SOME FACILITATION EXAMPLES FOR STRUCTURAL ADAPTIVITY

I believe that structural adaptivity will become generally accepted in our world even without conscious effort.  As change continues speeding up, and as planners, developers, futurists, risk managers, and many others come to recognize that change is coming at an accelerating rate and that the future is ever more uncertain and unpredictable, they will focus on adaptivity.  However, the longer we wait for people to realize this, the greater the chances are that much harm will occur that should have been avoided or mitigated by the resilience we should have been already building.

The facilitation strategies and techniques that I propose are primarily intended to show some logical possibilities.  Hopefully other people will be better able than I am to come up with the best ones. 

For now, I will present the full list of the possibilities that I have come up with and then present a discussion of a few of them. <!--break-->

My full list:

• ·         Strongly Support Private Enterprise Development Activities.
• ·         Expand the “General Welfare Authority” of Our Federal Government.
• ·         Promote the Futurist Perspective.
• ·         Adopt A “No Regrets Strategy.”
• ·         Refocus Our Development Regulation.
• ·         Put Plan-Making into a Broad Context.
• ·         Facilitate More Short-Term Temporary Uses/Development.
• ·         Facilitate New Land Tenure Options.
• ·         Bring Land Banks into Adaptivity Building.
• ·         Plan for Windfalls.
• ·         Advance the Development of Multi-Purpose Sites and Facilities and of Clusters of Complimentary Uses.
• ·         Timely Research.

Following is a discussion of several.

Strongly Support Private Enterprise Development Activities.  Free-market private enterprise provides the best available force for achieving much of the adaptivity needed in our urban and regional development.  Government controlled systems are much too slow and inefficient at present. 

Most likely, free-market private enterprise will continue as the basis for our economic system.  Even with its many faults and vulnerabilities, it is the most highly adaptable force for meeting the situations of change and growth.  It is like the redundancy/swarm system of nature.  When any one member of it fails, hundreds of others rush in to try to take its place, often with better methods to succeed.  With large increases in risk management principles and achievements, private enterprise will even more likely produce the best solutions to meeting our needs and keeping up with new ideas and new technologies.  This is especially true with regard to the development industry. 

Many planners believe that the precepts of our profession and the guidance we personally provide constitute the best source of leadership for developing the man-made environment.  We believe that developers should follow our lead, that we have the knowledge and experience to improve our world in the manner it needs to be improved.

The problem is that we have been thinking this for quite a long while and the results have not been good.  We make as many mistakes as the developers do.  We are even more ineffective in correcting our past mistakes than they are.  We are not any better than the developers are at avoiding the unintended negative consequences that come with our guidance. 

Private businesses:

• change directions rather quickly (compared to planners),
•  they return to their customers and correct their development problems/mistakes more often and more quickly (unless the regulations get in the way),
•  they are superior to us in adapting to the technologies and life styles that are so often changing, and
•  they are more willing to take chances and seize opportunities.  

As the risk industry establishes premiums that truly reflect the risks of different types, locations, and primary characteristics of development, private businesses will conform more quickly to the standards of resilience prescribed by such industry.  Speed is one of the elements of adaptivity.

Planners, on the other hand, must learn to focus on the issues and opportunities through which we/they can make the most important contributions to the future.  Our focus should be on being prepared and adaptable for the accelerating changes of the future, most of which cannot be predicted or forestalled.  We should be focusing on site planning designs that incorporate a host of possible changes over the life of the development and on development proposals that will allow for a host of choices by the users.  We should be assisting developers with “one-stop” permitting, site planning and regulation education, streamlining our regulations, and the like.  We should be focusing on land development characteristics that are likely still to have value 50 – 100 years from now. 

Adopt A “No Regrets Strategy.”  We, as the people in the US, need to “walk away” from specific decisions and expenditures that we could easily regret 30 years or so from now if such decisions and expenditures are not especially necessary.  As a part of a new perspective, we need to adopt, wholesale, a “no regrets strategy.” 

We need to assume that our world, regions and urban areas will be ripe for change - repeatedly.  We need to stop assuming that the basic economic, demographic, technological, and many other conditions will be pretty much the same in 30-50 years as they are when we make decisions about construction, development and financing.  If something cannot be paid for within 20 years or so, it normally should not be built.  Financing it for longer terms simply ties us in to trying to perpetuate the older conditions, or older trends, that we used to justify it. 

It seems likely that in the future, the financial institutions, guided by better and more comprehensive risk management, will insist on a “no regrets” strategy even if we do not.  They recognize, increasingly, that resilience comes from always being in a position to change if the circumstances warrant it.

Current thinkers in strategy formulation focus their attention increasingly on the level of uncertainty facing a company, government, or collection of groups and people with a common interest.  The thinking seems to be that traditional strategies are reliable only/mostly when future uncertainty is low.  The traditional approaches base their strategies on “rational” planning, management and control.  Moreover, when “rational” does not always work they add “co-dependent relationships” and/or “privileged relationships.” 

Apparently, co-dependent relationships, for planners, would mean something like holding a multitude of stakeholder meetings until we get all the stakeholders to go along with us (even if none of them has a clear picture as to where we are going).  In addition, apparently privileged relationships, for planners, would mean to rise to a position where we receive the support we need from the decision-makers by using special efforts to foster their favor and approval (e.g. lobbying and politicking).

The suggested approach in this paper is to slowly build a much more “adaptive” structure (“real and financially sound”) within which a lot of changes can be accommodated; and at the same time to follow a “no regrets” philosophy.  A “no regrets” philosophy, in my opinion, should include:

• Minimize the amount of construction/action which cannot be reversed or otherwise changed when needed (e.g. construction of massive sanitary sewer systems and/or programs built on new laws, large bureaucracies, and expensive technologies);
• Minimize the amount of new construction/action which will be paid for over a long period of time and thus tie us to ever increasing use of such construction or support of such actions even after they are obsolete (e.g. giant hospitals and stadiums);
• Promote new construction/action which allows for major changes in the future - and is built in incremental stages (multiple-use structures, networks of bus rapid transit); and
• Continue with new construction/action that makes sense no matter what eventually happens (e.g. investments in education).

We need to be thinking, as a rule, that whenever one can build something small instead of something big, build the small one.  Moreover, if the small one does not have sufficient capacity or power, build several small ones.  Our engineers, architects, builders and related others need to be challenged to build “incrementally.” 

Refocus Our Development Regulation.  We both must (1) regulate development less and (2) refocus our regulation to promote adaptivity.  Private market forces should be allowed to operate as freely as possible. 

Regulation should address only the minimum requirements for public health and safety for people and neighborhoods now and for public health and safety as technology and development trends change.  In addition, for our general welfare, regulation also must aggressively focus on the capacity for future changes, changes that we cannot foresee. 

Much of our land use and development regulation system has become more of a “permitting” system than uniform regulation based on planning for the essential health and safety of our environment.  We regulate neighborhood “compatibility;” we regulate design, appearance and character; we regulate in relationship to economic development as determined by public authorities; we regulate for environmental sustainability based on today’s or yesterday’s technology; we regulate to reflect citizen attitudes; we regulate to reflect current local political mind-sets; etc.  All the while, we are burdening our property owners, developers and builders with ever-increasing restrictions that only serve to shape our man-made environment into stagnant existences.

Regulation should be a matter of whether or not it is important to our general welfare and to our general welfare in the future.  Over-regulating simply thwarts private enterprise from keeping up with rapid change, change that is coming faster and faster.

The objective of regulation for our present general welfare should be met by regulating only for the most essential public purposes.  Fresh air throughout all neighborhoods, safety from crime and vehicular dangers, sanitary waste collection and disposal, fire and police protection, and similar elements were the reasons we needed modern regulations.  Those health and safety needs were the basis for the regulation in the first place and they must still be maintained and continually improved. 

However, as regards regulation for our future general welfare, we must focus on regulating for adaptivity to rapid change.  We are now to the point where we can no longer build much of anything with the expectation that it will be of such high quality, durability, and functional aptness that it will meet our needs 50 or 100 years from now.  Hopefully it might, but we can no longer count on it. 

Instead, we should be requiring that everything that is to be built be built with the maximum amount of adaptivity to future change.  How convenient will it be to tear down?  How convenient will it be to be expanded?  How convenient will it be to be converted to a significantly different use when technology is different, when consumer demand is different, when demographics are different?  How convenient will it be to rebuild, expand, or convert the whole neighborhood, of which it is a part, in 30-50 years?  Developers should be required to address these subjects prior to plan approval and to present concrete plans for potential changes/redevelopment. 

“Designing/building for deconstruction” is a new paradigm in the design and construction business that also represents fully the intent of adaptivity.  It should be incorporated in our development regulation.

In all of these regulation-setting and enforcement planning activities, planners need to be working closely with the risk-management professionals.  (In fact, to the extent that the premiums for risk protection truly reflected the health and safety risks for each individual structure and use of land, regulation would be much less needed in the first place.) 

The strategies and policies of both risk managers and planners must be reinforcing of each other.  If risk managers do not see the benefits and importance of guiding development in certain directions, those directions should be seriously reconsidered by the planners.  If planners see some better directions in regulation that are related to decreasing risk, they should be educating the risk managers to the logic of promoting them as well.  Together they should be building a common basis for describing and measuring the elements of risk that can and will become a forceful element in shaping both the detailed and large-scale components of our cities and regions and their distribution throughout the nation.

Timely Research.  City and regional planners, and others even more involved in guiding the development community, seldom receive the published results of research when they really need it.  They must move quickly and research comes slowly.  Recently, many journals and web sites certainly do bring research much more quickly but it still does not come quickly enough.  Presumably, that is because so much research takes so much time to pass through the lengthy process of concept, outline, breakout of detailed components, funding, contracting, publishing, aggregation into useful chunks, more funding, more contracting, and more publishing.   

Most research also does not seem to be focused on the new ideas and approaches needed for our existing rapidly changing environment for development.  Even less of it seems to be focused on the new ideas and approaches needed for an uncertain future, i.e. ideas and approaches that come primarily through foresight, logic, and imagination.

Therefore, little research appears to have been conducted on adaptivity and resilience solutions, especially “structural adaptivity” solutions, to meeting the unknown future.  We need to begin at virtually “ground zero.”  Then we need research to proceed rapidly through its standard process, or better yet, to shortcut much of the standard process if possible. 

The ideas reflected in these writings about structural adaptivity, and resilience, give obvious examples of the types of research I am suggesting.  Some of these include investigating:

• Opportunities and mechanisms for spatially re-balancing our nation;
• The best regional watershed planning structure. (locations & boundaries);
• How to generate a new megalopolis;
• The most adaptive locations and patterns of development and types and locations of infrastructure– at least hypothetically (e.g. urban centers, open space - including types and patterns the most beneficial once global warming has already occurred, highway types and patterns, bus rapid transit, etc.) ;
• New mechanisms, facilities, technology, etc. for freight transportation and delivery;
• Smaller, incremental sanitary sewer treatment and collection, and other utility systems which are not so much tied to large, expensive, set-in-place facilities;
• Open-space/infill/temporary-uses/land-bank coordination strategy and management systems;
• Transition regulations and programs, and strategic regulation models, to allow quicker and easier changes within our developed areas;
• Continued research on adaptable structures for housing, commercial and industrial buildings and other structures;
• Legal basis for national general welfare regulation and programs;
• Models and legal opportunities for facilitation of more land tenure options;
• A multitude of windfall plan models for all areas corresponding with the national and area wide adaptivity applications;
• New forms and opportunities for risk management that place its costs on the people, organizations and businesses that are being protected. 

William Schnaufer