Homeowners And The Resilient City

This book provides an important overview of how climate-driven natural hazards like river or pluvial floods, droughts, heat waves or forest fires, continue to play a central role across the globe in the 21st century. Urban resilience has become an important term in response to climate change. Resilience describes the ability of a system to absorb shocks and depends on the vulnerability and recovery time of a system. A shock affects a system to the extent that it becomes vulnerable to the event. This book focus examines how private property-owners might implement such measures or improve their individual coping and adaptive capacity to respond to future events. The book looks at the existence of various planning, legal, financial incentives and psychological factors designed to encourage individuals to take an active role in natural hazard risk management and through the presentation of theoretical discussions and empirical cases shows how urban resilience can be achieved. In addition, the book guides the reader through different conceptual frameworks by showing how urban regions are trying to reach urban resilience on privately-owned land. Each chapter focuses on different cultural, socio-economic and political backgrounds to demonstrate how different institutional frameworks have an impact.

'Climate Resilient Cities: A Primer on Reducing Vulnerabilities to Disasters' provides city administrators with exactly what they need to know about the complex and compelling challenges of climate change. The book helps local governments create training, capacity building, and capital investment programs for building sustainable, resilient communities. A step-by-step self-assessment challenges policymakers to think about the resources needed to combat natural disasters through an innovative hot spot risk and vulnerability identifi cation tool. This primer is unique from other resources in its treatment of climate change using a dual-track approach that integrates both mitigation (lowering contributions to greenhouse gases) and adaptation (preparing for impacts of climate change) with disaster risk management. The book is relevant both to cities that are just beginning to think about climate change as well as those that already have well established policies, institutions, and strategies in place. By providing a range of city-level examples of sound practices around the world, the book demonstrates that there are many practical actions that cities can take to build resilience to climate change and natural disasters.

Climate Adaptation and Resilience Across Scales provides professionals with guidance on adapting the built environment to a changing climate. This edited volume brings together practitioners and researchers to discuss climate-related resilience from the building to the city scale. This book highlights North American cases that deal with issues such as climate projections, public health, adaptive capacity of vulnerable populations, and design interventions for floodplains, making the content applicable to many locations around the world. The contributors in this book discuss topics ranging from how built environment professionals respond to a changing climate, to how the building stock may need to adapt to climate change, to how resilience is currently being addressed in the design, construction, and operations communities. The purpose of this book is to provide a better understanding of climate change impacts, vulnerability, and resilience across scales of the built environment. Architects, urban designers, planners, landscape architects, and engineers will find this a useful resource for adapting buildings and cities to a changing climate.

Climate Adaptation and Resilience Across Scales provides professionals with guidance on adapting the built environment to a changing climate. This edited volume brings together practitioners and researchers to discuss climate-related resilience from the building to the city scale. This book highlights North American cases that deal with issues such as climate projections, public health, adaptive capacity of vulnerable populations, and design interventions for floodplains, making the content applicable to many locations around the world. The contributors in this book discuss topics ranging from how built environment professionals respond to a changing climate, to how the building stock may need to adapt to climate change, to how resilience is currently being addressed in the design, construction, and operations communities. The purpose of this book is to provide a better understanding of climate change impacts, vulnerability, and resilience across scales of the built environment. Architects, urban designers, planners, landscape architects, and engineers will find this a useful resource for adapting buildings and cities to a changing climate.

This edited volume addresses sustainability efforts in cities and metropolitan regions around the world; focusing on four key areas: environment, economic, sociopolitical, and cultural sustainability. It includes chapters about applications to urban regions focusing on the movement from sustainable development to resilient urban centers.

Adaptation Urbanism and Resilient Communities outlines and explains adaptation urbanism as a theoretical framework for understanding and evaluating resilience projects in cities and relates it to pressing contemporary policy issues related to urban climate change mitigation and adaptation. Through a series of detailed case studies, this book uncovers the promise and tensions of a new wave of resilient communities in Europe (Copenhagen, Rotterdam, and London), and the United States (New Orleans and South Florida). In addition, best practice projects in Amsterdam, Barcelona, Delft, Utrecht, and Vancouver are examined. The authors highlight how these communities are reinventing the role of streets and connecting public spaces in adapting to and mitigating climate change through green/blue infrastructure planning, maintaining and enhancing sustainable transportation options, and struggling to ensure equitable development for all residents. The case studies demonstrate that while there are some more universal aspects to encouraging adaptation urbanism, there are also important local characteristics that need to be both acknowledged and celebrated to help local communities thrive in the era of climate change. The book also provides key policy lessons and a roadmap for future research in adaptation urbanism. Advancing resilience policy discourse through multidisciplinary framework this work will be of great interest to students of urban planning, geography, transportation, landscape architecture, and environmental studies, as well as resilience practitioners around the world.

Flood Resilience of Private Properties examines the division and balance of responsibilities between the public and the private when discussing flood resilience of private properties. Flooding is an expensive climate-related disaster and a threat to urban life. Continuing development in flood-prone zones compound the risks. Protecting all properties to the same standards is ever more challenging. Research has focused on improved planning and adapting publicly-owned infrastructure such as streets, evacuation routes, and retention ponds. However, damages often happen on private land. To realize a flood-resilient city, owners of privately-owned residential houses also need to act. Measures such as mobile barriers and backwater valves or avoiding vulnerable uses in basements can make homes more flood-resilient. But private owners may be unaware of flooding risks or may lack the means and knowledge to act. Incentives may be insufficient, while fragmented or unclear property rights and responsibilities entrench inertia. The challenge is motivating homeowners to take steps. Political and societal systems influence the action citizens are prepared to take and what they expect their governments to do. The responsibility for implementing such measures is shared between the public and the private domain in different degrees in different countries. This book will be of great interest to scholars of water law, property rights, flood risk management and climate adaptation. This book was originally published as a special issue of Water International.