Advocate a Culture of Resilience
Do we all have a right to live in resilient places? If so, how can planners help make places sustainable? To begin, what is it that we wish to sustain — the idea, the process, the product, the resources? Is it realistic to wish that a building be sustained forever? Is that akin to wishing for immortality? Should buildings die, or reincarnate?
Go Back to History and Mont Saint Michel
To think about these issues, consider Mont Saint Michel. The place was hard to reach and easy to defend during past centuries. More recently, it is easy to reach and hard to defend (due to the forces of the North Sea). However, it seems to have been sustained for more than a millennium. It gets repaired regularly and supports itself now through tourism (formerly known as pilgrimages) that undoubtedly consumes massive amounts of indirect energy in transportation. As one of the great historic communities — a UNESCO “world heritage site” — it is unsustainable but worth sustaining.
Mont Saint Michel does not really meet common professional criteria for energy conservation but clearly exceeds the criteria for a cultural treasure we wish to preserve. It proves what should be the first question in any analysis of sustainability: Do we want to keep it, forever? Keeping architecture forever makes it hard to measure lifecycle costs. In fact, it shifts the measurable equation to annual operating costs — what do we spend each year, what do we get, and can we expect the outcomes to remain favorable?
Whether it is Mont Saint Michel battered by the North Sea, Venice sinking in the Adriatic, or Jerusalem consumed by religious rivalry, they all should be sustained. If we can find solutions to the production of food, water, and shelter, then can we also find ways to save our cultural history?
As planners, we should ask: “How was this done before?” Whatever the issue, it is good to go back and check history. We currently have strong regulations for sustaining buildings through historic preservation. Related programs have become stronger over the years. Initially historic preservation efforts saved many single-family mansions and civic buildings — the symbols of our wealth and civic pride. Over time the efforts of preservation have spread out to save many other buildings, landscapes, and places.
While the national parks movement has preserved natural environments, the historic preservation movement has preserved built environments. Every time a new landmark is designated as part of the national register for historic places it is a sign that our society has picked a building to sustain — we have researched the structure, determined its value aesthetically and culturally, and determined it is worth keeping forever. We have also begun to save infrastructure as well as places that document social equity (or lack thereof).
Mont Saint Michel — Henry Adams’ story “Mont Saint Michel and Chartres” clearly documents how the culture of the Gothic era helped create and ultimately sustain this arguably unsustainable place. Now a UNESCO World Heritage site, it began as an idea in the early 8th century and evolved over subsequent centuries as a refuge, retreat, prison, place of pilgrimage and now a tourist attraction with over three million visitors per year. Can this story have a happy ending? Today, as a tidal island, the North Sea remains a never-ending threat. Every step in its evolution offers lessons in resilience.
Rethink – Save, Deconstruct, Do It Over
The first time you hear it, it seems simple enough. Let us sustain our communities, homes, businesses, and so forth. Let us keep our environments natural and healthy and let us consume less energy. Moreover, let us be resilient and regenerate what has been lost. Then, when we start thinking about how to be sustainable, regenerative, and resilient, the complexities begin. The simplicity melts away, hard choices emerge, ideology creeps in, facts get rearranged, private sector innovations get (re)invented, commoditized and marketed, government programs step in to provide incentives and directions, laws and lawsuits begin, and then — after the mess is on the floor and all over the land — planners have to rethink what we are doing.
There are some obvious flaws in our rhetoric. First, there is the assumption that sustainability is ultimately measured by consumption of resources and energy. I think it is better measured by how much a community loves its environment.
We need to ask some hard questions about where sustainability fits on the pyramid of needs. Perhaps we should have a hierarchy of sustainability where, at the bottom we make sure we conserve resources and, at the top, we make sure we sustain beautiful places.
If we assume that places like Mont Saint Michel should be sustained, the reverse question is what should be left to dematerialize. Some architects might say simply that we should demolish ugly buildings. We would need national demolition designations to parallel national landmark status — committees of people who identify structures that they judge as contributing nothing to our culture or history and have almost no expectation of ever being of value. In the past, we did just that (albeit mistakenly) under the banner of “urban renewal”. If nothing else, this history shows our failures to sustain cities and places equitably.
The need to judge value fairly, however, raises the issue of the type of value we have in mind. An ugly parking structure (it would be hard to find the worst) could be of value if it were reused as a structural frame for residential purposes. If many buildings have added value if reused effectively, then the next a question might be “how much building do we need?” Are we already overbuilt?
According to several slogans, the first two principles of recycling are: use less (or “reduce”) and if you cannot reduce then “reuse.” The building industry, however, seems to thrive on the opposite behavior. The goal is to build more new buildings — to “increase” rather than “reduce.” We are painfully aware that this is good for the short-term economy. But obviously it is bad for long-term sustainability and resilience of our communities.
Digital media inform us daily of the number, or lack thereof, of new housing starts. Seldom do we hear about the number of “resold” homes. This would be welcome acknowledgement that the reuse of an existing home is not all bad. However, resale is always considered second in value to building new. Moreover, the sale of a “used” home is often equated psychologically in our culture to the sale of a “used” car. It is just not as good. Our de facto slogan is “build a lot of new homes.” This of course leads to destruction or undervaluing of the old ones.
The advertisement for Pepsi Cola probably helped pay for a sign promoting the culture of keeping our countryside beautiful. The sign, however is not especially attractive, nor is the garbage bin, mailbox, or damaged edge of the pavement. Yet the intent of the Brussels Women’s Club, who apparently sponsored this message, seems quite laudable. How does this fit our culture of resiliency? Missouri, 1962.
Can We Make Resilience Both a Mission and a Business
The building industry leads the architecture profession. Without new buildings there would not be an architecture profession — or at least not the profession as it is structured today. Certainly, architects also engage in the rehabilitation and renovation of older buildings. This act, however, is often seen as an act of design desperation. If you look at the awards given out by professional societies, the overwhelming focus is skewed toward recognizing new buildings. Preferably, these buildings are supposed to have high “sustainability” ratings — typically awarded through the LEED system as advocated by the U.S. Green Building Council.
It should be self-evident that this is all backwards. We must build fewer new buildings — someday we may get to net zero. And we must build smaller and better. I checked the average size of a new house in the US Census; it was about 2,400 square feet in 2005 compared to 1,200 in the 1940s. More importantly the household size has reduced from 4 to around 2.5. In other words, about half a century ago we were far more “sustainable” with a family of 4 occupying about 300 square feet per person while a while ago we occupy 2,500 square feet with 2.5 people or 1,000 square feet per person. Our consumption of space has tripled. Is it any better?
These generalized statistics may be misleading. If we drill down into the details, we may find many families of 4 living in well under 1,000 square feet while, at the same time, there will be older couples living in 5,000 square feet. Perhaps we are approaching a two-tiered system regarding space — haves and have-nots, or at least overconsumption and under consumption. In any case, our race to overbuild to support the short-term economy becomes less sustainable and less resilient every day. It is failing in terms of all three “bottom lines” — our system of building is not economically efficient, it is not socially equitable, and it is not environmentally conservative. Is something in our culture broken? Or is this just a misperception of our culture?
We tax gas guzzlers but not space guzzlers. We assume that if we can afford it — that is, afford bigger and better private property — we have the right to buy or build it. We do not want anyone telling us we cannot have the biggest house we can afford. We know this is what drives lots of our economy. Perhaps the answer is not to stop this behavior, but to achieve a fair arrangement regarding the consumption, overconsumption, and under consumption of resources.
Assuming the United States is dramatically overbuilt, perhaps we should take a year off. We could have a moratorium on all new buildings. But before we discuss how much this would damage our economy, we could ask about improving the industry that reuses and recycles our current buildings. In fact, if we became very serious about “reducing” our consumption of buildings we might want to raze just a few — not in the mass destruction of neighborhoods that occurred as part of urban renewal but more of the “conservative surgery” suggested long ago by Patrick Geddes. Architects should become involved in razing the ugliest buildings. This would certainly create an interesting debate in planning circles. Rather than focusing on guidelines for what we want to see, we could focus on guidelines for what we no longer want to see.
It would be a great challenge — and I suspect quite a lucrative, economy-building challenge — if we substantially reduced the creation of new structures. Architects and planners would have to focus on the reuse, redesign, reconfiguration, re-visioning of what we have. This would be great except for the death blow to the profession’s collective artistic ego. On the other hand, there might be a bit of a Darwinian impact in which only the most talented designers would rise to the surface — those who could truly create new art from existing buildings. This would require the ability to use tradition and innovation simultaneously. Some cities and regions are already using this approach to renovate existing buildings.
Assuming the idea is far too radical to initiate in a short time period, the real question is whether we can change our attitude. This may be possible by changing the way we measure the use of energy and resources. More specifically we must look at the use of energy in terms of its human value — that is, what it actually does for us. In the case of buildings, the answer is relatively simple — the energy lets us occupy the building.
Copenhagen, the Stroget – this street in Copenhagen exemplifies a culture that created a system of resilient places integrating businesses, social missions, maintenance, cost-effective operations, food delivery, low-carbon circulation, and a TBL “complete” street. It offers many lessons for planners.
Learn How to Be Humble And Arrogant
Planners make bad decisions frequently. It is hard to stop. The inventors of “urban renewal” thought they were helping communities. They were clearly arrogant when they should have been humble. At the same time many planners act with humility when they should be more forceful (if not a bit arrogant) when, for example, they follow the speculations of residents who fear equitable changes in their property value or an inability to park their car in the right spot. To stay grounded we might think about these words from T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Rock” (1934):
The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence; …
All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,
All our ignorance brings us nearer to death, …
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
…
Topic Summary
Go Back to History and Mont Saint Michel
Rethink – Save, Deconstruct, Do It Over
Can We Make Resilience Both a Mission and a Business
Learn How to Be Humble And Arrogant