California cities seek united front to counter earthquake and flood threats

http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2014/mar/19/californian-cities-san-francisco-threat-quake-flooding

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Shortly after 6am in the morning, at home in Los Angeles but in the midst of preparing to fly to the 100 Resilient Cities "Agenda-Setting Workshop" in San Francisco, I felt an earthquake. The 4.4-magnitude temblor , epicentered not far from UCLA about 10 miles away, did no major damage, but still served as a potent reminder of California's vulnerability to shifting tectonic plates.

This is as true, of course, for the cities to its north, four of which – San Francisco, Berkeley, Oakland, and Alameda – the Rockefeller Foundation has selected for inclusion in its 100 Resilient Cities Program . Discussions of what exactly makes a city resilient, and how the amenities provided by the program might make it more so, took up much of the schedule for the two-day workshop, the program's first to include multiple cities.

It took place on San Francisco's Presidio, quite possibly the most picturesque location in a picturesque city, in the conference rooms of the Golden Gate Club, a well-appointed venue with an exquisitely expensive-looking view of the eponymous bridge – just the kind of resonant urban icon, I can't help but note, that tends to topple first in special effects-intensive disaster movies. The subjects of each session put one further in the mind of large-scale destruction of the built environment at the hands of nature: "Sea Level Rise", "Seismic Events", "Wildfires and Urban Conflagration".

Los Angeles' earthquake didn't stop me from getting to the airport – though whether the arduous freeway traffic jam on the way there had anything to do with it, nobody could explain – it did start me thinking about a city's ability to respond when what the insurance companies call "acts of God" disrupt their established order. This issue occupied the minds of the mayors attending and speaking at the workshop: San Francisco's Edwin Lee, Oakland's Jean Quan, and Berkeley's Tom Bates.

Their three cities, together with Alameda, a smaller city spread across Alameda Island and Bay Farm Island, make up much of the densely urbanised San Francisco Bay Area. Each has grown in a precarious location, especially in regard to its potential for earthquakes and flooding.

The mayors thus spent much of their time at the workshop talking about resilience in terms of effective disaster prevention and response: how they've innovated so far, the ideas they've adapted (and in a form of friendly regional competition, even "stolen") from one another, how best to shore it up their collective resistance to these natural, inevitable shocks in the future.

They spoke also of visiting and learning from such well-known sites of recent high-profile urban catastrophe as New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and Kobe after the Great Hanshin Earthquake. The Bay Area itself is itself a notable site, of course, having endured 1989's Loma Prieta Earthquake and the Oakland firestorm almost exactly two years later. Without certain resiliency measures their cities already had in place back then, Quan and Bates said, their cities could have emerged with more permanent harm, or burned down entirely.

But as the heads of newly designated Resilient Cities, these mayors were never going to settle simply for damage control; all reeled off a host of (intended and already implemented) programmes of home structural retrofitting, citizen emergency training, fire readiness, more robust utility connection, population health maintenance and improvements in "neighborhood cohesion".

For support in this work, each mayor will look to their own chief resilience officer, a position that is meant to facilitate the design and implementation of a "resilience vision" across all city departments which, even in the most functional cities, don't always cooperate.

San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley, have not, alas, necessarily enjoyed reputations as the most functional of cities. Part of that has to do with the competing economic and aesthetic conceptions of the urban future, bordering at times on the utopian, that struggle for supremacy within them.

Their mayors spoke proudly of the oneupmanship which led to such nationally trend-setting environmental laws as bans on polystyrene containers and plastic bags. Yet they also acknowledged the difficulty inherent in combining one progressive policy with another, as when Berkeley found it needed to mandate expensive seismic retrofitting on their large proportion of rent-controlled properties.

At lunchtime, I heard a caterer ask one of the workshop's attendees if he needed something vegan, or something gluten-free. "Actually," the man replied, a faint note of irritation in his voice, "I'd like both." The response illustrated an important psychological slant of the San Francisco Bay Area: many of its people not only desire what they consider a more evolved way of life (be it vegan, gluten-free, or protected from the risk of disaster), they also feel a basic expectation has gone unfulfilled if they don't find it provided for.

This trait is no surprise in a city where such forward-thinking operations as the Long Now Foundation – dedicated to considering the next 10,000 years, no less – headquarter themselves. But even the next hundred years, the three mayors present acknowledged, will bring an increasing intensity and frequency of environmental shocks, and with it a heightened need for thoroughly thought-through response procedures and preventative measures.

There again, observed Michael Berkowitz, managing director for 100 Resilient Cities at the Rockefeller Foundation, a city does not achieve resilience by pondering disaster alone. "All of your vocabulary is around shocks," he told the four cities' assembled representatives. "We need to think about stresses, too."

Berkowitz cited Detroit, a grim example of a city brought down not suddenly by any one undeniably calamitous event, but by the slow-acting poisons of corruption, disintegration, and a faltering single industry. This left delegates pondering what the cities of the Bay Area, with their ever-increasing population of new stakeholders from Silicon Valley (and those oft-bemoaned "Google buses"), might run the risk of overlooking as their identities change.

San Francisco and its neighbours may well prove resilient against the much-discussed "Big One", but how best to stay resilient in the face of subtler, less vividly feared challenges in the meantime? The first step, whether for internationally known and respected San Francisco or the quaint and low-profile Alameda, falls to their new chief resilience officers – tasked with the formidable challenge, especially in the Bay Area, of unifying a vision of resilience across each city's multitude of departments. I wish them luck.

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