Local Governments Can’t Ignore Resilience Issues Any Longer

The Rockefeller Foundation unveiled a new documentary Monday, showcasing work it’s been doing in the resilience space for more than a decade.

Initially intended as an inspirational guide for U.S. city and county officials, the film’s value as a teaching mechanism for a much broader audience became apparent during production.

A free, online screening toolkit was developed with the goal of getting “The Resilience Age” into as many hands globally as possible.

“Resilience is complicated, and it’s something that requires a little bit of thought to start wrapping your head around it,” Sam Carter, Rockefeller resilience portfolio managing director, told Route Fifty in an interview. “One of wonderful things about the medium of film is that you can tell stories that lend themselves to a more complex narrative and complex thinking.”

The term resilience refers to 21st-century cities’ efforts to identify and plan against often unpredictable physical, social and economic challenges—like climate change or infrastructure failure—exacerbated by increased urbanization.

Flagship programs at Rockefeller include 100 Resilient Cities and the Global Resilience Partnership, both of which have their work featured in the documentary.

'The Resilience Age'

Production occurred over a four- to five-month period at the end of 2014 with the website, also showcasing shorter films and articles, created after.

Director Daniel Fries was given latitude as the filmmaker to assemble a beautifully shot and interwoven set of diverse profiles in resilience. That includes El Paso, Texas, a city that developed its water management system during the abnormally wet 20th century and must now maximize every drop of diminishing rainfall in the 21st.

“There are no magic bullets when it comes to water,” says Carlos Rubenstein, an environmental consultant with RSAH2O, in the documentary. “The more diverse your portfolio is, the better you’ll be.”

Strategies like drip irrigation are being deployed to help farmers preserve agricultural productivity because crop losses in the region would be felt around the world.

Meanwhile Medellín, Colombia—a historically violent, tumultuous city—has reversed social collapse through dramatic transportation innovation.

“Medellín’s biggest problem was inequality,” says Oscar Santiago Uribe Rocha, the city’s chief resilience officer, in the film.

So local officials invested in a rail transit starting in 1990, when Medellín was still thought too small to support such a system. A series of transportation projects involving escalators and even gondolas has made movement around the city easier and cheaper, reducing geographic and societal gaps in the process.

Perhaps no people have taken resilience to heart as much as the Dutch, who have around a 400-year history of managing flood risk in cities like Rotterdam by giving more space to rivers instead of making dikes higher. New York City studied Dutch resilient design elements increasing water storage on green roofs and under parking garages to combat flooding in lower Manhattan without building a seawall.

The High Line is a public park built on an elevated former freight rail line above Manhattan’s West Side streets that acts as a green roof.

“The only way to do it would be in close collaboration with the different communities,” says Bjarke Ingels, Danish architect, describing the High Line project in the documentary.

Collaboration is also critical as the Japanese share best-in-class earthquake technology, like hydraulic damper systems in buildings, and regulations with the rest of the world.

Planners, architects and designers in some ways caused the resilience challenge of climate change, and now a handful of them at Architecture 2030 are working to get the building sector carbon neutral by 2030.

In all these cases, resilience starts with education and communication but is still learnable.

The Resilience Mindset

On Oct. 20, Rockefeller previewed “The Resilience Age” to the second cohort of Resilience AmeriCorps VISTA trainees in Alexandria, Virginia.

One of those trainees was Sara Chin, who’s been with the New York Governor’s Office of Storm Recovery for eight months working on community outreach, connecting projects, assessing their benefits, and memorializing procedures. For her, the documentary highlighted the diversity of resilience work to minimize disruptions caused by shocks and stresses, as well as the fact no place is immune to them.

“More and more I feel like we’re all just smaller pieces of this greater momentum,” Chin said. “We’ve adapted to specialized labor and become isolated in the way we approach problems. I didn’t always feel like there was a path forward, but now I feel over time that’s been changing.”

Since 2000, when Congress allocated more than $30 billion to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the agency has been involved in long-term disaster recovery. Most of that money has gone toward rebuilding things exactly as they were, where they were.

More frequent, more severe extreme weather changed that dynamic beginning with Superstorm Sandy in 2012. HUD and Rockefeller formed a collaborative partnership, Rebuild by Design, that brought resilient design thinking and global expertise to the New York and New Jersey recovery efforts.

“Places are going to be at repetitive risk more than they have been in the past, in all candor,” Harriet Tregoning, HUD Office of Community Planning and Development principal deputy assistant secretary, said in an interview. “That got built into their recovery.”

Since 2010, 85 percent of all 3,143 U.S. counties have experienced a presidentially declared disaster, and 223 counties have faced five or more—flooding being the most common.

Most stormwater management systems aren’t sized to handle the prolonged, heavy rains climate change is bringing, Tregoning said, and more communities need to open up capital improvement plans looking at how every streetscape and tree planting can increase their water storage capacity. Recent flooding in Louisiana occurred in predominantly upland parishes vulnerable to such rain events and not in coastal areas usually associated with higher risk for inundation.

Cities like Miami; Norfolk, Virginia; and Boston are embracing resilience more quickly than those inland because of sea level rise, but the issue is critical to the latter localities’ survival.

Geographically concentrated poverty makes cities even more vulnerable. Families, especially uninsured ones, can be set back a generation or more by a disaster causing home or even job loss—if they can’t get to work— with slim prospects for reemployment. A city’s affordable housing stock generally takes a hit in a disaster, Tregoning said.

Part of a resilience mindset is collaborating on solutions that help communities daily, not just during a disaster, by providing new jobs or creating a park, rather than a berm or levee.

After Sandy, Rebuild by Design connected HUD with winning design teams from around the globe to create different recovery options for affected localities.

A second major collaboration, the National Disaster Resilience Competition, took the remaining billion dollars in disaster relief money HUD had at its disposal and offered it to communities that could prove they had unmet recovery needs they could resolve with resilience in mind.

In the first phase of the competition, teams made up of agencies, community organizations and private sector partners took part in academies teaching them how to use climate science to understand the risk vulnerabilities of future disasters and how to approach resource commitments before crafting their proposals. A total of 40 applicants were selected for phase two, which entailed designing a project after a second round of academies analyzing benefits to vulnerable populations.

Thirteen winners were chosen, but all participants walked away with resilience strategies, potential partnerships and planned infrastructure investments.

Billions of dollars are spent by state and local governments on infrastructure each year and—if they all thought about how open space for capital projects could be graded in a way that manages stormwater runoff to the surrounding block—flooding could be far better managed as a resilience challenge.

“That’s the opportunity presented by the documentary,” Tregoning said. “And continued conversations by cities.”

Watch the full-length feature and access additional resilience resources here.