It’s October. Every door creaks, every picture has eyes that follow you, every call is coming from inside the house. Night falls sooner, mist swirls, dry leaves - or footsteps? - whisper along every path. Bats fly out of the tower on the old house at the edge of town, and surely phantom hitchhikers wait along every lonely road. 

Picture these spooky scenes. Where do you see them happening? Everybody knows a spooky place. A place that makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up. Not just dangerous, but eerie. Maybe not now, but years ago when you were a child, you knew a place like this - the haunted house, the old cemetery, maybe just the basement or attic. 

Remember it, then ask yourself: have you really outgrown spooky places? What scares you, and where is it? Maybe it’s Area 51. Or your favorite Bigfoot hotspot. Or Point Pleasant, West Virginia, or (the former) Edmonson, Kentucky. 

We’re justified in fearing some places, because they are contaminated, a scarier scare for the fully grown than whatever’s going bump in the night. Paranormal or aliens or radiation, eerie places are fascinating in a way that your run-of-the-mill dangerous place is not. Show me a dangerous intersection, and I’ll show you a place you avoid but never think about. But what’s eerie combines fear with mystery - and mystery is a potent, enduring universal attractant. 

Mystery, in fact, is one of the aspects of landscapes we find attractive, according to research on the subject. That general rule is this: that we are intrigued by scenes that we can’t immediately understand fully, because they invite exploration and hint that there’s more to be learned from them. Spooky places are mysterious, but they also scare. Two reasons to notice them, remember them, and care what happens to them, for good or ill. Another general rule: we place less value on what’s overgrown and unkempt, because those places look like no one else values them. But what good is a well-maintained spooky place? It’s just ordinary. A greater feeling of abandonment makes an eerie place eerier, and perhaps that much more mysterious/frightening. Our feelings about them are, in a word, contradictory. 

Also contradictory is that spookiness can protect a place. We aren’t indifferent toward places we fear, and indifference is the real enemy here. Indifference is what makes a place invisible, and that invisibility makes it ripe for a new Wal-Mart or subdivision or what have you. That protection can create a space for nature. To see this in action, you wanna see something really scary. Like Chernobyl.

In 1986 an accident at Ukraine’s Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant caused one of its reactors to explode. At least 50 people were killed immediately, and 120,000 residents were evacuated. The site remains radioactive today. A vast 1,000 square mile exclusion zone surrounds the site, including the abandoned city of Pripyat.  

Today, Chernobyl is famous not just for the disaster, but also as a haven for wild horses, elk, boars, bison, and most especially wolves. There’s room for them to live and thrive (radiation notwithstanding) because we humans are too afraid to enter that place enough to disturb them. Chernobyl is the perfect example, because we’re afraid not just of the place, but of objects and resources, like timber, that might be extracted from that place, and it’s a big place - 1,000 square miles! Big enough for wolves to thrive. 

Nuclear contamination is authentically terrifying, but there’s also a thousand horror stories about mutants, people or animals or viruses, and about you yourself becoming mutated. We can’t see radiation or contamination, so we can’t tell if it’s gone or increasing or creeping up behind you. That’s sinister. At this point, thirty-odd years on, the sheer size of the abandoned area around Chernobyl is unnerving because who knows what’s really in there? If you go in and get into trouble, no one can hear you scream. It’s self-perpetuating spooky.

Bring contamination closer to home, subtract the radioactive wolves, and you come to Love Canal. Love Canal is a former subdivision near Buffalo, NY, made infamous as a toxic waste disaster. The homes and, incredibly, an elementary school, were built on the site of an abandoned canal project (hence the name) that was used as a chemical waste dump in the 1940s and 1950s. A disease cluster in the neighborhood prompted grass-roots investigation, revealing that chemicals were leaching through groundwater into area basements and yards, as well as the school playground (!). A lengthy and intense struggle by neighborhood activists (mostly women) led to the relocation of over 900 families, and eventually to the creation of Superfund by the federal government in 1980. The disaster exponentially increased public awareness of the dangers of industrial pollution, particularly in working-class areas (like Love Canal) and minority neighborhoods.

Today the site of these vanished homes is a parcel of approximately one square mile, comprised of meadow, more or less, and scattered trees. It’s a savanna with crumbling driveways and roads, surrounded by chain link fence. A landscape that’s terrifying, if you’re old enough to remember Love Canal as breaking news; unsettling, if you are one of the residents across the road wondering about the genesis of their ailments; welcoming, if you are a rabbit or possum or deer. 

Industrial contamination is scary stuff, and the nature of pollution underground, in ground water, or in the soil, or in your basement courtesy of your sump pump, is, again, hidden and mysterious in its extent and severity. They say it’s gone. Is it? The idea that we’ve unleashed dangers we can’t control, be they industrial or nuclear, is a very disturbing one - and a fascinating one, as illustrated by most Twilight Zone episodes, a lot of science fiction, and any scary story about repeating names while looking in a mirror.   

Spooky/ nature spaces don’t have to be famous. I used to live near Split Rock, an overgrown abandoned quarry and industrial ruin in Syracuse, New York. Already you see the eerieness, right? - “abandoned quarry,” “industrial,” “ruin” - but there’s more: in 1918 a factory making explosives for World War I exploded, creating a horrific fire that killed fifty men and critically injured fifty more.

Today the Split Rock  quarry is a big blank spot on the map, approximately 900 acres of woods and brush - and according to some, paranormal activity. It’s a place where roads dead end, with a few rusty “Danger - no trespassing” signs for atmosphere. There’s plenty of good reasons to leave the place alone: old quarry cliffs and holes, industrial ruins, worrying contamination from that munitions plant, and the very real danger of getting lost in the deep, dark, possibly haunted woods.  While not truly urban, Split Rock is close enough to the city to keep me alert for urban ills. There may be a few of those there, plus the occasional ghost hunter, and surely mountain bikers using the unofficial trails. But mostly, Split Rock is left to the deer and the coyotes and smaller creatures. 

Set aside the specters and the chemicals, look at these places as natural landscapes, and you’ll find they look pretty good. Sinister places benefit us just like any natural area, benefits like cleaner water, reduced flooding, less urban heat island, and carbon sequestration, the whole ecosystem services  bundle. These processes are going on in each of these places; some of them are doing all three. They benefit us even while we fear them, and their enduring mystery helps keep us from destroying them, thus protecting their ability to continue helping us. 

Fear can create space for nature to recolonize, recover, even thrive. Contaminated sites are especially good at discouraging development, partly because they tend to have sticky legal issues about what’s there and whose fault it is and who should do what to clean it up. 

Yet plenty of eerie places have no natural value. Most buildings reputed to be haunted are just buildings - ecologically speaking, the most haunted house is just a house, unless it’s got an overgrown yard. Lots of horrifyingly contaminated brownfields are redeveloped  into utterly mundane things, like freeways or strip malls, and people forget what they were. Even the sites of authentically horrific events like Civil War battles, can struggle against encroaching development. Sites like Chancellorsville, where 24,000 men died in 1863, arguably could benefit from being more spooky, thus helping preserve them. 

What makes the difference, turning an unsettling place into a natural space as well? Is there a way to harness spookiness to help preserve natural areas? Can we use this without it backfiring and creating a place so eerily fascinating that people love it to death? 

Back in the ‘90s, there was an interdisciplinary effort to design a warning landscape to scare away humans (or any other intelligent life) in perpetuity from nuclear waste storage sites like Yucca Mountain and the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. Yucca Mountain, in Nevada, has since gone kaput as a doomsday nuclear storage facility, but the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in neighboring New Mexico is socking away nuclear waste underground, and still asking how to keep people away long after our civilization and language have crumbled into dust. 

Fear, made to act as a warning. Spookiness to save your life. Think about it, maybe while you ignore the tapping at the window and tell yourself the shadows on the stairs aren’t moving.

Also posted on Medium.

I'm writing a section for my next book about climate change predictions for the US by region. Wanna know what those predictions are? Look out the window. 2018 has been a real preview of the future, with above-average temperatures everywhere, soaking rains in the East, and drought and fire in the West. What matters is the long-term trend, not any individual year, but still, 2018 gives us a chance to see which everyday systems are not going to work for the warmer world. Ordinary things we take for granted. Like what happens in your yard when it rains.

Although I started my career as a landscape architect, full disclosure: I have always found stormwater management a little dull. These days precipitation of all kinds has become way more exciting, in the worst way, due to the increasing frequency of seriously scary storms. I write this with one eye on updates about Hurricane Florence inundating the Carolinas. My house up here in Connecticut has weathered nearly 50 years of coastal storms, including Hurricane Irene, in 2011, and Superstorm Sandy  just a year after that. Average annual precipitation here is about 47”. In recent decades, the Northeast as a whole has seen a marked increase - more than 70% - in the amount of rain falling during storms. This is a surprise/not a surprise, because these more frequent, rainier storms are part of climate change predictions for the region. And climate change, as you know, is a show already in progress. 

My house is in the woods between two seasonal creeks, with a walkout basement.  The whole property is sandy soil full of New England rocks, so drainage would seem to be a no-brainer. The previous owners of the house certainly thought so, since this house came to us with its sole drainage strategy as standard gutters and downspouts. This utterly predictable set-up is supposed to catch the water as it runs down the roof, funnel it through to eight points around the base of the house, and dump it out on the ground there, at the end of the downspouts. Those downspouts? They end 8” from the foundation of the house. A few have splash blocks that carry the water 24” from the foundation, if they don’t overflow. An absolutely typical setup, found on countless houses, maybe even yours.

What’s wrong with this? It works as intended, which means all the water captured by the gutters is dumped right next to the foundation, at the end of those downspouts. There the water can infiltrate into that rocky, sandy soil and go on its way through the hydrologic cycle and out of my life, and that works fine - most of the time. The walls of our basement testify that it didn’t work fine once, maybe twice, in the life of the house, when a flooding event marked the walls a few inches above the floor. Hmm. 

So we extend the downspouts, which is ugly, easy, and temporary. We need something more permanent, which would, in the past, have meant running those downspouts into a set of pipes to take that water, underground, to one of our creeks. The easiest way to route those pipes is across the driveway, which a landscaper suggested we do. You don’t really know what’s under a 50-year-old gravel driveway, but it’s probably not solid bedrock, a distinct possibility anywhere else in the yard. 

But wait: think about that tried-and-true set of underground pipes and the gutters in 10” (Irene) or 20” of rain? (Sure, 20” is a lot of rain, but Hurricane Harvey (2017) dumped up to 60” of rain on Texas, so…) Simply: everything overflows, and everything backs up. Only so much water can fit through those pipes at once, then water starts to pool. Water coming from the house and backing up means way too much water around the house’s foundation, and that means way too much (ie any) water inside the house. 

If you don’t want a lake in your basement, you need drainage meant to handle a deluge-worth of water. Yet it’s overkill to run the LA River through your yard. It’s hideous, and it’s right outside your house, and also: groundwater recharge is a thing. Sure, Connecticut’s had two badass storms in the last seven years, but it’s also just emerged from a two-year drought, because climate change is about weirder weather, not just warmer weather. Who wants to spend the next drought staring at a yard built for floods? 

A layered system seems to be the answer: a normal rainy day system to work all the time, with a gullywasher system for the next epic storm. The gullywasher layer doesn’t have to work very often, but when it’s needed, it really has to work, because it’ll be that epic storm. When the deluge comes, you’ll need to get in and out. Maybe that’s the classic supermarket run for bread and milk, but it could be for emergency services to rescue you. It could even be for you to evacuate. It’s important, that rare thing in home landscaping that actually is life or death. So nope, keep that pipe away from the driveway, aka the sole route in and out. Look around and imagine a foot or two of rain, and give it somewhere to flood that isn’t where you’ll be or how you’ll get out. 

My strategy is something like this: some of those underground pipes attaching to the downspouts, but with the ground surface sloped to form swales that will move the water away from the house and into the creeks when all hell breaks loose. An old idea, the dry well, may come into play here, too, as a way to provide a place for water to pile up, so to speak, in the epic storm, and a place for water to infiltrate the rest of the time. Circling back to that recent drought, this also could be a good place to install a cistern, if the next drought or the one after that is worse. 

If climate change affects simple home landscaping to this extent, it really does affect everything. The strategy of layering everyday systems with ones for catastrophic events is a good one, and maybe one that can work elsewhere. Your yard seems ridiculously trivial, but aren’t you likely to shelter at home if/when the big one hits? A little planning can create a lot of resilience, or at least more than you’ve got now, exactly where you’ll need it when the storm comes. 

This post is a preview of a sidebar in my upcoming book about the neglected city, Design by Deficit. Also posted on Medium. 

If you spend a lot of time outdoors, like I do, you’re more or less perpetually alarmed about Lyme disease. Even more alarming are the array of other tick-borne diseases  that are way scarier, but reported at much lower levels - SO FAR!! As always, it’s easy to panic, and difficult to know what to do. 

Those rare-but-scary other diseases make solutions that only work on Lyme, like vaccinations, only so promising. More promising are solutions targeting these diseases’ common factor: what people are doing, what ticks are doing, and where they meet each other. 

There’s some surprising tidbits to be found in this. Like this: most people are infected with Lyme in their own yards, during daily activities, not out in the woods on that hike or camping trip. Maybe this is because we think about ticks in the woods but we don’t at home. Or perhaps people who choose to be out in the woods are people more likely to know about ticks and take those precautions - you were wearing special hiking clothes anyway - while people doing daily activities in their yards are just people, without that self-selection effect. 

You can’t stay in the house forever, so can you de-tick your yard or de-Lyme your ticks? Another surprising fact: deer aren’t the main villains here. The tick in question is the deer tick (aka blacklegged tick), so white-tailed deer get blamed for this modern plague. But a closer look at the life cycle of Lyme-infected ticks reveals the key middleman is much smaller and more common: the white-footed mouse. As mice tend to be, they are around in large numbers, unnoticed, and closer than you think. You see deer, but not mice. This particular mouse likes woodsy areas and their edges. Your yard will do fine, especially if you live in a heavily wooded area like much of New England, ground zero for Lyme. 

It’s tough to exclude mice from your yard. You can fence out deer, but just try fencing out mice. What really works to suppress mice is eating them. Since you probably don’t want to try that yourself, it’s lucky that foxes are very happy to do that job. A 2017 study found that indeed, where there are more foxes (and some other European predators, where the study was set), there are lower numbers of Lyme-infected ticks and ticks in general. Surprising again, the key dynamic in play seemed to be that mice move around less when there are predators around, as the study’s authors speculated. There are still mice around, but they are kept under wraps by the foxes, so they encounter fewer ticks. 

Red foxes are champion mouse eaters, and where foxes are, there tend to be other creatures. Some of these, like opossums and possibly turkeys, eat a lot of ticks, which helps in a different way. Others could help in a less direct but effective way by serving as alternate hosts for ticks. This means the ticks bite other creatures, like squirrels, that are less likely to carry Lyme disease instead of disease-carrying white-footed mice, and therefore never become infected with Lyme. You may still get bitten, but you won’t get infected if the tick that bites you doesn’t carry Lyme. 

How do you get foxes on board in your backyard fight against tick-borne disease? You do it with landscape management, looking at your yard and neighborhood as habitat. This starts with trees. A landscape with very small patches of forest is good for mice, but not larger animals that prey on them or on ticks. A landscape with larger patches of forest has the potential to house foxes and possums and so on, thus keeping the lid on mice and ticks and Lyme.  In urban areas, tree canopy is often referred to as the critical factor in the presence of foxes and other larger wildlife. It stands to reason, though, that what’s under those trees matters, too, as well as what kind of trees they are. More diverse woodlands with greater diversity of plants at ground level, especially native plants, tend to be home to greater diversity of wildlife. 

What else makes up the low-Lyme landscape? At a more detailed level, it’s less obvious what’s good and bad. Leaf litter is the natural cover of the forest floor, but it’s also habitat for deer tick nymphs and larvae. Brush and tall grass create good wildlife cover, but they are also the preferred spots for adult ticks to lie in wait for someone to bite. Every creature needs a water source, but dampness and humidity are key to deer tick survival. Obviously there are a series of trade-offs here that merit more study to discover the right balance. Foxes in particular need den sites, hollow logs or buildings to dig under or similar. But these same denning sites can also make the fox’s larger cousin, the coyote, at home, which brings us to one last surprising fact.  

Where there are coyotes, there are fewer foxes, because the bigger, stronger coyotes tend to kill the foxes. So if more foxes means less Lyme, do more coyotes mean fewer foxes and therefore more Lyme? That’s exactly the suspicion of a few researchers studying the matter, who note that the key factor in the outbreak of Lyme in New England may have been the arrival and establishment of coyotes in the region. 

So stay tuned, but consider what a low-Lyme landscape might be. Maybe also consider what the fox is worth to you that keeps you from getting Lyme disease, and what the forest that nurtures that fox is worth, too. The assortment of creatures living around us and the web of their interactions with each other plays a surprisingly key role here. You can surround yourself entirely with pavement and buildings. You can do the vegetated version of that with closely mown, chemical-soaked lawn. Or you can have a diverse, intact woodland edge ecosystem that works just well enough to allow predators like foxes to keep the mice and their ticks in balance, without making coyotes too much at home. Wild, but not too wild; just wild enough.

 Also posted on Medium.

(Based on my November 3, 2017, presentation at “Community Renewal and its Discontents,” a conference at Albany Law School’s Government Law Center) 

Picture a vacant lot. If nothing comes to mind, the one in the photo will do. What would you find there? Litter, probably. Rats, perhaps. Maybe an old tire or two. Your first answer is probably not “climate change mitigation” or “better mental health.” But expectations aside, you could be getting both from that vacant lot and other accidental urban natural areas.

Weeds fight climate change? Well, yes, but not weeds especially - plants do. The list of ways urban trees mitigate climate change impacts is impressive, but they boil down to this: cleaner air, cleaner water and less flooding, cooler local temperatures, and better livability in the city generally. Trees aren’t weeds (except when they are), but any plant growing on that vacant lot shares some of the salient characteristics. They all photosynthesize. They all raise the relative humidity around them. They all sequester carbon within their structures. They all allow more rainwater to soak into the often-compacted urban soil. At core, “weeds” vs. “trees” is a distinction of human perception, and these climate benefits depend on what plants do and how they interact with the physical world, not how or whether we see those plants. True, some of the benefits of urban trees depend on the larger overall size of the trees to cast shade, but then again, some weedy species, like tree of heaven (Ailanthus altissima) or buckthorn (Rhamnus spp.), can get pretty big. Bottom line: look at that vacant lot again, and take a deep breath.

While you breathe, relax, because that same urban wild is also benefiting your mental health. Again, the list of mental health benefits from urban trees is lengthy, and again, it’s mostly about trees. In summary, humans evolved in natural environments, and therefore, we do better in some important ways when we can see natural environments. We think better, we feel better, and we treat each other better. Research on these effects usually shows a small benefit, but a (statistically) significant one, and these are easy benefits to get, with little downside. The research on benefits to mental health falls into three categories: benefits related to getting more exercise, benefits related to better social cohesion, and benefits related to stress reduction. Do you get these benefits from weeds as well as from trees? Yes, at least some of the time, but what matters here is how we see the weeds. Is that vacant lot a danger or an oasis? Are those weeds wildflowers or a home for vermin? Is that a deer or an assailant hiding in the underbrush?

That ambiguity makes it essential that we know whose health we’re trying to improve with these urban wilds and their benefits. Who you are makes a difference in how you see a given wild, and who you are also often makes a difference in where you live within a particular city. The demographic group, particularly race/ethnicity and gender, of the viewer can make a difference in how s/he views unmaintained vegetation, particularly whether it is threatening or desirable. The level of environmental education a person has, as well as how urban or rural a place s/he grew up in, can also matter.

More useful than sweeping statements about perception and demographic groups: it matters where you are in proximity to the wild area in question. You might enjoy the view from your 10th floor office while I worry about the overgrown lot across the street, but we could be looking at the same vegetated land. Each health benefit of urban wilds has its own geography. Some benefits, like heat island reduction, are best experienced by those closest to the wild site. Some costs, like depression of property values, are, too. Other benefits, like vegetated views and downstream reduction in flooding, may be gained by people too far away from the wild site to be affected by nearby burdens like increased pollen count or disease-carrying ticks. The same urban wild can simultaneously provide benefits to some and burdens to others, or some benefits and burdens to the same people at the same time. It’s not simply good or bad. It’s…both. 

The question that matters, then, is how to manage wilds in your city for the most benefit and least burden to those most in need. What parcels are more valuable as wilds than as redevelopment, and why? What neighborhoods have the greatest health needs and the fewest resources with which to meet them? For parcels that remain wild, how best can they be managed to be healthy for nearby residents and positively viewed by the general public?

Climate change and healthcare share an urgent need for on-the-ground action that transcends contentious debate. Both are complex problems poorly suited to soundbite solutions. Both are negatively affecting the health of countless people, right now, today. If you had something that could make a difference in both areas without the need for political will or legislative action, wouldn’t you use it, even if the difference it made was small? Look out your window. That small difference may be closer than you think.

If you're going to be in Albany (New York) on November 3, stop by and say hello! I'm speaking about the health aspects of urban wilds on the panel on Shrinking Spaces and Community Development. Keynote looks great, and... it's free! For a bonus point, City Wild Seminar alum Jordyn Conway is helping plan the conference in her current position with Albany Law's Government Law Center. How can you resist? See you there!

Full conference info here.

Also posted on Medium.

​Call it biking the urban wild. Portland, Oregon, is developing a citywide off-road trail network, called the Portland Off-road Cycling Master Plan. Conventional planning processes will produce a network of single-track trails through natural areas, instead of the much more common paved bike/pedestrian trails. Portland is reported to be inspired in this effort by the broad popularity of mountain biking within the area, but the advantages of “wild” urban trails over conventional multi-use paths are worth considering anywhere. A network of single-track through the city is a network of urban wilds, with a built-in community of people to use them. 

What are these advantages? First, there’s the array of benefits to physical and mental health that come with exposure to everyday nature, particularly vegetation. Key to this list are lower perceived stress, greater time spent exercising, and improved mental focus. These three benefits lead to a host of secondary effects, from lower blood pressure to better mood and social relationships. Research on this nature-health connection generally finds that benefits are significant, but small, meaning that the ideal way to benefit from them is through activities done on an everyday basis. Thus, the trail through the natural area across the street is potentially much better for your health than the trail at the state park twenty miles away. It’s the everyday that makes the difference. 

Key to the the mental health benefits is mindfulness, or the necessity of being present and focused on the moment. The more rugged surface of unpaved trails promotes this, as does the narrowness of single-track. The limited views through trees and shrubs promote the feeling of being away from the city, even in locations well within city limits. This feeling of being away, or “extent,” is also key to achieving health benefits from nature, as is the feeling that a landscape can’t be understood completely at a glance, that it contains scope for exploration. 

Biking or running on a trail is obviously good for the trail user’s health, but it’s also good for everyone else’s health, in terms of the climate change mitigation benefits of urban wilds. The abundant vegetation of natural areas in cities sequesters carbon, which aids in offsetting climate change. These same natural areas also help cities adapt to the impacts of a warmer, more volatile climate, through lowering the temperature of adjacent areas and creating more area for rainwater from storms to infiltrate.  

Urban trail networks of any kind fight climate change by promoting human-powered transportation over cars, but an urban off-road network in an outdoorsy town like Portland goes further. If many people - Portland found 12% of county residents - are already doing single-track recreation, they are likely driving to those trails. Trails in the city eliminate at least some of those trips. This is not to say that trail users will never drive out of town, but as with everything having to do with lowering our impact on climate change, it is what you do routinely that matters, not the special occasion. It's the Tuesday night ride, not what you do one Saturday each summer.

An urban wild network promises major advantages to local wildlife and its ability to withstand the disruption of climate change. A substantial challenge for wildlife of warming temperatures and changing precipitation levels is the ability to move fast enough to keep pace with a livable climate. For some creatures, this means moving up in elevation or farther north to stay with cooler temperatures, while for others it means moving to stay with adequate moisture levels. Cities and many suburbs are obstacles to this movement, because they interrupt the habitat necessary to allow wildlife to travel. This fragmentation of habitat is offset by urban wilds, especially those that occur in a connected network, because the wild areas provide wildlife corridors, a kind of safe route for creatures to move through the city. Even manicured lawn, like in the top photo, is inhospitable to many organisms. Even though it’s green, it lacks sufficient shelter and may well lack adequate food and water sources as well. 

There are more benefits - reduced maintenance, improved views from adjacent properties - but this short list illustrates the advantages of a wild trail network like this in an urban area, that are not available with a more conventional trail network. Intriguingly, a wild trail network may be much less expensive, and therefore far more feasible, to build in urban areas that already have ample amounts of vacant lots, brownfields, and other urban wild spaces. Traditional trails are surprisingly expensive to build, so the cost difference between simply adding single-track to existing wild areas and clearing those areas,  establishing lawn, and constructing an asphalt trail, could be quite substantial. Since urban wild spaces are usually seen as waste space, using these spaces more or less as they are to get a desirable recreation and health benefit is well worth considering, for many places other than Portland. Maybe your town needs some killer in-town single-track, too.

This post begins with the foundational assumption - foundational fact, really - that the world is warming. Our climate is changing, and that’s not an assumption, that’s a fact. Last year was the second warmest year on record in the US; 2012 was the warmest year recorded. We experienced a series of climate-related storm/fire/flood events, and around the world we've seen several extreme droughts in the last few years. 

It’s easy to find people, and when I say “people,” I mean pundits and politicians, who are eager to convince you that climate change is a theory, that it’s not proven, and/or that there’s nothing we can do about it. These claims are politically charged, and in the dark magic of our times, that makes the facts that we just saw politically charged, EVEN THOUGH THEY ARE FACTS.

Our task here is not to debate the cause of climate change or what actions should be taken to limit greenhouse gas emissions and eventually to reduce them. Our task, regardless of each of your beliefs and place along the political spectrum, is to discuss the city in a warmer world, and the facts demonstrate that it is a warmer world. 

So: what next? What does the heat of a warmer world mean for urban environments and their residents? What does it mean for urban design? 

We know quite a bit about climate change at this point. Once the Pope and 190+ countries get on board with something, it’s officially big news. We, in this class, know more about climate change now thanks to the readings recommended by Rachel May at SU Sustainability and tweeted @susandieterlen with #citybynext. Rachel also recommends Climate Wire, a subscription-only resource you can access here . She also recommended Vox and Grist more generally. New information is constantly coming out about climate change, so you need to stay up to date with resources like theses.  

Some of the highlights (?) of climate change impacts at the scale of the postindustrial city include more unpredictable or extreme weather (called “global weirding”) and its impacts in turn, including flooding and landslides, extreme heat events, and power outages due to storm events. While some places (California?) are becoming drier, here in the Northeast we expect to become rainer, which brings a different set of challenges. There’s a substantial public health angle here, not just from heat and natural disasters, but from infectious disease shifts due to changing weather and climate refugees. Declining air quality due to more pollen and mold, as well as ground-level ozone, is an issue, particularly in urban areas where air quality is already poor. 

In fact, one of the more insidious and sinister aspects of climate change and the city is that many climate change impacts turn up the heat, in a somewhat dreadful play on words, under existing urban problems. Climate change impacts makes these problems wicked-er. Combined sewers overflow more as rainfall and storm events increase. Inner-city asthma rates increase due to that declining air quality. Already-vulnerable populations take the brunt of extreme heat events, a killer that flies under the radar but that the CDC takes very seriously. Inequality matters more in a warmer world. Resilience becomes more necessary all the time.

Whenever you read this, chances are excellent that there will be a new story about some aspect of climate change and its impacts out today. We in environmental design fields are grappling with how to design, build, and retrofit places in this new context. It’s tempting to view this as a game of catch-up or a huge limitation - “climate change ate my design.” I propose that climate change impacts are a constraint, like any other constraint in that established design language of “opportunities and constraints.” And like any other constraint, it’s inspiration waiting to happen. The biggest obstacle to a great design is a blank slate. You need some boundaries, some context, to make it real enough to mean anything. This isn’t Sketch-Up. 

Should you need it, there is ample motivation or inspiration in the need to reduce greenhouse gas levels - to reduce, not just mitigate. The challenge lies in breaking this global effort down to the scale of a single design decision. What does a warmer world mean for this flooring tile, this section of curb, or this window?

How can urban design simultaneously address climate change at multiple scales? 

Let’s find out.



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WHAT DO I DO FOR CLASS? 

• Read this post and click on all the links within it. 
• Read the articles; review (that means look through, but don’t read every word) the websites.
• Think about what you agree with, what you disagree with, and what doesn’t make sense to you. 
• Come to class prepared to talk to your classmates about it.