Resilience Design Matters for California's Bay Area

Keywords: resilience design, climate justice, adaptation equity
Abstract Type: Virtual Paper Abstract

Abstract

While the abrupt end to the 100 Resilient Cities initiative by the Rockefeller Foundation was met with surprise and reflection by multiple scholars, the Resilient by Design initiative, also supported by the Rockefeller Foundation, was not a project discussed in disciplines outside of strictly design-oriented ones. Here, I analyze and discuss the design of future resilient landscapes by using the Rockefeller Foundation’s Resilient by Design project as a pivotal case study.

Resilience design proposals shift how urban landscapes are traditionally known and understood by recasting them as moving, evolving and shifting in relationship to ecological changes accelerated by climate change. In the context of climate urgency, urban places are increasingly seen as critical infrastructures that incorporate socio-ecological processes. This study discusses the implications of resilience design for questions of economic and social resilience, for labor, and for equity, by examining the Resilience by Design project that took place in 2018 in California’s Bay Area, with pilot projects currently underway.

I look at the ways in which ecology is deployed in these proposals in order to normalize, contest, and direct conversations on socio-environmental relationships, and discuss how these proposals reveal, disguise, or otherwise implicate equity in and for the landscapes they are meant to serve. Evaluating resilience design matters because such proposals, which typically involve large-scale urban infrastructural projects that rely on a land-as-ecosystem framing to redirect or remediate resource flows, also direct the impact of these ecological processes on the economic, labor, and political systems they are embedded in.