Some Examples of Structural Adaptivity - Part III

Here are 4 more examples of structural adaptivity for resilience.  As with the other examples presented previously, they only are intended to illustrate the concept of structural adaptivity for resilience.  They are intended to focus on the structure or structural elements of cities and/or regions.  Moreover, they are intended to demonstrate how such structural elements can be located, organized, or otherwise developed to have capacity to adapt to the continuing needs of the citizens - as the unknown and rapidly changing future unfolds.

Polycentric Urban Development.  Urban development need no longer be monocentric (having only one center).  In fact, such a pattern is not adaptive to meet the future.

Central business districts have traditionally been the home of government, financial institutions, offices, civic plazas and the like, as well as many commercial retail and services.  They have also often contained many churches, health care facilities, educational institutions, libraries, museums, convention centers, theatres, etc.

However, slowly in many areas they have been diminishing in many of their uses and intensities (although strengthening in a few). 

Today most central business districts have a lower percentage of total employment of an urban area than is contained elsewhere.  A larger share is now located in nodes within the older residential areas (at hospitals, universities, research centers, etc.) and throughout the suburban and urban-rural fringe areas.  We recognize them as edge cities, satellite centers, or secondary centers. 

While at first many of the outlying centers may have been primarily of a single dominant use (e.g. retail malls, corporate offices, or public or quasi-public use), more recently they are attracting many diverse types of support businesses and services, much the same as the central business districts did over several centuries. 

Having several primary “business districts” would provide much more adaptability in urban/metropolitan areas large enough to support them.  People and business could locate in the centers that are best suited to their requisites and interests and could quickly and easily re-locate to a different center when and if their needs and pursuits change.  Likewise, the urban area as an aggregate would not have to depend on the stability and prosperity of any one complex.

In the future, each new center should be diversified even more so that each contains all of the most essential uses and facilities vital in the event of failure of one or more of the others.  This especially should include sufficient government offices and facilities, with independent operations, if needed.  Each primary center should have emergency response capabilities, health care facilities, independent communications capacities, etc. as well as other central city functions.

Modular Utility and Similar Infrastructure Systems.  Each utility system needs to be as adaptive as possible.  Long lines and giant facilities at one end or the other, however, are not adaptive.  The systems should be composed of much smaller networks, normally linked together for overall efficiency and reliability, but still operational in local independent networks that are reliable in times of overall system failure. 

Such modularity and redundancy is also needed to allow adaptation to changes in technology, resource scarcity, changes in growth patterns, and similar future scenarios.  Otherwise, the service area is locked in to a structure that could persist far beyond the time of its aptness.

Utility and similar systems, herein, are meant to include power generation, lines and other facilities, gas lines and related facilities, telecommunication systems, water supply, storage and distribution systems, storm sewer and sanitary sewer systems, and similar infrastructure.  Many of these involve large investments set in place. They have a major impact on the form, location, and characteristics of our urban and regional areas.

This paper will not try to cover all such systems, facilities and lines.  However, the principle of adaptivity does need to be applied to most all such systems; and both research and planning needs to be focused on their adaptivity. 

One of the most important ones can serve as a model of how adaptivity can be applied.

Large sanitary/waste water sewer collection and treatment systems are especially problematic in terms of our urban adaptivity.  They are very expensive; they are often financed over a long time with repayment dependent on additional growth; and they cannot be moved.  The collection systems/lines can also be difficult to extend unless such extensions were designed-in to the original plans. 

Planners, engineers and government bodies need to shift their priorities to smaller, more flexible systems – systems that can be adaptive to numerous possible changes in urban development, in technologies that are less expensive and/or more effective, and to the larger unexpected changes in our world conditions.  Climate change and declining availability of potable water supplies is a major example of the necessity for such adaptivity.

Many new technologies are being investigated, developed and improved which could take the place of such giant, immovable investments – and at the same time allow for unexpected changes in world conditions.  These include, for example: ultraviolet light, photo-voltaics, constructed wetlands, biological filtration, hydroponic treatment, solar aquatic treatment, new bioreactors, textile and artificial filters, new membrane technologies, nano-tech filtration membranes, and computer controlled maintenance and management systems.  Some are appropriate for on-site facilities and some for small package treatment systems. 

Neither on-site facilities nor small package treatment systems tie down development with enormous investments requiring years to pay off.  Many of the researchers, manufacturers, and users of such new technology practices believe they have only scratched the surface of the innovative possibilities.  Such new research and development should include attention to the potential relocation and re-use of the facilities wherever possible.

Another aspect of large sanitary sewer systems should be mentioned: the negative impact the large systems have on the ground water and the river flows of the community they serve.  Being so large, big centralized systems discharge their effluents generally into large streams a rather far distance away rather than back into the streams and the ground under the larger part of the community itself. 

Likewise, because the treatment plants are so far removed from the development they serve, there is little opportunity for re-circulating the treated effluent back to the community for appropriate uses.  In the future, this will become an increasingly greater deficiency of such larger systems and is contrary to the goals of sustaining our natural environment – i.e., to watershed integrity.  The necessity to re-circulate water within our cities and regions cannot be ignored. 

Dynamic Open Space Systems and Reserves.  The strategic design, location, and characteristics of open spaces and reserves offers enormous opportunity for building adaptivity in urban and regional areas.  In addition to traditional planning for open space (e.g. for parks and recreation), much more attentiveness must be given to the dynamic nature of open space systems for achieving resilience to the community at the same time.

Many of the traditional types and uses of open spaces must be continued.  They provide opportunities for clean fresh air, relief from stress and congestion, for recreation, quiet enjoyment, nature conservation, civic gatherings and events, and many other doings.

Open spaces, along with land banks, in-fill strategies, and short-term temporary uses/development, also need to constitute a big part of the adaptivity strategy for each urban area.  Several specific types of open space should command the most focused attention for structural adaptivity:

(1)  Smallish open spaces (with free open space) inside each and all neighborhoods and all other small expanses of development (within convenient walking distance, with appropriate topography, and appropriate minimum size) that enable:

Emergency health care service pop-up facilities and provisions;

Dispensary for food and water, information, communication and similar necessities;

Access by helicopter; and at least one major road leading outside the area;

Assembly of local residents for activity coordination; and

Use of the site on an everyday basis for informal and inventive recreation, social interaction, and related purposes.  (This might be their primary designated purpose.)

(2)  Open space reserves/land banks that build up an inventory of sites and properties that are well suited to meet future development demands that emerge as the future unfolds.  These might well include lands apt for solar energy collectors, wind turbines and facilities for other energy production as they emerge, for temporary emergency housing and longer term resettlement housing, and for superior technologies as they become feasible (e.g., space ports, materials recovery centers, and robotics related lands and improvements).

(3)  Protective open spaces for flood plains, landslide prone areas, wild fire prone areas, coastal surge areas, etc., with each of these based on best available foresight thinking.

(4)  Open space (and rooftops) for needed/appropriate green uses, including storm water retention, water table/aquifer recharge, cooling and carbon-sink vegetation, food production, etc.

(5) Open space corridors traversing all parts of each urban area and providing connections for the movements of people, flora and fauna, and air and water (with attention to temperature and wind patterns).

(6) Social-community-building parks and open spaces carefully designed according to the latest and best knowledge on characteristics generating a balance of social cohesion and independence.

All of the above should include ardent attention to multiple use, various property ownership and access alternatives (especially arrangements for use of privately owned properties), optimum available locations and site characteristics, property trading/exchanges, interim uses and temporary structures, agency coordination and facilitation, and modularity, redundancy and other adaptivity characteristics,

All of the above was formulated with urban spheres in mind.  However, many may also apply to rural areas and the smaller urban areas and development sites within.

Even as important as open spaces are on their own and as important as they are to many people with unique interests which they serve, they must be operated as an adaptivity system or dynamism.  Such a system and dynamic must be operated in unison with land banks, in-fill strategies and temporary uses/development.  It must supply the urban area with a ready reserve of developable land in critical and strategically planned locations.  Moreover, it must contribute to the adaptivity of the area to meet unexpected and unpredictable change.

Rural Area Adaptivity.  Our existing rural areas are quite adaptative and high priority should be given to protecting and enhancing their structural adaptivity.  Efforts to achieve other focused/targeted goals in the rural areas should take lesser import.  In most cases, we should buttress the unrestrained free market to achieve the worthiest, ever-changing balance of uses and development in the rural areas. 

Many planners focus mostly on agricultural production as the primary concern for rural lands.  Certainly, the need for agricultural production will continue to be vital, both in terms of meeting our own population’s need and in terms of its contribution to our economic vigor.  However, at the same time, agricultural production is very likely to transform dramatically this century, in ways we cannot predict.  Food shortages could become a problem – although now much of what we see as a food production problem is actually a food distribution debility.  It is also possible that food production could be quite high and produce far more than is needed.

Planners are not going to have much serious impact on agriculture.  It will be determined through the private market place.  It will not be helped by artificially trying to “protect” prime farmlands.  If the private market place determines that larger amounts of land are needed for food production, it will be reflected in the price of food.  At some point, if prices for food become increasingly higher, the private market place will lead to land being converted back into agriculture.  Moreover, the increased cost of food will result in other changes: major changes in our food consumption patterns; in new food technology; major new resources for food production, e.g. the oceans; and/or “food factories” or other new approaches to agricultural production. 

Re-localization within and around urban areas will also increase food production much closer to where it is desired. 

Planners must focus on the best uses of our rural areas and on development in rural areas without an over-riding concern for anyone type of use or development.  Currently only about 23% of non-urban land is used for cropland and about 31% for pasture and range.  In fact, it is reported by some that in the last half of the last century, millions of acres of farmland were reclaimed by wilderness in the US.  Another large user of rural land is forests, at about 30%.  This leaves millions of acres for a whole host of other rural uses. 

Other usages could also include large amounts of habitat for people wanting or needing to move out of the urban zones and for people migrating into the U.S. because of other world changes.  Future economic and technology transformations likewise could result in uses that necessitate large amounts of land for development.  These might include, for example, spaceports and the generation of new forms of energy.

We must envision the rural areas as expanses with enormous adaptivity.  They normally do not have an existing development pattern that restricts future opportunity.  They normally do not have large investments in infrastructure that must be retired.  They normally do not have large concentrations of population and businesses committed to particular goals.

Rural areas are already facing development or preservation forces for a whole host of alternative futures - and all are still possibilities.  The tourism industry sees them as sites for theme parks, historical attractions, scenic vistas, etc.  Naturalists see them for their value in the preservation of unique natural features, national parks, hunting lands and fishing waters, wildlife preservation and similar uses.  Others desire to use them also as locations for major developments or uses that need to be isolated from the urban areas (correctional institutions, military installations, sanitary landfills and salvage yards, regional airports and railroad yards, etc.).  In addition, we have not even yet mentioned forestry, mining, oil and gas wells, water retention reservoirs, and many other types of uses or development.

From the point of view of the futurist, and in the interests of adaptivity and resilience, the paramount focus should be not on which one of these special interests should prevail.  Rather it should be on how most if not all of these uses can be integrated into our rural areas without harming or destroying the flexibility that is inherent in them. 

William Schnaufer