"I love that you've brought this to attention. An extensive database of uncommon but resistant and hardy plants/foods could be developed and organized by climate. Ease of growth and processing should also be taken in to account. I will try to…"
A crash course in changing the world.
Resilience and the City
I'm gonna touch the issue that is the elephant in the room
of the mission now: Cities are inherently not resilient,
they are in themselves one of the best analogies for centralization, consumption condensation and unbalance.
If you live in a city and the main water supply fails, or the power
goes down, or there is a food shortage, you are done,
there is no adaptation to disruption, there is just no power, no water,
sending the techs to fix the supply or the power station
is not resilience, that's maintenance of a non resilient system.
Regarding the food security issue a city is as not resilient as it gets,
all the food is grown outside of the city. The only solution to this that
I know of is indoor horticulture, roof tops wont suffice, I'm not aware
of one city that is considering the promotion of indoor horticulture
in a urban environment.
Resilience can be seen as a system's structural property
rather than as a contingency plan for a disaster,
its about the disruption tolerance of the system
and not about rebuilding whatever was there
when the disaster takes it down.
That said, I can tell you that there is no real
resilience plan for Buenos Aires,
yet.
of the mission now: Cities are inherently not resilient,
they are in themselves one of the best analogies for centralization, consumption condensation and unbalance.
If you live in a city and the main water supply fails, or the power
goes down, or there is a food shortage, you are done,
there is no adaptation to disruption, there is just no power, no water,
sending the techs to fix the supply or the power station
is not resilience, that's maintenance of a non resilient system.
Regarding the food security issue a city is as not resilient as it gets,
all the food is grown outside of the city. The only solution to this that
I know of is indoor horticulture, roof tops wont suffice, I'm not aware
of one city that is considering the promotion of indoor horticulture
in a urban environment.
Resilience can be seen as a system's structural property
rather than as a contingency plan for a disaster,
its about the disruption tolerance of the system
and not about rebuilding whatever was there
when the disaster takes it down.
That said, I can tell you that there is no real
resilience plan for Buenos Aires,
yet.
Views: 32
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Comment by A.V.Koshy on April 19, 2010 at 9:16pm
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hmm, disintegration wont happen if they decentralize more...
but its on the cards at least one kind of disintegration , into more states etc.....
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Comment by Benjamin Michael Jones on April 19, 2010 at 9:39pm
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Interesting thoughts, although i have a counter if i may:
Do you not think perhaps that the problem with central cities is more to do with the scientific design or more specifically lack thereof. On could through Social, Economical and Scientific Planning re-design cities to still act as a central hub, but still contain more effective ways to tackle issues like power and electricity.
To expand, one could use more effective technologies to sustain themselves better, much of what fails at present is because it is designed to fail as we live in a society (Globally) that relies on things falling apart in order to create a deficit. Otherwise the markets would fail to function it everything was designed to last years instead of months. Furthermore things like electricity have been transferred wirelessly with the help of brilliant scientist's like Nikola Tesla allowing free energy for all with little or no up keep. In order to help support your argument I would also supply each home with the ability to be as self sufficient as possible so that the grid simply provide more back up energy, rather than primary source.
Also really sorry, but your idea of resilience is also a bone of contention. If it's resilience your looking for look to the pyramids for your design, then look at some of the problems building so basic in the society that exists today. What we needs is adaptability - cities that could be changed and re-designed to suit our needs as a species as a wh*** not as segregated community of a countries. Again these are simply points that sprung to mind. However, you makes some excellent points about shifting power away from central areas that would leave current local communities isolated and struggling to survive.
Thanks for reading ^_^
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Comment by Patricio Buenrostro-Gilhuys on April 19, 2010 at 10:26pm
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All cities have a massive amount of embodied energy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embodied_energy to waste all that energy is an option. The other option is retrofit, decentralize so later we can have a distributed network within cities for food, water, energy, first aid and education in the broad sense. As you now we are having a dialogue about it here http://www.urgentevoke.com/profiles/blogs/copying-the-internet
We should make this change before History changes us first. Rome was a centralized system, when it collapsed the solution came from decentralized little kingdoms and that´s called middle ages.
I really think indoor horticulture is a great idea!!! Perhaps a lot of the urban farming efforts in evoke should focus on that. Land is usually expensive in cities. Abandoned land is limited. Rooftop farms can work on a building by building basis but not all buildings are suited for it. Indoor agriculture has perhaps more potential.
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Comment by Erin Sammons on April 19, 2010 at 11:10pm
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No society is safe from all possible threats - every structure has a weak point as does every system. The definition of resilience: 'recovering readily from adversity, depression, or the like' - So instead of worrying about how a city is run or how they cater for the people living there, I think the mission is focusing on the recovery of a downfall - whatever that may be.
Thankyou for your post - maybe I'm not looking at this the right way... I totally agree with how cities are indeed very weak, I never really thought about it before =)
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Comment by Mladen Janković on April 23, 2010 at 4:15pm
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You should consider the case of Cuba, after they hit peak oil after the fall of the Soviet Union, where they shifted half their agriculture to the cities as they could no longer transport food. It is possible to come up with a solution in such cases, and we have a case that proves it.
Fortunately, most of the world does not need that particular solution yet.
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A crisis does not form new ideas, it simply makes urgent the need to implement some good old ideas not yet widespread.
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Cuba and Havana are perhaps the best example in the World of a resilient City. It´s the power of community, urban farming, organoponics and a little dancing and smiling against adversities that make Havana a model for every city in the planet.
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Comment by Mary Sexton on April 26, 2010 at 10:01pm
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You're right about urban areas being worse place to be in a crisis. When I worked in Seattle during an emergency drill they told us that if there was a bad earthquake (there were seven or eight while I lived there from 1997-2002) that the glass would be so deep in the streets that it would take months to clear the streets. Perhaps an exageration on his part, but still it let us know how inadequate the office emergency supplies were.
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