Community Resilience to Climate Change: Theory, Research and Practice

7 Mensch als Gestalter der Erde (1954)—stood directly in line between the pioneering conservation science of George Perkins Marsh (1882)The Earth as Modified by Human Action or Nathaniel Shaler (1905)Man and the Earth, and modern environmental conservation represented by the Wenner-Grenn Foundation’s symposium Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth (Thomas, 1956), Rachel Carson’s (1962)Silent Spring, Carrol Wilson’s (1971)Report of the Study of Man’s Impact on Climate and Ward and Dubos’s Only One Earth (1972). Urban climatology has a long pedigree in the conservation movement. Since the study of urban weather systems is explicitly a science of anthropogenic cause, it has always challenged cities to assume responsibility for their role as “co-patterners of their climate” (Kratzer, 1956, p. 170). So there is also a prequel in the realm of collective action. Greenhouse gasmitigation is prefigured inmunicipal energy provision and public health action against soot and smog. The history of modern town planning can be written in terms of a collective response to the externalities of carbon-based industrialisation—as Patrick Geddes defined it in the early 20th century, substituting the clean-energy ‘Neotechnic’ city for the black pollution and physical concentration of ‘Paleotechnic’ capitalism (Geddes, 1915). Adaptation strategy has much older antecedents. The design of cities embodies local knowledge of wind, sun, humidity and precipitation, and of what is needed to survive in a given geographical setting against the contingencies of weather and human enemies. The history of urban habitats is not just one of passive adaptation to regional climate but of active transformation to produce microclimates radically unlike their surrounding terrain—hotter, cooler, drier, moister, less windy, more ventilated, or whatever is most conducive to human comfort at a given latitude. City design is the oldest type of anthropogenic climate change (Egli, 1951). These precedents are explored in order, the next section dealing with the science of cities as climatic singularities, and subsequent sections with antecedents of urban policy response. The purpose of these historical excursions becomes apparent in the final section of the paper where we compare the prequel with the sequel and ask if and how it matters. THE SCIENTIFIC PRECEDENTS Scientific interest in the atmospheric effect of urbanisation extendsmore than 200 years. As a nation of pioneers, Americans contributed early research into the effects of deforestation, agriculture and town-building on seasonal change (Fleming, 1998). Thomas Jefferson suggested in 1824 that anthropogenic impact should be monitored through climatic surveys ‘repeated once or twice in a century’ (Landsberg, 1956). However, it was the great cities of Europe that contained the sites with the longest instrumental measurement series and here that the climatic changes produced by industrialisation, densification and suburban growth were most readily visible. Patterns of urban temperature, precipitation and wind circulation were studied for sites around London by Luke Howard between 1806 and 1830, for Paris in the 1870s by Emilien Renou, and for Berlin and Vienna in the 1890s by Gustav Hellmann and Julius Hahn respectively. The physicist Sir Arthur Schuster set up a University of Manchester observatory that allowed comparison with a municipal weather station two miles north. He commented: The remarkable differences which appear in the temperature records in different parts of the city furnish an additional proof, if proof were wanted, that observations taken in or near a large town cannot be taken to represent correctly the meteorological character of the surrounding districts, but it by no means follows that these observations are of no value. On the contrary, they may lead to some important conclusions on what may be called town weather as distinguished from country weather (Schuster, 1893, p. 168). Manchester, of course, epitomised the spectacular environmental contamination achieved by free industrial enterprise in the absence of pollution control. Whatever the season, town weather was foul. Its evil reputation was compounded by the orthodox medical assumption that infection occurred miasmatically—germ theory prevailed only in the final quarter of the century. Some of the 19th century’s most detailed urban heat island studies were done by doctors—Barles (1999) for example discusses the work of Pierre Foissac, author of De l’influence des climats sur l’homme (1837) and De la météorologie dans ses rapports avec la science de l’homme et principalement avec la medicine et l’hygiène publique (1854). Ventilation and sunlight became overriding concerns of the movement for public health and hygiene, and so for early modern town planning. The literature on the atmospheric environments of cities and their effects on citizens was swelled in the 20th century by a growing number of monographs from regional geographers, for whom the physical environment of the city offered an ideal object of study as a cultural artefact in a natural landscape. An increasing interest inmicro-climates amongst meteorologists was pioneered by Gregor Kraus (Boden und Klima auf kleinstem Raum, 1911) and Rudolf Geiger (Klima der bodennahen Luftschicht, 1927). Much of this research was German, as was Albert Kratzer’s earlier-mentioned synoptic text Das Stadtklima (1937). Written as a doctoral thesis in the philosophy faculty of the University of Munich by a Benedictine monk and geography teacher from the Ettal Abbey, Das Stadtklima was a definitive state-of-the-art review, based on 225 studies and extensive analysis of comparative data, documenting the differences between urban and non-urban climates, and explaining the mechanisms of the urban heat island, wind systems, ventilation and stagnation, precipitation anomalies, pollution and its dispersion, and the downwind effects of urbanisation. By the publication of the second edition in 1956, its reference list had grown to more than double the original size, incorporating a mainly English-language bibliography by the British public meteorologist Charles Brooks (1952). Subsequent translation of Kratzer’s second edition into English by the US Air Force in 1962 confirmed the internationalisation of the