Cities Designed for the Future
We are pleased to release another post in our blog series “Connecting the Dots” between Human-Centered Design and the world in which we work and live. This series will explore the rich and deep connection between design and our realities, how design affects our experiences, underscoring the importance of design in our lives.
As long as climate change continues to negatively impact human civilization and urbanization continues to be in vogue, cities will need to adapt their designs to the future challenges of adverse climate conditions. Enabling local governments and communities to act as laboratories of social and technical design innovation provides society with a wide range of climate solutions and practical, sustainable development tools that create more resilient urban environments.
Stakeholders at all levels of the socio-economic spectrum should look to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs) for novel solutions, specifically SDG 11 and 13, since they provide the tools necessary to build smart-designed cities adaptively. The Sustainable Development Goals Sustainable Cities and Communities (SDG 11) and Climate Action (SDG 13) establish a framework for great solutions, which would help people with their local geographically-based climate problems and impact how they live through these environmental conditions transformations.
Cities used to grow and develop by accident, with people being settled where there was available land. Unfortunately, as recent disasters have shown, including New Orleans’s flooding and heatwaves, Mexico City’s earthquakes, or Port-au-Prince’s constant weather-related problems, cities need to be designed or redesigned with intention and not haphazardly. According to a recent paper published by OECD, however, there is no perfect way to build a city because geography is a stakeholder that sets clear limits in how an urban settlement is or should be designed.
Climate change is forcing many to reevaluate their urban plans for people-focused approaches and based on how cities can best respond to the impacts of global warming. The human-centered design provides an ideal roadmap because it helps design cities to be more interactive with their environments by employing stakeholders at all levels of society to design solutions that address the core problems they face.
With this in mind, urban planners and designers must seek to align their decisions more with how people should be living from a sustainable standpoint and implement their designs to be more resilient and habitable to individuals. SDGs 11 and 13 provide for the best blueprint to manage climate-related problems facing many urban centers. In addition, we can see their use in action in several contemporary solutions that cities have employed.
Local governments around the world are implementing decisions that take into account two stakeholders that cannot sit at the table: climate change and geographic location. Chinese policy-makers are encouraging cities to redevelop many of their flood-prone areas to become ‘Sponge Cities’ that use sophisticated sensors to digitally track floodwater into the town to regulate wastewater systems and avoid catastrophic flooding, as well as be live accessed by citizens. Similarly, Stockholm, Berlin, and Barcelona are solving their increasingly frequent rainwater problems by harvesting the overflow into ‘stormwater ponds’ or vertical farming, thereby saving water.
On a smaller scale, two women-led initiatives are transforming plastic to help their neighbours. In Malaga, Spain, adapting to rising temperatures in their streets, women have knitted crochet square blankets from recycled harmful plastic overlays as cooling tarps. This new novel design enabled locals to continue working and socializing in their streets as they had done for generations. Finally, in Nairobi, Kenya, a female engineer has developed a way to take the plastic waste and convert it into a brick material that is more resilient than standard concrete. This solution is twofold for the region: it repurposes single use plastics, thus cleaning the land from waste, and it enables people to create more substantial homes that are cheaper, sturdier, and more sustainable.
These examples differ in scale and the problem they are tackling. Still, they share the similarity that they physically impacted the functioning and design of the city while simultaneously creating more favorable environmental conditions for those dwelling in the town. Thus, we observe that the best solution to many urban problems is to create a sustainable design that contributes to the development and resiliency of the settlement and, more importantly, makes the city more enjoyable for its populace by dealing directly with the local climate problem. Thus, human-centered design plays an essential role in all situations, and urban development in the face of climate change is no exception.
Designing safe and sustainable cities with climate-based resilience based on recommendations provided by the SDGs will enable many at-risk communities to prosper and withstand potential future devastation while still allowing a municipality to hold value as a place that is cool to live within.
