know Your City (KYC) data collection program, led by Slum Dwellers International (SDI) are helping to improve energy access within slum areas by engaging the community in energy planning. Lack of access to sustainable energy is a significant obstacle to slum development, and financial and practical barriers to extending the grid can often leave low-income communities without service for decades......read on......

Housing is a crucial entry point to advance climate goals and sustainable development. It has the most direct impact on people’s lives and livelihoods, the ability to pull along other core urban services and can serve as the foundation for climate mitigation and adaption policies, programs and peer learning across cities and countries. National and urban decision makers and stakeholders need to prioritize access to climate-resilient basic services and urban housing within informal settlements, positioning them prominently on the political, developmental and climate.....read on https://www.wri.org/insights/climate-resilient-housing-urban-services

Details: Written by: Glenn and Rick; Category: Urban; Hits: 190

URBAN & INFRASTRUCTURE Urban Land Use Reform- Report 2023. The Missing Key to Climate Action Strategies for Lowering Emissions, Increasing Housing Supply, and Conserving Land RMI - POSTED IN URBAN https://rmi.org/insight/urban-land-use-reform/

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Vancouver shows how cities can develop better infrastructure planning and development
May 11, 2024

Globally, cities have seen an increase in funding and public demand for improved critical public infrastructure.
Resilient urban infrastructure requires a long-term planning mindset that considers impacts ranging from scaled electrification to climate change.
Cities have traditionally approached urban infrastructure through siloed departments, causing a lack of alignment, spending, and redundant work.
Cities can learn from Vancouver in Canada which has developed best practices for collaborative infrastructure development.
Cities around the world have become increasingly complex, and leaders are having to solve problems they’ve never faced before. From increased population to climate change, these challenges require a more collaborative approach across city government, which can be difficult when city services have traditionally been organized into silos.When it comes to cities and their large portfolios of infrastructure, there are many stakeholders who have a vested interest: utilities such as power and water, roads and transit departments, public works and community relations, parks and recreation, innovation departments, housing, and many others, depending on the city’s geography, size and structure. Globally, cities have seen an increase in funding and public demand for improved critical public infrastructure.Resilient urban infrastructure requires a long-term planning mindset that considers impacts ranging from scaled electrification to climate change.Cities have traditionally approached urban infrastructure through siloed departments, causing a lack of alignment, spending, and redundant work. Cities can learn from Vancouver in Canada which has developed best practices for collaborative infrastructure development..City leadership can establish the high-level goals for the city such as growth, affordability, or climate preparedness, but these intrinsically have different meanings for every stakeholder. Considering all these factors as part of the city infrastructure ecosystem, the need to find effective, creative, and realistic collaboration methods is critical.In 2022, the World Economic Forum’s Urban Transformation “Building Tomorrow’s Urban Infrastructure” team began looking into how cities are implementing infrastructure governance models. Following the reviews of over 25 city plans, interviewing 11 city infrastructure experts, Vancouver’s approach of collaborative infrastructure governance stood out as a unique and powerful model. Vancouver has strategically positioned itself as a leader of proactive planning across governmental agencies and can serve as a lighthouse model for other cities dealing with shared challenges such as affordability, rapid growth, climate resilience, and citizen well-being. Vancouver's collaborative approach..........
Vancouver has spent many years developing a governance model that increases collaboration around infrastructure, encourages joint funded projects, and spurs future engagements across the board. This did not happen overnight, nor was this a single iteration that worked immediately. It has been a long-term effort that challenged all parties to actively commit and engage in the collaborative model. This includes dedicated director meetings, transparency of priorities and issues, as well as strategic alignment of departments.The steps Vancouver has outlined for collaborative governance are as follows: 1. Establish and integrate city level priorities into all departments’ plans and programmes utilizing a “layered” system referencing an overall citywide vision, vetted by the community. 2. Connect departments at multiple levels, specifically at the director level, ensuring consistency, collaboration, and coordination throughout. 3. Incentivize the idea of “win-win” models for jointly funded projects in alignment with citywide targets and objectives, creating flexibility of budgets and more available ways to build out infrastructure. 4. Create a centralized approach on programme and project delivery, focused on outcomes and how collaboration can yield those outcomes long-term. 5. Instill a culture that can adjust, evolve, and input feedback from all stakeholders to decrease chances of falling backwards. 6. This process is anchored with an overall citywide vision and land use strategy, called the Vancouver Plan, it was shaped and validated by a wide range of public feedback over a three year period, the highlights of which can be seen in the figure below. ....read on https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2023/05/vancouver-cities-develop-better-infrastructure-planning-development See also document ......
METRO VANCOUVER REGION.docx
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Inside Vancouver’s plan to be the greenest city in the world

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Slow Water: can we Tame Urban Floods by Going with the Flow?

Sustainable Housing can Create a Pathway to Climate Resilience.

We Cannot Let our Cities Descend into islands of Privilege amid seas of Disadvantage. With the Right Policies and Investments, a Better Future is possible.

Why Climate Action Must Start with Housing......Housing has the Most direct Impact on people’s Health and Livelihoods. Equitable Housing Integrated with Low-carbon and Affordable key Services like water, sanitation, energy and accessible transportation is

CANADA- British Columbia-Vancouver Shows How Cities can develop Better Infrastructure Planning and Development

Inside Vancouver’s plan to be the greenest city in the world

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