Design for adaptation: The climate challengefor New Urbanism

we're gonna let people come in uh for the next minute or two and then we're gonna begin the webinar once again we're letting people come in for a minute and we're going to get started very soon [Music] we're gonna get started in a minute here it's good that happened then so welcome to on the park bench at public square conversation brought to you by the congress for the new urbanism on the park bench presents conversations with thought leaders in new urbanism and allied fields providing an opportunity for the audience to engage in real time the webinar series is a platform for cnu members and like-minded people to engage debate and collaborate on the pressing issues related to urban places and people today we have design for adaptation the climate challenge for new urbanism with elizabeth slater zyburk and the discussion with interviewer rick cole so share your thoughts on hashtag on the park bench www.tinyurl.com otpb feedback i wanted to remind everybody about cnu 30 in oklahoma city coming up next year um save the dates for uh march 23rd through 26th 2022. it's going to be cnu's first in person congress since 2019 very exciting meet your colleagues hear from people who are making a difference in urban design and development witness first hand a city's renaissance a city oklahoma city is is doing so much in so many creative things that others can learn from learn more at cnu.org cnu30 and we've got a very exciting show today with a very distinguished a very distinguished panel elizabeth plato zyburk is malcolm mathison distinguished professor of architecture and director of the master of urban design program at the university of miami she is co-founder of cnu co-founder and principal of dpz co-design she is author of suburban nation a seminal planning book and she is one of the most influential urban designers of our time and rick cole is executive director of cnu rick is the former mayor of pasadena be where he became one of the first u.s elected officials to embrace new urbanism he also served as city manager of azusa ventura in santa monica and he was deputy mayor of los angeles i'm rob studeville editor of cnu's public square and producer of this series today we're going to have a presentation by liz followed by a discussion with rick followed by q a from the audience and so please use the q a function of zoom to ask questions as they occur to you once again this is a very important topic how to help communities adapt to climate change with that i'm going to pass this along to liz to share her screen welcome liz and thank you very much for agreeing to talk about climate change as you know it is one of um congress for new urbanism's three most important focuses and we'll talk more about why that is after your presentation thank you rick and thank you rob um it's a pleasure to be here and um you know this is a big topic so i will have to admit that um whittling it down to um the preparation for discussion was not easy and uh some of this i will dash through but i felt it was important to provide um the background um for a clear discussion and so this is the table of contents um i will not be reading the slides to you all uh but just giving some of the background information along the way um you know i tagged on the un climate change conference logo just to remind us that just now there is a lot of discussion about this and we're bound to be hearing some new news in the near future so um starting with um what the you know i'm just going to take you through a bunch of media because uh the climate change discussion in public has been largely um started with a kind of sensationalist approach to um to the topic um there are a lot of people who have attached themselves to the um to the picture there's a great uh i think belief in innovation that's being presented by many of the topics um i think i must have skipped through naomi klein's book there are other agendas that are being attached to it there are people who are arguing back about the technology and the actions that are being proposed but for the most part um it's all about um reducing emissions and mitigation and um i think adaptation is really in our wheelhouse and that's what i'd like to spend the most time on uh before we get to seeing you in the discussion but um you know part of it is that um uh as various media for various audiences attempt to deal with this um there are in fact solutions being sought um and the electrification of everything recently in the wall street journal i think points to some of that approach but so let's go back to the beginnings and say very quickly what is it we're talking about the science and what are the impacts um the science is essentially looking back um at the sources uh it's a it's an action of discovery um the impacts are is look is about looking forward and thinking about what do we do what are the innovations in creation what kind of creative activity is needed in order to address the impacts and one addresses primarily concerns of mitigation most of the scientists are talking about and trying to help us consider how to reduce uh mitigation but in fact many are speaking to the fact that that takes a long time and we should be addressing adaptation immediately so we don't need you don't need to hear about this there's so many sources that will tell you about why the globe is warming and there are various lists of impacts um this is my list that takes it from um the additional heat that's being generated and um what that how that heat is moving around the globe and having various impacts and of course when you look at these you begin to understand that there are great geographical differences and that's part of what makes it difficult to discuss on any larger level um than let's say reducing emissions so um before getting on to a little bit about mitigation um i just wanted to show this diagram which came up in one of my courses and i thought um is very interesting from the perspective that there are there is of course the long-term historical trajectory but that magical line at 1950 that appears in all these increased population increased energy use increased water use any number of things really points to how recently we have become aware and that the word accelerating uh is obviously um something we need to be paying attention to so the very basics two responses to climate change and notice not solutions but responses mitigation to which in which most of our sustainability activities um that we've been engaging since the 60s and 70s can address but obviously not yet adequately and this speaks to the sources which uh and it's a universal response everyone can deal with uh or address mitigation which is exactly what's going on in the un conference but adaptation which speaks to resilience or responding and responding to impacts is really very regional and very local and that's part of the complication of discussing it or working on it in any way together or collectively which of course is important so um just to review uh minimizing through mitigation universal actions for universal generator generators adaptation regional and local actions um for those impacts which are occurring locally and there's still a great deal of uncertainty which um increases the difficulty of addressing it the chart on the right is something that we've developed at dpc that speaks to the fact that even as you develop tools um there's often a crossover from mitigation to adaptation or it may be the same tool that can deal with both and that doesn't help clarify although it's good news um so uh a few slides on mitigation uh note the 30-year lag time um that any effect from changing our technology or behavior can have and they're really two those two aspects technology and behavior are um kind of an overview of what we can do in order to reduce the generators draw down uh now a much more complete website than that first book is a great place to go learn more about this the sources are divided up into these categories which you've seen before in terms of emission types again in each one of them we can begin to think of the changes that could occur technologically or through behavior and sometimes both industry buildings you know i'm sorry mice i'm just going to go back and show you one my computer seems to be slipping through some slides i wanted to show this one because steve moves on our own uh one of our cnu members has produced this for the wall street journal a while ago so we're already working on this um i would say that cnu is quite prominent in building design transportation changes and even promoting certain kinds of industrial production changes uh the natural environment which um uh we're hearing we're beginning to hear uncertainty about whether this is really um one of our uh wonderful opportunities for absorption of emissions or whether it may be producing uh more than we expected uh we won't go there now so on to adaptation um a little bit more complicated it's not just two kinds of responses but there's really a sequence that runs from defending um a certain con a certain place geographically against the impact accommodating um eventually in some cases retreating and if there is a retreat what might the cleanup be and even the scientists will say the sooner you start the better this is a kind of graphic presentation of the difference between the two um between mitigation and adaptation and i think it's pretty obvious what the differences are so i'll move on now forgive me for this slide because uh probably most of you can't read it but what i wanted to point out and i'll run my cursor through it is that in the adaptation there's a whole series of variables to understand from chronic and catastrophic and each one the public and private sectors have different roles to play and each one of those has a series of sequential actions of defend accommodate retreat and clean up and really the only reason i'm showing this is to say i think that having some kind of structure to understand how all of this works together um is important because otherwise just from uh reading about it in the media it can be very confusing and i think if we want to imagine how any one of us or how our organization deals with uh any aspect of it we need to understand where we are within that structure so using sea level rise at first as an example um you can see a kind of sequence of defense accommodation retreat and finally clean up and these are probably things that many of you have thought before thought of before and just like mitigation which speaks to types of sources adaptation speaks to types of impact or impact vulnerability and once again we can divide it into infrastructure buildings natural environment and a little bit different than mitigation regional networks this is the bayonne bridge in a sequence of photographs that shows the road bed being raised not only for size of ships but anticipation of the water level rising um that took me through too many okay so uh infrastructure adaptation is generally public sector work um it's long-term thinking it's you know the window of change maybe a hundred years so the investments might be rather large buildings although some are public sector primarily private sector and here we can begin to parse in terms of um the type of owner or the type of investor as well as the life of the investment and you can make your own um uh priorities in terms of a list like that but uh at some point i think what this sets us up for is uh where do we spend the money for adaptation in this kind of situation and sometimes the the decisions might be made by the private sector without any attention to larger shared concerns and likewise adapting the natural environment much of it will be adapting on its own agriculture is a managed adaptation and even now we are trying to adapt things like corals um [Music] in a way that we would we haven't historically um and then of course uh the larger patterns of um either trying to save or set aside whole geographical areas of settlement or natural systems but always it comes eventually it gets to the point of consideration considering it economically um what is the what's happening to the regional regional economy um is there a loss of employment uh are there revenue losses for the city um uh and the municipalities so another aspect of adaptation that's important to understand are the fact that there are differences between catastrophic and chronic impacts the catastrophic is usually an event um a storm surge or um an unexpected huge flood and um in terms of the built environment we're thinking of the occasional resilient recovery um the chronic impact is an evolving condition um it's rising groundwater for instance um sunny day flooding as it's called in miami beach and will require or already has required permanent physical changes examples of defending and fortifying a chronic condition can be seen already in miami beach where streets were raised in a particularly low area and pumps were installed what you see on the upper right is not the pump but the generators that are kept above flood level the pumps are underground uh and much larger defending and fortifying for catastrophic uh events uh another miami example um our the army corps of engineers has recently landed on us and said they have the solution um that wall which is pictured in a miami herald article you'll you might notice the tiny bit of graffiti that whoever was putting that newspaper photograph together uh put on the wall uh it later disappeared in the electronic version of the paper but i caught it on paper and um a interestingly enough a developer's counter proposal um uh which was made because of the prospect of the terrible impacts of that wall but anyway this is about um a man-made mechanical more often than not mechanical responses although there's more and more knowledge about the natural ones that could be used so that was about defense and fortification and moving on to accommodation you can see one place which has been living with water um literally for a long time uh venice um uh which accommodated for many years before its fortification and defense was finally completed those gates at the outer harbor were recently completed and that apparently functioned well during a high water event uh and another we're quite used to um uh event designing for event resilience um catastrophic event resilience around the world some quite old versions such as the paris uh river sand banks and then some of the more modern ones from shared and public spaces to buildings uh but what about some of the other impacts so uh thank you to martin dreiling on the west coast who has done a lot of work on fires and likewise points out that they can be both catastrophic and chronic and that actually there's a certain normalcy to fires and so there's a certain knowledge or predictability that we can work with um slow slide sorry um and he has uh come up with an approach to what might be called fire resistant urban design uh and you see a page from the smart code module um which he produced um to actually give instruction about that um but essentially uh he's speaking that about normalizing fire um in a sense normalizing fire and climate factors to make them less severe uh but as well to understand that actually the location or the geography of where we build is important um what is known out west as the wildland urban interface um so that's a kind of accommodation to fire now there is a whole series of other variables that complicate decision making um and i think by now in all cases one understands that there's a a great potential and likelihood in fact for triage and how do we make those decisions um so the three have i missed them yes um the three responses or the three variables the three main variables are geographic economic and political and i think you can understand the geographic from the flooding and fire perspective the economic always some kind of cost benefit analysis and then the political which obviously can be a kind of wild card but it's essentially about how we invest uh in the changes that need to be made and so um we can begin to see the geography in a place like miami-dade county uh and understand how it might impact economic choices because of the location of certain uh certain items that are important to the regional economy interestingly enough at the beginning of these discussions the public sector was very fearful of making these kinds of maps and they're not yet finalized you can see those were kind of committee drawings the economic factors of course are getting a lot of national attention how long can fema spend money on digging us out of floods or fires i think is clearly before us but the local factors are probably going to take us through [Music] are going to be prioritized or the first um that we feel in terms of responding to impacts and you know i think um in many conditions we look at urban decline uh because of not being able to respond completely to the impacts as they evolve or worsen and we can look to the rust belt in fact to understand how urban decline occurs and the plummeting of values the plummeting of revenues and so it really does raise a question we have we know we have that experience we know that how that happens so how should public policy respond to the private response of retreat um because probably um that's the order in which it will happen is that private decisions are made first out of fear um or desire for what better and well-being and so setting the priorities for these decisions is very important what are the high value public facilities that are needed the infrastructure how do we deal with the high value private areas there's a very interesting ongoing situation evolving with condo consolidation in miami which is a very complex picture legal picture and um that's one of the scenarios that needs to be studied but obviously um uh thinking about how do we let go of the lower value places first perhaps uh maybe not uh they are the voters perhaps anyway you can see from all of this kind of thinking that we really need to figure out those scenarios and the local political factors already that kind of difficulty for the politics of climate change adaptation is evident um as communities start to plan for it so this is a dpc plan for a small community in which as with some of the public documents uh the county's documents the euphemism of prosperity um is copiously used because there is a great fear and denial of the difficult actions that have to be taken or at least wanting to postpone them and uh an understanding that the coordination of public and private efforts is really unprec unprecedented and needs to be figured out the for instance rebuilding sea walls is it a public cost is it a private cost how do you coordinate it um you can see it gets complicated and the timing of course is important what's the private window investment window that's [Music] maybe influential as opposed to the public one climate gentrification you don't need to read all this i just wanted to show you that internationally there's a great concern and a lot of research which i think is calling us to attention more so than good solutions or responses and at the federal level you can see that it starts getting complicated with um other agendas so we've been through defense and fortification uh accommodation retreat now we're on to retreat and um the cleanup i think is pretty obvious so i won't be spending time on that um but retreat might be called relocation uh it's often called abandonment i decided not to put that word up uh but certainly people are speaking about climate migration and um this is the only adaptation action which is in fact universal um mitigation is wholly universal um and the only thing that might apply to everyone and therefore i think offers an opportunity for cnu but also maybe the only um way that the federal government can intercede productively is through um this understanding that at some point it applies to all the impacts that we need to get out of harm's way and already we can see we can see the discussion about people leaving places that are no longer hospitable and those places which are in fact inviting people uh in um because it would be a way to revive an economy uh lots of hazard and retreat mapping going on um matt howard who i think is at the university of florida has some interesting statistics about how where people are leaving and going just within the united states so um let's talk about retreat because i think this is where some of the scenario building still needs to be done and could be an opportunity for cnu um and so uh part of it from the private to begin with the private sector is uh issues of timing the products or drivers like insurance rates rising and um and the financing of properties you can't get a mortgage if you don't have can't get certain kinds of insurance how does the devaluation of property because its life is shorter than we've ever considered affect uh its purchasing and its long-run viability um maybe increased affordability maybe we can begin to think about real estate in terms of um different ways not ever not constantly increasing but depreciation like automobiles the public scenarios um require really an understanding of what the impacts will be what the ultimate capacity for defense and and um if there is a shrinkage um scenario how that's managed economically so let me just keep going but one thing to understand is that the funding sources are not coordinated so um currently there are four different funding sources for let's say flooding buyouts um i don't know if this would be the same for fire for instance whether the army corps of engineers would get involved but they all have different methods and different results and those really need to be coordinated to be effective not to forget that all of this may have a kind of creative financing approach which i would be very interested in discussing uh in the cnu conference because um although that's not uh in a sense in our wheelhouse um we could have some influence over it it could be very helpful in the long run um but there are some interesting proposals being um projected uh for pro the use of private capital in uh redeveloping so um after uh retreat uh because it's a coordinated effort that a response cannot be mustered then perhaps private uh redevelopment mustering large amounts of capital could come in or public capital new development using public climate defense funding instead of the kind of short-term adaptation that might be occurring especially in flood flood zones or sea level rise zones perhaps tying those to new investments could be very interesting so what is cnu's role in adaptation in that in this complex picture i've just put in front of you well you know i think we've already started by laying out the principles in our various documents the charter the canons many of the kind of tools that have been produced tactical urbanism um already mentions this kind of long-term change lean urbanism and of course our 2017 summit where we came together to discuss these things and these are the things we do we research write practice we're activists and not to be diminished i think is the kind of discussion and learning that goes on in the list served so um with an apology to lawrence uh for quoting him but he often brings up the difficult um a difficult standard a more difficult standard than others are using and you know he's suggesting that our work with urban design is a kind of slow-moving change compared to um perhaps some of its increments um that we could be working on and scott bernstein's center for neighborhood technology which pointed out that the way we measure effects needs to be uh is important and needs to be understood uh doug kelbaugh's book the urban fix which um speaks to um tree planting as the closest thing to a silver bullet uh response and really just hot off the presses um gabriel talia venti is the healthy city which compares cities of comparable populations but of different urban type and what the pandemic statistics were in those cities very interesting it's in italian we can't read it in english yet but it's already generated a lot of attention and jason king from dover cold war stories of community planning for climate change and then harrison fraker is speaking to the environmental performance of public space and how we can improve our public spaces to deal with climate the transect has proven to be um very important because of its geographical foundation um uh in south florida it has directly influenced the first official climate action plan taking a look at the eight different conditions each one requiring a different response [Music] and as well of course martin dreiling's smart code module on fire mitigation it's called the fire mitigation module and there there's the rub uh about the use of these two words and of course tactical urbanism has been very important in the pandemic the kinds of changes that were made to public spaces um which uh indeed many of us hope will continue um with a longer life um we should probably get to discussion pretty soon thank you um so uh this was really the my last slide which is to say that this is our expertise um making change uh and to use a social science um trajectory of change from social marketing through facilitation to establishing making new goals normative and perhaps even establishing regulations i think we can look back at our experience in change making and imagine perhaps try to set up the same kind of trajectory for working on adaptation thank you so let's um leave that slide up um liz for a moment all right good as you referenced earlier in your talk glasgow is a gathering that's happening next week of people from all over the planet to address what the un intergovernmental panel on climate change is calling a planetary red alert and so as executive director of the congress for new urbanism this is really timely to talk about how cnu is going to seize this opportunity to make an impact and i know opportunity sounds strange but it's both an opportunity and a responsibility of the congress for new urbanism based upon the principles of the charter which 30 years ago enunciated that placeless sprawl economic and racial segregation um environmental devastation and and the loss of social fabric were one issue so this is a planetary red alert that means it's a congress for new urbanism red alert and the board of of the congress for new urbanism has voted that the year that we kick off uh in march when we gather together in oklahoma city will be a year focused on climate change and equity those are central planks of cnu's strategic plan to design for climate change and our prime directive around challenging exclusionary processes and practices both within our own professions and out there in the world and so this is an opportunity and a responsibility for cnu to focus on what we can do and this really is the beginning of a major effort to focus our energies um back in uh in 2017 um the uh one of the things that came out of that was um i want to get the exact uh quote magnitude of climate change is even greater than that of sprawl and will call upon new urbanists and allies to step up their efforts to share best practices and collaborate across sectors so i'd like you to kind of address where we start liz what what are the most important things to mobilize our membership uh our planners our engineers our architects our elected officials our developers our our financial folks our our academics where do they dig in to really prepare cnu to make a measurable impact on the national conversation around climate change um what a big challenge i guess that's why you're asking the question exactly um and so you know my inclination would be to parse it in some rational way according to our experience and um part of that was identifying what the problem is that we're trying to solve it was like you said suburban sprawl and in a way um we came up with one vision for that the pedestrian-oriented walkable transit-friendly compact community and we've been working on making sure new places are that way but also trying to help old places um maintain or increase those characteristics i'm not sure it's going to be that easy with climate change except for one the issue of retreating and receiving communities and so i suspect we probably should have a series of topics and one of them might be how to encourage movement or mobility from community to community to get people out of harm's way or to help communities in receiving inviting and receiving [Music] new it's not just new people but you need to be thinking in terms of employment the amenities that are there and so on that's clearly within our wheelhouse um and that touches upon um the second theme of equity and the intersection between climate change and equity you you um reference one of your slides the the reality of climate gentrification there are nice places those places get bit up and become unaffordable often to the residents who've been loyal to those places for decades similarly if there are a relatively few safe places um people uh of means are going to be able to bid up um though the prices in the places that are safe which makes our responsibility to make many many more places safe and safe and inclusive yes and of course we shouldn't forget that um many of um [Music] the less wealthy are living in less less safe places already in other words it's a historical reality to deal with uh but i think um it may be about developing scenarios for these for these conditions and in particular um you know there's the the short term of looking um looking back and saying there's a lack of safety um in this place where people are living now and what do we do about that and they don't have the resources to leave either um uh social or economic um you know the community becomes localized community becomes very important um the less resources one has and so um that's one aspect of it but i think the long i think we can be providing some of the long-term um trajectories in order to preclude people from being left behind in unfortunate circumstances which is the rust belt analogy and so that's already something that i think we could be developing but i think we need to be doing that as we always have in partnership with other groups in partnership with people who um understand where finance is going because no matter what we learn about it somebody else is thinking about you know is inventing new smoke and mirrors on wall street um and that's kind of that's missing in our um what do you call it our cloud of organizations i think uh daniel church asks the question that's right on point here uh understanding that there's still a great deal of uncertainty of where potential climate migrates migrants will relocate to and of course parenthetically some of that will be decided by politics what can cities that are assumed to be receiving cities perhaps the great lakes or the inland south do to prepare for population growth while also working to do it sustainably um that and and that would be a great um maybe in the future a great legacy charette topic um for future cnu gatherings because i think you're talking about anything from the initial marketing to saying what are let's do the growth plans for this place ahead of time not one development at a time but let's imagine what the expansion over time with new neighborhoods new transportation would be in one of these places in other words and that's very much something that uh the cnu has experience with um so you know i think there's a kind of two or three step approach to developing those kinds of plans and the first one of course is the intention the understanding and the intention by the leadership of such a community of such a city that um this is really what they're aiming to do i think we perhaps we have seen that in places like carmel you know it strikes me that um again an opportunity and a responsibility for cnu to make an impact here um we weren't around when really catastrophically stupid decisions were made about how to shape cities after world war ii um in which giant freeways and giant infrastructure systems were imposed upon fine-grained neighborhoods and urban renewal and highway relocation moved 3.6 million people out of um out of the way in the name of progress and so one of the things that cnu can do because we are here now and we are connected um and we are mobilized is to stop some of these really catastrophically expensive and disruptive massive efforts to to fortify and to deny change versus more decentralized more fine-grained um more organic solutions that respect the timeless ways of building and i attempted to show some of that with the army corps of engineers proposal for miami's storm surge wall um but so yes that's absolutely true and you know i wonder if we shouldn't be um trying to have our ear to the ground um it's not a wonder we definitely should be for the current infrastructure bill that's coming through because of course we know um who's wired or ready to accept those kinds of funds for what kind of development it's even you know as we speak highways the new highways are still um an easy way to imagine that um that kind of funding uh should be spent so you know i think that's that could be another topic rick that um how to address the new infrastructure spending um sending it to the places that need it or um to the types of uses that need it more so than what would be conventional and every billion and um we're talking about multiple billions spent on urban freeway and highway expansion are billions that we won't have to devote to adaptation strategies for for climate change uh it's going in the wrong direction and yet that you know particularly in the bipartisan bill there's there's a significant amount of money set aside for for uh highway expansion uh even as we we find it difficult to to repair um what we have and repair the damage of what was created and eagle offers i think an intriguing counterpoint and i think an equally significant challenge she says the red alerts of everyday americans are terribly far from those of climate change they care about the cost of gas because there's no transit available in bath spots in america the rise in consumer prices the lack of affordable health care child and elder care etc cnu focuses on the region the city a lot blocked does it make sense to express and share our specific goals and objectives all complete compact connected complex convivial a lot of c's there and which can be channeled locally to appropriate leadership in other words that that overlap between mitigation and adaptation the things that um that are are not just good for um preparing for for catastrophic climate change in the future but make life better right now well you know obviously the answer is yes um but you know i think we need to understand um that there is the kind of immediate i don't even know what i'm going to be doing in five years and i'm worried about my children in school right now [Music] and as you said gas prices when there's no public transit available which hits everybody and so there are um and it probably that's where the localism of adaptation can be the most have the most beneficial impact um because i think if we um look at everything that we're about to spend money on publicly or even private investments uh locally and say this needs to be seen through an um the lens of climate change uh while it may not be diverted to be thinking only about the long-term um what is it about climate change that can and and thinking about adaptation for the long term that can um be more beneficial immediately and so that that timing becomes um that time frame becomes very important and especially when dealing with the what the private impact but if you look back at where we started you know when we started talking about suburban sprawl the public was totally um unconcerned unaware um and it really was only when uh the alternatives started appearing and that people understood they could start making decisions that um changes started to happen and i think we might look ahead to that kind of trajectory if we can start showing the plans that we're working on or that our local civic activism um uh might produce something that could be um shown as being part of an adaptation approach as well as currently beneficial um each one of us could be having an effect um in our own communities and certainly those of us who produce um the the traffic planning or the legal documents or the um the urban designs could keep this lens in front of the public in front of our audience to say um you know we're helping we're doing what needs to be done right now but there's a longer picture that we're looking at too because ultimately that's the greatest sustainability if you're making investments in something that will have a long life uh excellent point and and it speaks to another of the conclusions in 2017 which i'm reading now we have neither the time nor the resources to tackle climate change racial and social equity and public health as separate challenges we must aim for solutions that address all three that that speaks to the responsibility um of connecting the dots and by its nature cnu is interdisciplinary right we're we're neither in one region nor one profession um we include people who who think holistically even though urban design and how we build places is the center of who we are and what we practice we have a wide range of people who think both across divides but also in short medium and long term ways which is in many ways the the essence of sustainability and resilience a couple of great questions i don't know if we'll have much time to do them justice but i want to at least note them how do we discourage growth in areas that have underlying long-term climate change for example the phoenix metro area with future challenges of extreme heat and not enough water contrary to economic expansion social marketing underway that comes from bonnie richardson one of the things i think that will run smack into that is insurance that's probably going to going to be a a problem for builders before some of the the symptoms of climate change really come into play so it may be difficult to finance some of the development in places like that and then ryan stevenson says uh it seems like coming from some urbanists uh new urbanism isn't married to any particular urban form of typology which is counterintuitive i think the person is saying you know we believe in the whole transect that there's appropriate kind of development across across the spectrum one would expect new urbanism to espouse cities i think clearly we have um we've always said that they are more they are the most environmentally sustainable uh per capita um field urbanism are newly adapted typologies maybe even concessions do we this is a fancy word defenestrate in other words throw out the window urbanism to date importance to adaptation is adopting the pulsing paradigm and homeopathic planning versus steady state uh okay so complicated and thoughtful challenge i'm going to give you an opportunity liz for kind of a final word not necessarily responding to either of those two questions but again what is the way forward over the next year to fully mobilize new urbanists around this challenge this opportunity and this responsibility well um rick two things if i may uh one you know the urban less urban question that was brought up um you know it may be just about reformatting some of the highest density uh or the most crowded um uh density of our cities to make them greener and healthier and i think that's where talia benti's book is kind of pushing us it's not about um pushing everything down the transect as much as um really learning from that kind of data to how to perhaps reformat cities but i think in terms of cnu maybe one of the things we can do is develop and some of these questions i think in a sense develop the topics and say uh let's parse this into various the topics that interest people to explore further so that some of the um research discussion um writing and so on can be um more focused and more coordinated among the people who uh according to their interests and then bring that back uh in some kind of um [Music] list of responses or scenarios for responses that could advance the discussion because i do think uh it's not an overnight thing and we're going to as we always do learn from each other um in having these kinds of interactions and the congress is a great place to um to enable that absolutely and there'll be sessions at the congress um in march in oklahoma city that will kick off this year of focus on climate change and equity new urban opportunity and responsibility to respond to this planetary red alert an opportunity for all of us to enlist ourselves in making an impact climate change is not something that is coming climate change is here and it's our responsibility to make an impact not just to mitigate but to adapt to that reality so i hope we'll see you in oklahoma city and i look forward to working with all of you over the next 18 months as we focus on climate change and equity rob turn it over to you and thank you very much liz for an absolutely stellar uh presentation about the complexity and the depth of the challenge uh and some preliminary thoughts about how we tackle it rob well you all have said it all and uh so i wanted to thank everybody who uh all the participants all the listeners all the people who asked questions as well and uh thank you liz uh especially for helping us to get our arms around this very important topic that we're going to be talking a lot more about in this coming year so stay tuned for more on the park bench episodes or uh webinars uh coming up in november and december and uh go to the cmu website to find out more about that and once again uh thank you everybody and have a great day i should mention the the video will be posted on the cnu website probably tomorrow thank you [Music]