Sea Level Rise and Coastal Flooding. A summary of The Future We Don’t Want research on the impact of climate change on sea levels.By 2050, 800 million people will live in cities where sea levels could rise by more than half a metre. Many coastal communities around the world already live with the threat from sea level rise and coastal flooding; where climate impacts can drown neighbourhoods, put people’s lives at risk and wreak economic havoc. But, if the world fails to commit to the Paris Agreement’s goal of reducing carbon emissions and limit global average temperature rise to 1.5oC, many of the world’s cities will face an extraordinary threat from rising seas and coastal flooding by mid-century. According to the new The Future We Don’t Want analysis, the total urban population at risk from sea level rise, if emissions don’t go down, could number over 800 million people, living in 570 cities, by 2050. It is therefore crucial that Paris Agreement pledges are honoured if the social and economic impacts of catastrophic climate change are to be avoided. Estimates suggest that the global economic costs to cities, from rising seas and inland flooding, could amount to $1 trillion by mid-century. As with other climate hazards, local factors mean that cities will experience sea level rise at different paces. Cities on the east coast of the U.S., including New York City and Miami, are particularly vulnerable, along with major cities in South East Asia, such as Bangkok and Shanghai. In the U.S., east coast cities are witnessing sea level rise that is two to three times faster than the global average while cities along China’s Yellow River Delta are experiencing sea level rise of more than 22 cm (9 inches) per year. According to a 2016 report by Christian Aid; Miami, Guangzhou, and New York are the top three cities in terms of the value of assets exposed to coastal flooding between 2010 and 2070; between 2 and 3.5 trillion dollars. But it’s Kolkata, Mumbai and Dhaka that have the highest number of people at risk from coastal inundation; between 11 and 14 million.                                                                                                                                  Cities are at risk of coastal flooding and storm surges Even though variations in geography leave certain cities acutely exposed to sea level rise and coastal flooding, such as low-lying delta cities in typhoon and hurricane zones, a city’s level of climate risk is intensified by socio-economic circumstances and the built environment’s shape and form. In New York City, some of the most valuable properties in the world are located in flood-prone areas at the southern tip of Manhattan and real estate valued at an estimated $129 billion lies within the city’s floodplains. While the financial scale of a storm surge impact may be unique in New York, considering the city’s property values and status as a global financial centre, many other cities are dealing with a common problem: How can a city increase its resilience to climate change while simultaneously meeting the housing demands of a rapidly growing, low-income population? Such is the situation in Dar es Salaam, the largest city in Tanzania. An estimated 8 percent of the city already lies below sea level, which puts over 143,000 people at risk from coastal inundation. But an extremely rapid population growth of 5.3 percent a year means that unplanned informal settlements are expanding into flood-prone areas, where poor residents are highly susceptible to climate impacts. There, the residents’ vulnerability is heightened by inadequate storm water drainage, sewage and piping systems that result in public health hazards during floods......and there's more   https://www.c40.org/what-we-do/scaling-up-climate-action/adaptation-water/the-future-we-dont-want/sea-level-rise/

A TALE OF more than TWO CITIES  The social housing secret: how Vienna became the world’s most livable city. In the Austrian capital, renters payof what their counterparts do in London, Paris or Dublin. How is it possible ? Welcome to Vienna, the city that may have cracked the code of how to keep inner-city housing affordable. As other cities battle spiralling rental prices, partly fuelled by inner-city apartments being used as short-term holiday rentals or being kept strategically vacant by property speculators, the Austrian capital bucks the trend. In the place that last year retained its crown as the world’s most livable city in the Economist’s annual index, Vienna’s renters on average pay roughly a third of their counterparts in London, Paris or Dublin, according to a recent study by the accounting firm Deloitte. Part of the reason Schranz’s apartment is so affordable is simple: it’s owned by the city. In Vienna, that is (almost) the norm. The landlord of approximately 220,000 socially rented apartments, it is the largest home-owning city in Europe (in London, which has more than 800,000 socially rented apartments, they are owned by the local councils). A quarter of the people who live in Vienna are social tenants – if you also include the approximately 200,000 co-operative dwellings built with municipal subsidies, it’s more than half the population. Welcome to Vienna, the city that may have cracked the code of how to keep inner-city housing affordable. As other cities battle spiralling rental prices, partly fuelled by inner-city apartments being used as short-term holiday rentals or being kept strategically vacant by property speculators, the Austrian capital bucks the trend. In the place that last year retained its crown as the world’s most livable city in the Economist’s annual index, Vienna’s renters on average pay roughly a third of their counterparts in London, Paris or Dublin, according to a recent study by the accounting firm Deloitte. Part of the reason Schranz’s apartment is so affordable is simple: it’s owned by the city. In Vienna, that is (almost) the norm. The landlord of approximately 220,000 socially rented apartments, it is the largest home-owning city in Europe (in London, which has more than 800,000 socially rented apartments, they are owned by the local councils). A quarter of the people who live in Vienna are social tenants – if you also include the approximately 200,000 co-operative dwellings built with municipal subsidies, it’s more than half the population.Many of these apartments came into being a century ago, as part of an enormously ambitious building programme after the end of the first world war, when Vienna was awash with people uprooted by the collapse of the Habsburg empire. Funded primarily through a hypothecated tax on luxuries such as champagne or horse-riding, the inaugural phase of socialist-governed “Red Vienna” saw 65,000 socially rented apartments shoot up within the city by the time of the Nazi coup attempt in 1934. The majority of Vienna’s council estates were built after the second world and look more familiar, but even they don’t tend to have the stigma of poverty and crime associated with similar developments in the US or Europe. The Viennese term for estates like these is Gemeindebauten, “communal buildings”, which hints at their underlying philosophy. “One of the key concepts to understanding Vienna’s approach to housing is social sustainability,” says Maik Novotny, an architecture critic for the Austrian newspaper Der Standard. “In order to avoid the creation of ghettoes and the costly social conflicts that come with them, the city actively strives for a mixing of people from different backgrounds and on different incomes in the same estates. Social housing isn’t just for the poor.” As a student without a disability or any dependants, Schranz would have no hope of applying for social housing in countries such as the UK, but in Vienna the city courted him via a programme for first-time tenants under 30. But the reality doesn’t always live up to the ideal, and Barnerth is even more animated when complaining about the time it takes the city to carry out repairs in his estate. The light by the stairs leading to the basement hasn’t been working for three weeks, and when a door lock breaks, the residents usually don’t bother waiting for central management to fix it. “If you don’t sort a handyman to repair the lock overnight, the junkies try to break in,” he says. One of the downsides of having a single large company, Wiener Wohnen, in charge of managing and maintaining so much housing stock in the city is that logging and commissioning caretakers’ tasks can lead to bottlenecks.......read on- there's more              https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/jan/10/the-social-housing-secret-how-vienna-became-the-worlds-most-livable-city                                                      BUT......HOW DID WE GET HERE?........It’s believed that more people are sleeping rough in Canada than at any point since the Great Depression. How did tent encampments suddenly become a fixture of so many of our towns and cities? Many things happened at once, among them a pandemic. COVID-19 forced homeless shelters to impose capacity limits to reduce the spread of the infectious disease, which forced many people on the margins into tents and sheds. Shelters were already under pressure, in part because of a substantial increase in the number of refugees using their services. The number of people seeking asylum in Canada has spiked in recent years. During the first 11 months of 2023, more than 128,000 people filed asylum claims in this country — a record number. It’s more than double the number from all of 2019, the year before the pandemic’s outbreak. The steady loss of affordable housing has also contributed to the nation’s homelessness crisis. As real estate prices soared in recent years, rooming houses and other rental accommodations were renovated and sold as single-family homes or converted into Airbnb rental units. These “renovictions” forced many thousands from the bottom rungs of the housing ladder.According to research by Carleton University professor Steve Pomeroy, 15 affordable, private rental units (monthly rents below $750) were lost for every affordable, publicly-funded unit that came onstream between 2011 and 2016. Pomeroy calls this “naturally occurring” loss the most serious threat to Canada’s supply of affordable housing. In a recent update of his study, Pomeroy found the country’s naturally occurring loss of affordable housing continued between 2016 and 2021, when a further 230,000 affordable units disappeared — an average of 46,000 per year.                                      That annual loss represents more than double the number of new units being added to Canada’s affordable housing stock each year through the federal government’s 10-year, $82-billion National Housing Strategy, which launched in 2017. The goal of the strategy is to create 160,000 new affordable housing units; which equates to fewer than 20,000 being added to the housing stock each year. “Canada is losing affordable housing faster than we can create it,” concluded Pomeroy, a senior research fellow for the Centre for Urban Research and Education. The National Housing Strategy represents the federal government’s return to social housing investment after 30 years of sitting on the sidelines. Housing Minister Sean Fraser recently conceded that withdrawal has contributed to the current crisis. To further complicate matters, cash-starved universities and colleges have in recent years turned to foreign students as a means to bolster their revenue. More than 800,000 international students studied in Canada in 2022 — a 31 per cent increase from the previous year — and their numbers imposed more demand and inflationary pressure on the country’s rental housing market. Those at the lower end of the market found it harder to find affordable places to stay, especially as their budgets were further strained by rising food prices. Welfare and disability payments from government have not kept pace. While all of that was going on, cheap and powerful synthetic opioids — fentanyl and its many analogs — continued to flood Canadian communities. Many of those on the margins or living rough turned to drugs to ease their pain and past traumas.The chaos of addiction has only deepened the current crisis. It has made conditions at overcrowded shelters that much worse, and led some people to abandon shelters in favour of tent encampments. In other cases, it has made tent cities themselves more immutable and hard to manage......keep on reading the blow by blow account.....      https://nationalpost.com/feature/tent-city-nation/wcm/820779d7-88ff-498e-9d19-955f52c24c77?_gl=1*45v648*_ga*MTgwNTUxMTY5My4xNzA4ODk1OTMz*_ga_72QH41ZTMR*MTcwODg5NTkzMi4xLjEuMTcwODg5NjA2OS42MC4wLjA.*_ga_9H6VPHFHKG*MTcwODg5NTkzMy4xLjEuMTcwODg5NjA2OS42MC4wLjA.&_ga=2.140668023.498149286.1708895934-1805511693.1708895933BGJKpxsMGlGRZwkkBdjMwGrBs      

THE GUARDIAN-Story of cities #42: Medellín escapes grip of drug lord to embrace radical urbanism. 13 May 2016 Last modified on Mon 3 Feb 2020 Twenty-five years ago, Medellín was the most dangerous city on earth. Yet its most infamous criminal, Pablo Escobar, also helped create the conditions that sparked an extraordinary revival – by taking the city to the brink of collapse. The architect Luis Miguel Velez Wiesner recalledthe first time he set foot in Santo Domingo, one of Colombia’s most notorious comunas (slums), when the Medellín cable car opened in 2004. “The first time, I felt like I was going to be kidnapped. Now it’s quite different – there are lots of places to eat and shop. It feels safe now.”For intrepid residents such as Wiesner, stepping off the cable car to enter the once out of bounds “other side” of Medellín, was a seminal moment in the history of their city. Their photos in front of Giancarlo Mazzanti’s dramatic new España library in Santo Domingo sent an altogether different image of Medellín to the world. The long-entrenched division between the gridded city in the valley and the informal settlements on the hills was finally disappearing. The world’s most dangerous city had become accessible, and safe. Escobar and his cartels helped set the conditions for urban change to happen. They led Medellín to the brink of disaster, then demanded it change. In 1982, Escobar launched his “Medellín Without Slums” programme – a politically motivated but nonetheless heartfelt campaign to rid the city of its slums and provide a “life of noble dignity” for the urban poor who, in Escobar’s words, had been living in an “inferno of garbage”. Besides increasing his popularity, power and even election-winning potential – Escobar was elected to Colombia’s house of representativesfor a brief period in 1982, before his associations with drug trafficking had him expelled – Medellín Without Slums was the first effort to make change for the poor from within. Through it, Escobar – who was eventually shot and killed by security forces in December 1993 – gave the city’s comunas a political voice and a vehicle through which to demand change. He radicalised, politicised and militarised the poor, turning them against the citizens of the formal city in an all-out civil war. Escobar’s legacy, in planning terms, was this transformation of the spatial divide between formal and informal territories, between rich and poor, into a violent opposition of territories. At one point, Medellín was the most dangerous city on earth. From 1990 to 1993, more than 6,000 people were murdered annually, and not just in the slums. Drive-by shooting was regular and indiscriminate. The accounts of suffering and violence are truly obscene. “For me, 1991 was a key turning point for the whole country. It was the worst and the best moment – a time of complete crisis and a moment of hope,” Ortiz says. “It was truly a moment where everyone felt it could not get any worse – we had to do something.” The need for change was urgent – and perhaps only such extreme conditions could have led to such radical urban experimentation.                                              Medellín’s authorities started a series of radical programmes to reorganise the social fabric of the comunas and mobilise the poor. The city’s planners began addressing its endemic violence and inequity through the design of public spaces, transit infrastructure and urban interventions into the slums. Key to their approach was a commitment to the public realm as a truly shared space, and a faith that they could transform Medellín’s public spaces from sites of segregation and warfare into spaces where communities would come together. But Medellín’s social urbanism stretches way beyond the more modest experiments with participatory planning and community consultation that are now vogue in cities across the globe. The sheer enormity and complexity of the issues here demanded something unique – an urbanism of inclusion, where the dispossessed became partners in driving urban change.

Influenced by European regeneration models, notably in Barcelona, Medellín’s 1995 and 1999 strategic plans set a new agenda for the city. “They redefined the realm of what ‘public work’ is. Participatory planning became a key question of social equity,” Ortiz explains......and much more!   https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/may/13/story-cities-pablo-escobar-inclusive-urbanism-medellin-colombia