Planning for Coastal Resilience

Best Practices for Calamitous Times

Timothy Beatley

• Publisher: Island Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781597265621, 9781597265614
• eBook ISBN: 9781610911429
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Climate change is predicted to increase the frequency and magnitude of coastal storms around the globe, and the anticipated rise of sea levels will have enormous impact on fragile and vulnerable coastal regions. In the U.S., more than 50% of the population inhabits coastal areas. In Planning for Coastal Resilience, Tim Beatley argues that, in the face of such threats, all future coastal planning and management must reflect a commitment to the concept of resilience. In this timely book, he writes that coastal resilience must become the primary design and planning principle to guide all future development and all future infrastructure decisions.

Resilience, Beatley explains, is a profoundly new way of viewing coastal infrastructure—an approach that values smaller, decentralized kinds of energy, water, and transport more suited to the serious physical conditions coastal communities will likely face. Implicit in the notion is an emphasis on taking steps to build adaptive capacity, to be ready ahead of a crisis or disaster. It is anticipatory, conscious, and intentional in its outlook.

After defining and explaining coastal resilience, Beatley focuses on what it means in practice. Resilience goes beyond reactive steps to prevent or handle a disaster. It takes a holistic approach to what makes a community resilient, including such factors as social capital and sense of place. Beatley provides case studies of five U.S. coastal communities, and "resilience profiles" of six North American communities, to suggest best practices and to propose guidelines for increasing resilience in threatened communities.

SECTION II

APPROACHES TO PLANNING FOR COASTAL RESILIENCE

CHAPTER 3

Coastal Resilience: Key Planning Dimensions

SEVERAL PLANNING DIMENSIONS ARE KEY to advancing coastal resilience: resilience of land use and built form; resilience of ecosystems and natural coastal environments; social resilience; and economic resilience. These dimensions are obviously not mutually exclusive, but rather are interactive and interconnected. Changes in coastal land use patterns and urban form can serve to reduce direct exposure to natural hazards (by avoiding floodplains or high-erosion zones, for instance), but they may also help to promote social interaction and to build a sense of community, in turn enhancing social resilience. Actions to strengthen economic resilience may, as a further example, help ensure that companies can function and reopen quickly following a storm or natural event, thereby helping to buffer the individuals and families that depend on the jobs and income these companies provide. Limiting such business disruptions in coastal areas, then, helps to enhance social resilience. While it is certainly possible that actions taken to enhance resilience in one realm might work against resilience in another realm, most often, investments in resilience in one realm help to advance resilience in the other dimensions as well.

In this chapter we briefly introduce these key planning dimensions and discuss the types of measures and actions that might be aimed at enhancing or strengthening them. More detailed discussions of land use and built environment, and the specific tools and techniques that might be employed, can be found in chapter 7.

Resilience of Land Use and Built Environment

The vulnerability of a coastal community or region to a natural hazard such as an earthquake or hurricane often manifests in the clearest and most visceral way with respect to the built environment. Hurricane winds and surge inundation wreak havoc on buildings, streets, neighborhoods. Families return to find homes destroyed, infrastructure damaged or destroyed, roads impassable, and services and facilities disrupted. These impacts on the built environment suggest the clearest (though certainly not easy) set of actions and steps that communities and regions might take to reduce long-term damage and disruption and thus make the community more resilient.

What follows is a discussion of resilient land use, organized around three geographical groupings: the community and regional levels, the neighborhood and site level, and the building and facility level. Action at each geographical level is required. This multiscale design and planning framework is presented in box 3.1.

Community and Regional Land Use and Growth Patterns

Avoidance of natural hazards is perhaps the most effective coastal resilience strategy, one that can be effected by steering development away from high-risk locations, such as floodplains and seismic fault zones. Local and regional land acquisition efforts can be aimed at setting aside these most dangerous locations, and at trying to ensure a healthy coastal ecosystem that preserves the mitigative features of the natural environment. More specifically, coastal communities can

• prepare comprehensive plans or community land use plans that guide future growth away from and out of these risky locations;
• use land use regulatory tools, such as zoning, to keep the extent of density and development away from high-risk locations;
• impose performance standards to reduce exposure (for instance, by requiring new development to be set back a minimum distance from high-erosion shorelines);
• create hazard mitigation plans.

The many specific tools and techniques that can be employed in these efforts are discussed in greater detail in chapter 7.

It is critical as well, to work toward resilience at the broader geographical scale of the region or bioregion. While examples of effective regional planning are few in the United States, it is nevertheless useful to understand how an individual locality’s efforts can fit within, complement, and be complemented by efforts in other localities and the region as a whole. Preserving regional systems of greenspace, protecting those essential elements of a green infrastructure network, and restoring regional ecosystem functions, for instance, are important strategies for enhancing resilience. Many aspects of resilience—from evacuation, to infrastructural investments of all kinds, to sustainable economic development—are best viewed through a regional lens.

Box 3.1 Planning for Coastal Resilience at Different Scales

SCALES	DESIGN AND PLANNING ACTIONS AND IDEAS
Building	Energy Star house
	Passive solar design
	Local materials
	Solar water heating/photovoltaic panels
	Safe room
	Rainwater collection/purification
	Passive survivability
	Green rooftops and rooftop gardens
	Daylit interior spaces and natural ventilation
Street	Green streets
	Urban trees
	Low-impact development (LID)
	Street designed for stormwater collection
	Vegetated swales and narrow streets
	Edible landscaping
	Pervious/permeable surfaces
	Sidewalks and walkable streets
Block	Green courtyards
	Setback from ocean or high-hazard area
	Clustered housing outside of floodplains and high-hazard areas
	Photovoltaics
	Native species yards and spaces
Neighborhood	Stream daylighting, stream restoration
	Decentralized/distributed power
	Urban forests
	Community gardens
	Neighborhood parks/kitchens, pocket parks
	Greening greyfields and brownfields
	Neighborhood grocery, food center, or co-op
	Neighborhood energy/disaster response councils/committees
Community	Urban creeks and riparian areas
	Urban ecological networks
	Walking, hiking, biking trails
	Green schools
	City tree canopy
	Community forest coverage (min 40%)/community orchards
	Greening utility corridors
	Disaster shelters and evacuation capacity
Region	Conservation of wetlands
	River systems/floodplains
	Riparian systems
	Regional greenspace systems
	Greening major transport corridors
	Regional evacuation capacity

Source: Modified from Girling and Kellett (2005, 58).

Neighborhood and Site Level

Design and planning actions at the neighborhood or site level can enhance resilience in many ways. Neighborhoods can be designed and built with wind-resistant and flood-resistant trees and vegetation, and can incorporate a number of urban greening ideas and techniques, from rain gardens to green rooftops to permeable paving, that will enhance resilience. Many of these techniques and design strategies are discussed in greater detail in later chapters, and in the case studies of resilient coastal communities and projects.

Building and Facility Level

Complete avoidance of hazard areas is often not possible in many coastal areas. Buildings and homes throughout a coastal region must expect to experience and withstand the high winds associated with hurricanes and tropical storms, at least along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts of the United States. Building codes and coastal construction standards that address hazards are an essential aspect of coastal resilience.

Moreover, building construction is increasingly recognized as providing tremendous new opportunities to reduce our energy and ecological demands, and to enhance broader goals of resilience, such as less dependence on fossil fuels. “Passive survivability”—the idea that buildings should be designed to survive the loss of essential services in the event of a natural disaster—has become a new structural design goal since Hurricane Katrina, which made clear that homes must provide the conditions for safe living following a disaster (daylight, natural ventilation, on-site water collection, etc.). There are now a number of compelling examples of creative, sustainable, and safer buildings to point to and learn from, as well as a number of certification systems that are helpful in promoting sustainable and resilient building design (e.g., Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, or LEED). Buildings can be designed ideally to withstand greater wind speeds and seismic shaking forces. They can be designed so as to utilize natural daylight, allow natural ventilation, and include power generation that does not rely on the coastal power grid (e.g., photovoltaic panels, solar hot water heating systems). Strategies for designing buildings for passive survivability and for resilience in the face of natural forces are described in greater detail in chapter 7.

Ecological Resilience

The ecosystems and natural environments of coastal regions are at once subject to perturbations and impacts of natural events such as hurricanes (and longer-term changes such as global climate change and sea level rise) and essential moderators of the impacts of these forces on people and built form. We can meaningfully speak, then, about both of these dimensions: the resilience of these ecosystems and natural systems in the face of perturbations, and the positive role they play in enhancing the resilience of built environments and human communities.

Examples of planning actions that might be taken to ensure the ecological resilience in the built environments and human communities include the following:

• Ensuring sufficient wetlands buffers
• Permitting coastal wetlands to migrate landward in response to long-term sea level rise
• Protecting ecological systems and land area (landscape) sufficiently large and complex and diverse that any particular perturbation (storm, wildfire) will not cause irreversible harm (e.g., extinction of a species, complete loss of a biological community)

Examples of planning for ecological resilience in the latter category might include ensuring the existence and health of beach and dune systems because they are effective flood barriers, or preserving extensive coastal marsh systems because they act as natural sponges, retaining large amounts of floodwaters. Indeed, many of the actions that could be taken to enhance ecological resilience of one type will help to advance the other.

Social Resilience in Coastal Communities

Coastal communities are not simply or primarily composed of buildings and infrastructure, but of people—individuals, families, and social groups of various sorts—and thus many resilience efforts must be aimed directly at them. How will individuals and families cope with and respond to crises and natural events, and what factors help to explain successful and effective coping? What individual and social resources exist to help in coping and rebounding? What social structures or institutions or programs might help individuals, families, and communities to better cope? There are strong reasons to think that coastal communities that have nurtured certain social qualities, conditions, and relationships will be more resilient in the face of natural disasters and other disruptions.

Box 3.2 presents the story of the recovery of the Vietnamese community of New Orleans’ Versailles neighborhood following Hurricane Katrina. Here recovery has been highly successful on almost every measure, from quickly reopened stores to maintaining the prestorm population, aided by a strong social network, shared values, and social institutions, including the Catholic Church. Some critical lessons can be gleaned from recent coastal disaster events about the value of such social networks, resources, and institutions. The story of Versailles is one of a strong and cohesive community, with the Mary Queen of Vietnam Church and its active pastor serving as essential community anchors, coordinating and mobilizing that community’s very successful recovery efforts.

Box 3.2 The Resilience of the Versailles Community in the Aftermath of Katrina

The Versailles neighborhood in eastern New Orleans, a community of Vietnamese immigrants, has recovered and rebounded from Hurricane Katrina in a remarkable way, and most residents have returned to the neighborhood (unlike in the rest of the city). Stores and restaurants reopened relatively quickly, and through a sense of shared mission, roofs have been replaced and homes repaired. Recovery in Versailles (also now known as Viet Village) has not waited for official government help or decisions, but proceeded when the residents of the neighborhood made a decision that the neighborhood would return and coordinated actions to bring this about. At the center of the...

Table of contents

• About Island Press
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• INTRODUCTION - Climate Change and Coastal Resilience
• SECTION I - COASTAL RESILIENCE: BACKGROUND AND VULNERABILITY
• SECTION II - APPROACHES TO PLANNING FOR COASTAL RESILIENCE
• SECTION III - BEST PRACTICE IN PLANNING FOR COASTAL RESILIENCE
• CONCLUSION - The Promise of Coastal Resilience
• APPENDIX I: - PASSIVE SURVIVABILITY: A CHECKLIST FOR ACTION
• REFERENCES
• INDEX
• Island Press. | Board of Directors