The term resilience has often been applied to the design of buildings and waterfront locations, with Hurricanes Sandy, Irene, and Katrina driving many conversations on the topic. From those experiences, we know resilience means better protections for people, properties, and the communities in which they reside, but what is it that makes a community truly resilient? How do we decide where best to invest our creativity and finite resources to make places safer, stronger, and ready to withstand acute shocks such as severe weather events and other chronic stressors such as property devaluation or low employment?
What matters most may come as a surprise: The latest findings include infrastructure protections, flood zone avoidance, and rooftop building systems to maximize resilience. But they also include better financial underwriting standards that consider business continuity, personnel safety, and asset protection. And they also highlight the roles of greater social cohesion and stronger interpersonal human networks as yet another determinant of positive outcomes after a catastrophic event.
These measures constitute a three-legged stool of how communities and developers can achieve resilience. For the built world to be stable, all three legs must be in place.
In addition to better design of the built environment, for example, underwriting standards are now undergoing a valuable transition to make resilience part of how construction projects are financed. In consultation with Morningstar and Standard & Poor’s, the nonprofit Institute for Market Transformation and global design firm Perkins+Will have been amending U.S. underwriting standards for financing to integrate resilient design techniques, which can help create buildings that fare better through severe weather, floods, and other threats.
Second is undergirding support for the most vulnerable populations and designing healthier places for all. Dependable, place-based social networks can largely determine an area’s survivability during and after an acute event, says sociologist Eric Klinenberg, author of Heat Wave. “Good social networks and connections” positively affect outcomes after disasters, including how much longer people live, confirms Nicole Lurie, the Obama administration’s assistant secretary for preparedness and response at the Department of Health and Human Services. This was documented in the role of nonprofit organizations as a critical lifeline to many New Orleans residents following Hurricane Katrina.
Third is better design of buildings and urban infrastructure. Recent work on hospitals and other critical facilities has been geared toward helping stabilize communities and support emergency response efforts. Multiple-day power outages and fuel shortages are often part of the aftermath, so facility owners are increasing redundancy and alternate systems for electricity, heating/cooling, and telecommunications. Other key steps, urged in a variety of studies undertaken by groups such as the American Institute of Architects, include the following:
- Strengthening the reliability of all critical building systems.
- Hardening buildings and infrastructure to reduce storm damage from high winds and flooding.
- Putting in place better disaster preparedness planning (based on lessons learned) to increase the speed of response and recovery.
- Investing in systematic assessments of existing facilities and their vulnerability to the effects of extreme climate events.
- Adopting improved zoning, regulatory requirements, and building standards where necessary to aid and encourage resilience and preparedness.
Maintaining essential safety for occupants and other building users is the ultimate goal of all these steps, including during the initial disaster and also during the ensuing recovery period.
New hospitals designed for challenging waterfront sites, such as Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital in Boston, as well as existing facilities like the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, have learned from events like Hurricane Ike and Superstorm Sandy to be ready for regional infrastructure damage. Many of their features and layouts that protect the health care population and ensure ongoing operations can be adopted by any commercial or multifamily residential development.
Sometimes even the best-prepared facilities, however, will fail. That is why Perkins+Will has worked with Degenkolb Engineers, Mazzetti Engineers, Public Architecture, and Alliance Health of San Francisco to develop a concept for a rapidly deployable health clinic (RDoC) and pharmacy for use as a replacement venue for critical ambulatory health services in the aftermath of a seismic or severe weather event. Deployed after an event, this temporary clinic would be available to community organizations whose staff would “relocate” there until their “home” facilities can reopen.
Other efforts add the dimension of social resilience to benefit long-term planning, which groups like the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) now incentivize through grants and awards for more integrated thinking. Successful communities globally have demonstrated the positive outcomes associated with more cohesive community structures. In a recent demonstration concept, a Perkins+Will team proposed a 15-acre (6 ha) fibroCITY project for Houston, which reclaims spaces by providing interwoven programmatic elements. “A city should be cohesive with connections running throughout,” said one project statement. The solution includes reconnecting areas that have been physically separated by highways and adding new places for “people, activities, and interactions.”
These emerging ideas in bolstering community networks—as well as established building methods being codified in critical facilities plans by various municipalities nationwide—are two big steps in helping improve resilience of vulnerable developments and urban areas. On top of those, the amended underwriting standards for financing will provide valuable guidance at the city, organizational, and individual levels to enable better decisions about preparedness, says Douglas Pierce, a senior associate with Perkins+Will in Minneapolis. The new standards will also encourage building designers, construction executives, and other real estate professionals to integrate resilience into planning and operations for all capital projects.
Altogether, these advances help build muscle and readiness for the next severe event, improving everyone’s ability to weather the next storm with less business and personal loss. In doing so, they will help coalesce the nation’s communities—the third leg of the stool—making us all more prepared, more resilient, and even more confident about the next big storm.
Janice Barnes is principal and global discipline leader for Planning and Strategies.
