Urban Designers Look to Nature as Solution for Flood-Prone Cities
From Houston and Miami, to cities in South Asia, 2017 has been a year of intense weather and devastating floods. A combination of climate change and urban development has created a perfect storm for catastrophe.
"We are living in a warmer world. We are living in a world where potentially, hurricanes could be more damaging,” said Bill Patzert, climatologist at NASA. “Sea levels are rising. They have risen almost nine inches (22 centimeters) in the last century," he said. Rising sea levels, however, make up only a small fraction of the problem, he said.
Architects and urban planners said many cities in potentially flood-prone areas should rethink how they are built and their relationship with water.
“Many urban designers have acknowledged that leaving out natural systems is actually a big problem and the reasons why these cities are flooding is because we have taken away wetlands; we have paved over rivers, we have largely ignored the interaction between physical and natural systems,” said Kian Goh, assistant professor of urban planning at the University of California.
One approach to fight floods is what architects call “passive design”, which means designing cities around nature and not trying to change nature in the process of building structures.
Another factor to consider in designing cities in flood-prone areas is transportation, including looking at cities with a "car culture," such as Houston.
"For every Houston inhabitant, there are between 25 and 30 parking spaces. That’s another urban design rethink. Do we need that much parking in this era of Uber and Lyft and autonomous vehicles?" said architect Rives Taylor.
