The need and opportunity to engage Resilient Design

[Donald R. Watson]

Folks:

Like many True Sustainability participants, I have been involved in sustainable design, energy and environment since the 1970s. I also had a hand in rewording the AIA COTE Top Ten principles in the 1990s. I am now involved in concepts of "Resilient Design." "Resilience" is different and distinct from our prior conceptions because it is incorporating lessons learned, knowledge and vary rapidly emerging tools and methods from the natural disaster mitigation disciplines. These disciplines like ours have a 20 to 30 year history, evident in conferences sponsored by the Natural Hazards Center, U.Colorado, (among many others worldwide). Resilience is an equally strong and important thread to our increasingly multidisciplinary professions and practices. It is not merely an extension of sustainability. It is a critical enrichment and on some points overriding set of principles, with some terms, methods, and practices that are entirely new to the sustainability forum.  If sustainability practitioners do not understand the special issues of disaster preparedness, we will not qualify for a seat at the table. Or more specifically: if we as planners, designers and built environment professionals do not fully engage the issues of resilience and disaster preparedness and bring these to bear in the public realm of policy and action, then our future cities and environments will be determined by the incidents and accidents of the natural disasters they experience, not the hand and mind of the designer and builder. The state of art of work in resilience is very dynamic and dramatic. Its emergence reminds me almost exactly of the early 1970s when so many of us stayed up day and night enlivened by what we then called "energy conscious design" and "environmentally responsible design," those clumsy phrases now reduced to practice in green building, LEED, and other topics so well articulated on the TrueSustainability website. But there should be a seperate topic definition for the special and new considerations of resilience and preparedness, not to exclude the others, but to give focus on what for many of the green community will be entirely new insights, experiences and ways of working. Otherwise I will have to look elsewhere for leading edge discussion of design for the 21st century.

Donald Watson, FAIA

[James L. Binkley]

Don,

 

I completely agree.

Let me know how I can continue to support you, Dan Williams and others.

Sincerely,

Jim

James Binkley, FAIA