Archinect - News

Amidst increasing wildfires, should we retreat or regroup? A UC Davis proposal recommends taking the high road despite challenges

2022-07-19T16:13:00-04:00

As Spain, France, Greece, and Germany grapple with a spate of historic wildfires that have gripped the region in recent weeks, a group of researchers in the American West is now advocating for fairly extreme shifts in development trends there which would buck others currently favored by the industry that involve more direct applications of design in the built environment.

Writing in FastCompany this week, UC Davis professors Emily Schlickman, Brett Milligan, and Stephen M. Wheeler proposed a three-point plan that entails zoning changes (including San Diego’s approach of avoiding hillside development) and placing severe limitations on new construction, which are seen as a large part of the problem in Northern California and other places.

The trio pointed to recent examples from Los Angeles County and an existing law in Oregon as frameworks that could easily be adopted in the sunshine state, backed up by aggressive legal measures and incentivizations that would further prevent develo...

The case for pitting big infrastructure against climate change

2020-01-22T15:26:00-05:00

The US has become terrible at building big things, and negligent in even maintaining our existing infrastructure. [...] That all bodes terribly for our ability to grapple with the coming dangers of climate change, because it is fundamentally an infrastructure problem.

MIT Technology Review senior editor, James Temple, penned an urgent plea for a renewed, but sustainable, American public works boom that could significantly speed up the painfully slow infrastructure planning process in the face of rapidly changing climate conditions.

"To prepare for the climate dangers we now can’t avoid, we’ll also need to bolster coastal protections, reengineer waste and water systems, reinforce our transportation infrastructure, and relocate homes and businesses away from expanding flood and fire zones," Temple writes. "Given those staggering costs and tight time lines, we can’t afford to take decades to build—much less not build—a single project."

As the rising Pacific slowly swallows California's beaches, managed retreat becomes a dividing topic in coastal cities

2019-07-09T08:00:00-04:00

While other regions grappled with destructive waves and rising seas, the West Coast for decades was spared by a rare confluence of favorable winds and cooler water. This “sea level rise suppression,” as scientists call it, went largely undetected. [...] But lines in the sand are meant to shift. In the last 100 years, the sea rose less than 9 inches in California. By the end of this century, the surge could be greater than 9 feet.

In her LA Times long read, Rosanna Xia tells the tale of coastal cities up and down the Golden State and their increasing struggles to defend beaches, infrastructure, and (mostly pricey) properties against the rising sea that relentlessly chews away on a coastline many perceived as permanent.

"Retreat is as un-American as it gets, neighborhood groups declared. To win, California must defend," Xia writes. "But at what cost? Should California become one long wall of concrete against the ocean? Will there still be sandy beaches or surf breaks to cherish in the future, oceanfront homes left to dream about? More than $150 billion in property could be at risk of flooding by 2100 — the economic damage far more devastating than the state’s worst earthquakes and wildfires."

Facing the realities of climate change: Staten Island's complicated strategy of Managed Retreat

2015-02-13T15:07:00-05:00

Living at land’s edge has always come with a certain amount of risk: storms coming off the ocean can be violent and proximity to water always carries with it a possibility of getting wet. [...] in three communities on Staten Island, a New York State program to encourage managed retreat through homeowner buyouts has elicited strong interest and vocal support.