Friday, May 16, 2008

Using disasters for systemic change

Matthew Waxman in WorldChanging: After reading Justus Stewart’s recent article about a BIM collaboration I immediately thought of the Earthquake in China, the Cyclone in Myanmar, Hurricane Katrina and the SE Asian Tsunami, and last year’s mini-disaster in the San Francisco Bay Area where I live, the collapse of the “MacArthur Maze” Interstate 580 connector ramp. All of these disasters could benefit from a process to redesign the destroyed urban environment and its infrastructural systems and to not just re-create what was there before.

What if we could accompany a collaborative design process with some sort of policy framework tying together disaster-response to designing for systemic change? What if we could plan to use the future's inevitable disasters as opportunities for change and innovation?

The planning policy would focus on finding sustainable solutions to broken or destroyed systems. Disaster in this way is used to jump-start changes in infrastructure and thus alter daily habits, patterns, and preferences on everything from energy consumption to transportation, housing and health, economic development, community and civic facilities, open space, food, and lifestyle.

Changes would be contingent on disasters occurring, so this type of planning policy wouldn’t necessitate immediate results without the destructive context – as would planning codes, LEED guidelines or simply better design practices – but it would produce readily-available plans and design-response focused on long-term, large-scale changes to infrastructural systems beyond the scope of a single, smaller-scale project. In the long-view I believe this would speed up the eventual implementation of large-scale change…..

Collapsed 35W bridge taken on 9/1/2007 from the 10th Avenue Bridge in Minneapolis, Minnesota, by "Rehcsif," Wikimedia Commons, under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation license, Version 1.2

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