How can we develop knowledge systems for urban resilience to climate change?
At present, most global cities are vulnerable to climate change, urbanisation and the capacity to sustain ecosystem services. These events are often inadequately addressed through urban management and policies to navigate change and build capacity to face the uncertainty of climate change impacts. As urbanisation becomes a global multi-dimensional process, cities will need to rapidly transform its urban governance to build capacity with the use of experimentation and innovation to face climate variabilities and uncertainties. Using the example of Phoenix, Arizona, we can expand our knowledge on how cities can help address these challenges using a resilience theory for human-dominated ecosystems.
Before we get into the example of Phoenix, there are two scales to aid urban management and policies to address urban resilience suggested by Batty (2008). The first scale is the ‘resilience in cities’ that deals with sustaining local-to-regional ecosystem that involves stakeholders such as urban planners and real estate companies that have the knowledge on the urban ecological process. The second scale is ‘resilience of cities’, which is to utilise a system of cities to exchange ideas that better prepares to respond the social and bio-physical factors between cities. Usually, the second scale involves a broader category of stakeholders such as technical networks and ecosystem management in the society.
The urban population in Phoenix is increasing their vulnerability to climate change impacts that triggers disaster. Due to sprawling and the low density development, Phoenix has experienced rapid development and grew its population by 8.5% between 2017 and 2018. The dispersed urban layout requires Phoenix to have the availability of land and supply of water that can be used for agriculture and open space that provide varieties of ecosystem services (Rosenzweig et al., 2019).
The location of Phoenix sits between Salt River Valley and the edge of the Sonoran Desert. With the rapid conversion of agricultural land to urbanised lands with dry desert climate, the urban expansion has been supported by water supply projects from the Salt River and canal transporting Colorado River water to Phoenix. However the water supply is currently running low in Colorado River. This water issue increases the uncertainty with the variability of rainfall patterns along with different experimentation to climate change scenarios in precipitation and change in air temperature. From a resilience perspective, the governance needs to sustain and improve its urban transition to a more adaptive capacity and build transformative capacity to face urban changes. In this case, Phoenix has been proactively securing water for the growth of urban areas and to irrigate crops in the desert (Rosenzweig et al., 2019).
Alternatively, the state of Phoenix has provided a more resilient urban design approach with national polices and technological innovation to create a scattered urban layout that requires great consumption of land and water. In this human-dominated ecosystem, Arizona has sparked collaborations with 20 local governments in the region to face the ecological uncertainties and emergency approaches with funding from the US National Science Founding to develop systems dynamics modelling of climate scenarios (ASU, 2019). This has demonstrated the relationship between social dynamics, the urban structure and the ability to sustain ecosystem, building a resilience system of cities. The “Sustainable Cities Network” administered by member cities with water managers, practitioners and interested citizens have shared interdisciplinary knowledge to implement innovative strategies to response the uncertainties of water provisioning (Ernstson et al., 2010).
Sustainability and resilience depend on innovative capacity. Bettencourt et al. (2007) highlighted the innovation is the key factor to urban growth and it is correlated to economic value and technical solutions that are all responsible for the attractiveness of a city. The strive for innovation will share knowledge and create public space for investment and collaboration that enable new perspective on human-in-nature and facilitate meaningful policies. This means that partnerships between cities can be solutions to innovate urban infrastructure and present opportunities to support future research and decision-making for the society and the environment. In order to build resilience, practitioners and engineers should also face changes and limitations to construct and frame out the uncertainness of socio-ecological approaches.
From the example of Phoenix, we can be extracted that:
- The knowledge system for urban resilience needs to be examined with experimentation, technology and innovation to promote urban design, guide infrastructure and policies that create opportunities for sustainability.
- The partnerships between the local governments in Phoenix have demonstrated how partnerships can work and the engagement of different stakeholders can share general strategies as a knowledge base for urban resilience and planning.
- Planning policies should define the scales in resilience and bring different stakeholders to value the methodologies with the process of knowledge networking to connect all actors across different scales to improve city life and foster experiments and learning.
At the moment, the contemporary urbanisation is full of uncertainties with climate change and urban expansion. What would you think about the resilience approach of Phoenix to the context of today’s planning disciplines and different urban systems?
If you’ve made it this far and have any new perspective about urban resilience to climate change, feel free to make a comment and exchange ideas!
Reference:
ASU. (2019). Decision Centre for a Desert City, Global Sustainability. Retrieved from March 25, 2020, from https://sustainability.asu.edu/dcdc/
Batty, M. (2008). The Size, Scale, and Shape of Cities. Science. 319(5864), pp.769–771.
Bettencourt, L.M.A., Lobo, J., Helbing, D., Kühnert, C. & West, G.B. (2007). Growth, innovation, scaling, and the pace of life in cities. PNAS. 104(17), pp.7301–7306.
Ernstson, H., E., S., Leeuw, V.D., Redman, C.L., Meffert, D.J., Davis, G., Alfsen, C. & Elmqvist, T. (2010). Urban Transitions: On Urban Resilience and Human-Dominated Ecosystems. AMBIO. 39(1), pp.531–545.
Rosenzweig, B., Ruddell, B.L., McPhillips, L., Hobbins, R., McPhearson, T., Cheng, Z., Chang, H. & Kim, Y. (2019). Developing knowledge systems for urban resilience to cloudburst rain events. Environmental Science and Policy. 99(1), pp.150–159.
Wood, T. (2019). In Era of Drought, Phoenix Prepares for a Future Without Colorado River Water, Yale Environment 360. Retrieved from March 19, 2020, from https://e360.yale.edu/features/how-phoenix-is-preparing-for-a-future-without-colorado-river-water
