Building Resilience Scaled Strategies for Healthy Community Design

BUILDING RESILIENCE Scaled strategies for healthy community design Susan Rogers Author Susan Rogers University of Houston Community Design Resource Center 122 Architecture Building Houston, TX, 77204, USA This manuscript was submitted in conjunction with a national professional conference, “The Value of Design: Design & Health,” hosted in Washington, D.C., April 22-24, 2014, by the American Institute of Architects Foundation, the American Institute of Architects, and the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture. Conference staff have edited manuscripts for clarity and style. This project was made possible in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Visit www.aia.org/DesignHealth The local approach recognizes and celebrates that the places where we live matter, and “that our lives are impacted both for the better and for the worse by these places.” Resilience is “the capacity of individuals, communities Gradually, the quest for the global city is being partially and systems to survive, adapt and grow in the face of eclipsed by the possibilities and potentials of a beautiful changes, even catastrophic incidents.”1 The emergence, and equitable everyday city. The local is being re-po- and growing prevalence, of the concept of resilience as sitioned as a focus for investment and intervention, a tool to drive design and measure the quality of our and while not necessarily replacing the global, at least cities and our societies re-positions the social, eco- competing with it. In many ways a local approach is by nomic, cultural, and political factors that drive urban necessity a systemic approach to change, a method that decision-making away from sheer capital accumulation focuses on the interconnectedness of conditions and to more human-centered and ecological approaches. most of all, process and engagement. Resilience does not drive economies, or make a location The local approach recognizes and celebrates that a global city. It is an inherently grounded concept; in oth- the places where we live matter, and that our lives are er words, resilience is grounded in the cultural, ecological impacted both for the better and for the worse by these and social capital of a place. places. As a result, health and equity are two fundamen- Cities that are exhibiting the greatest resiliency are tal parts of resilience. In cities across the globe, health cities poised to address both the metropolitan scale with has become a major priority. In Korea the “Healthy creative and innovative approaches to public design City Project” initiated in 2004 focused on Changwon projects that boost economic competitiveness and global City, Wonju City, Seoul and Jingu, and Busan. By 2010 appeal, while simultaneously addressing the local scale 55 cities were part of the project focused on building with urban design projects, programmatic interventions, health-oriented cities.3 In Korea, the United States, and policy decisions that improve equity, the quality of and across the globe the socio-economic context of the everyday life of the city, and the health of residents. place—income, housing, education, and employment—is Between these two scales—the global landscape of more often than not directly correlated to the health of meta-data and special economic zones and the local the people that call it home. Some places are rich and environment of bottom-up growth and community activ- others poor, some areas have plentiful food and fresh ism—is an intermediary role for design and urbanism that water while others are food deserts, some places have is too often missing.2 Design can connect data and policy well-maintained parks while others are without even to experience and projects with the potential to transform basic infrastructure, and some places thrive while others spatial practices and affect transformations in space that decline. lead to positive change. This is the missing link, the con- Design has a role to play in imagining, advocating for, nective tissue for designers to contribute to both macro and creating healthy communities. To this end and over and micro-level change in cities around the world. the course of nearly two years of study, the Community Design Resource Center at the University of Houston 1 FIGURE 1. Seven strategies directly linking quality of the built environment and health worked in partnership with four Houston neighborhoods the four study neighborhoods—for example, understand- and the Department of Health and Human Services to ing the relationship between educational attainment, identify the determinants of health that can be impacted median household income, and obesity rates—and from by design. The project worked across scales, from the a further analysis of systemic connections (Figure 1). city, to the neighborhood, to the block, to the lot; and We found that parks and open spaces, good public across issues, from policy, to planning, to programs and infrastructure, density, and community centers were projects. At all scales, resilience was an end goal. The important indicators of health. Access to healthy food, proposals range from re-positioning and re-program- or food security, is equally important. We looked at new ming infrastructure systems to meet community needs, single-family housing permits to understand locations of to re-thinking the uses of public facilities, to creating and constraints to new development in the four neigh- food networks. The proposals fit within a framework of borhoods and across the city. Overall, we looked at the seven broader strategies that are connected and syner- interconnectedness of both the existing conditions and gistic. The strategies—education, economic opportunity, opportunities for neighborhood transformation, work- environmental justice, food security, neighborhood ing to develop synergies between the seven strategies, stability, public space and amenities—directly link the across the interventions, and across scales. In concrete quality of the built environment to health. The strategies design terms this means connecting programmatic emerged from a “thick” investigation of the conditions in 2 FIGURE 2. Relationship of economic opportunity to education and health interventions and local projects to broader infrastructure Economic opportunity is directly connected to education and landscape interventions to generate a network of and health, and the healthiest communities have greater hybridized buildings and infrastructural systems that equity (Figure 2). For example, a recent study complet- lead to greater resiliency, equity, and health. ed by the Clark County Public Health Department for Portland Oregon concluded that economic opportunity is critical to both the health of individuals and to Re-Localization: From Global Capital to community-wide health. The study notes, “education Local Markets and employment increase individual income, leading to Healthy communities depend on healthy economies improved individual health, community prosperity, and with equity and opportunity. UNHabitat notes that “high income equality. These all lead to greater community levels of inequality do not just hamper poverty reduction health, which feeds back into improved opportunity for and economic growth—they impact all aspects of human education and employment.”6 development.”4 In 2012 the World Economic Forum iden- Health, equity, and opportunity should be embedded in tified rising inequality as one of the top global risks.5 Too community and urban design and development strat- often opportunity is unevenly distributed across space egies. In our four study neighborhoods there are few and therefore people are penalized for where they live. sources of employment and many basic shopping and 3 services needs are met outside of the community. For ex- because, “It is one way to expand services for children ample, in one neighborhood residents spend $22 million and families, increase opportunities for physical activity annually outside of the neighborhood on groceries and and healthy living, and provide additional educational, other goods. While design does not typically drive eco- cultural, and civic uses.”8 The Center’s list of potential nomic opportunity, there is little doubt that design has the joint uses include gyms, outdoor recreational spaces, power to generate new ways of thinking about how things libraries, performance venues, cafeterias and kitchens, are done, specifically by creating connections between and meeting spaces. neighborhood assets and economic opportunities. This Houston’s demographic shifts, changing housing can mean building on the history and culture of places patterns, and new school capital investments present to develop programming with the potential to create real an unprecedented opportunity to reshape the ways local change. For example, in the Sunnyside neighborhood government and schools work together to provide for with a strong farming and ranching history a series of the people who depend on them and the resources they programmatic interventions were developed to build on manage. This is especially important for low-income, and support this culture. The proposed programs include low-resource urban communities that disproportion- horse stables, an arena, and sixteen miles of continuous ately struggle to meet community needs. To this end, riding trails that take advantage of existing utility, bayou developing strategies to share public facilities, such as and drainage easements. It is one part projective pro- joint-use schools, is one way to work

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