Offering experience, intelligence, and wisdom for climate action
As the authors of the Charter for the New Urbanism did decades ago, again CNU has produced an urgently needed document of great value. A Necessary Response: The Climate Action Handbook for Urbanists is an impassioned manifesto that clearly connects the principles and practices of New Urbanism to the action agendas of climate resilience, adaptation, and mitigation. While that connection has been apparent to those who understood the big-picture and long-term benefits of New Urbanism, the Handbook delineates them compellingly and specifically. Compact development is climate action. Transit-oriented development is climate action. Ecologically-sound development is climate action. Lasting quality in design and construction is climate action. Community engagement and empowerment is climate action.
In the Handbook’s Introduction, Mallory Baches succinctly summarizes the indispensable role urbanists must fulfill in climate action: “to save the planet, by saving our communities.” Any uncertainty about the importance of the built environment in combating climate change is dispelled in the first chapter: Measuring the Impact of Urbanism. The following chapter, Climate Mitigation: A Shifting Landscape, shows how deeply climate change is already impacting communities, and further, is sowing the seeds for a dramatic redistribution of population across the United States. The first section of the Handbook concludes with lessons from Hurricane Maria. In Disaster Recovery: A New Urbanist Perspective, Ricardo Álvarez-Díaz traces how Puerto Rico went from chaos to “organic” recovery, marshaled both tactical and strategic assets (“from water bottles to placemaking”), suffered the paralysis of recovery institutions, and awoke to the importance of strong local leadership.
The main body of the Handbook is titled: Response Tools from the New Urbanism. Thirty-eight specific “Actions” are sorted into three categories (Resilience, Adaptation, Mitigation), although many actions in fact provide benefits in more than one category. The Handbook uses the three terms as they are broadly applied across many fields, thereby associating CNU’s Actions to a host of other climate action frameworks. To fully appreciate the usefulness of the Actions also requires understanding that the impacts of climate change are experienced as both “catastrophic” and “chronic.” Action 1, Strengthen Social Bonds, will resonate with those who attended CNU34 and heard Eric Klinenberg’s keynote address on the importance of social infrastructure. More than half of the Handbook’s Actions fall within the subsection on Adaptation. Many address ways to create urban neighborhoods where higher temperatures are mitigated through landscape, water, and design strategies aligned with regional climate and local microclimate conditions. The subsection on Mitigation is fundamentally a restatement of the foundational urban concepts of the CNU Charter.
The following chapter of the Handbook, Implementation of Climate Action, is comprised of four essays written by CNU luminaries, each showing how the lens of climate change does in fact pose heightened challenges for New Urbanism. How Communities Respond, penned by Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, makes it clear that while global warming and climate change are truly global issues, responding in the built environment remains locally specific. Jennifer Hurley’s essay, Effective Public Engagement, reminds us as designers and technologists that genuine and authentic community empowerment is the strongest force New Urbanism can unleash. Similarly, New Urbanism and the Long View, written by Andres Duany, reflects on the reciprocal relationship between the intensified challenges of climate change and the “maturing” of New Urbanism’s mission. In demanding heightened outcomes, climate change also provides CNU opportunities to climb to a higher plateau of market and political relevance. The final essay by Douglas Farr, Decarbonization for Urbanists, reminds us that urbanism, including New Urbanism, is only part of the larger ecosystem of human settlement patterns and also Earth’s ecology. Ever practical, Farr advocates for all-electric urbanism as arguably the highest impact action urbanists can take to mitigate society’s persistent and increasing appetite for consuming energy.
The final section of the Handbook presents eight New Urban communities as climate action case studies. Their names may be familiar: Civano in Tucson, Arizona; Panama City, Florida; Maplewood in Ithaca, New York; Culdesac in Tempe, Arizona; Norfolk, Virginia; Charleston, South Carolina; The Republic of Nauru; and Denver, Colorado. The case studies vary greatly in character, scale, and the scope of New Urban interventions as well as climate vulnerabilities and the corresponding resilience, adaptation, and mitigation action agendas. It is a useful aggregation that reflects the points made by Plater-Zyberk: climate change is effecting communities everywhere yet the responses must be regionally and locally appropriate.
The approach and realization of CNU’s Climate Action Handbook for Urbanists are both admirable. For newcomers to New Urbanism, the Handbook provides an accessible yet thorough introduction to the pillars of the CNU Charter and their value in our time demanding urgent climate action—urgent to anyone and everyone willing to responsibly face Twenty-first Century realities. And for dedicated CNU members and other urbanists working to heal the scars of modern-era urban renewal and sprawl, the Handbook provides resources and references useful to a wide spectrum of communities and challenges.
The experience, intelligence, and wisdom encapsulated in the Handbook, gives urbanists a comprehensive picture of their agency. From detailing everyday appurtenances of streetscapes to envisioning generational community evolution, the urbanist’s scope of work affords opportunities to act for resilience, adaptation, and mitigation. Yet it is equally important for urbanists—and the Congress for the New Urbanism—to stretch beyond expected roles. Urbanists must also be firmly intolerant of the paralysis experienced in Puerto Rico and become fierce advocates for the “mature” New Urbanist mission by converting market and political resistance into engines for progress. The urgency of the climate crisis demands it.
The Climate Action Handbook, published by Andelani Press, is available here.
