Community Resilience to Climate Change: Theory, Research and Practice

10 to raise awareness through meetings, institutional links, training initiatives and publications. Examples from a single year include two World Meteorological Organisation reports, Weather, climate and human settlements (Landsberg, 1976) and Urban climatology and its relevance to urban design (Chandler, 1976), as well as published proceedings on Planning and construction in conformity with the climate (CIB, 1976) and The role of local and regional government in improving the environment of human settlements (IFHP, 1976). Climate experts researched the training of architects and town planners and campaigned to improve the almost non-existent coverage of meteorological factors within the curricula of built environment schools. Remarkably, their lobbying effort extended to an unsolicited mail-out of 1500 copies of the text Fundamental knowledge in urban and building climatology to Europe’s architecture and planning schools (Frommes, 1980). The scientific community was repeatedly disappointed by the lack of response to its efforts at knowledge transfer. The political scientist Richard Tobin explained the reasons: urban decision-makers would resist evidence of inadvertent anthropogenic climate change until public opinion forced them to do so (Ferrar, 1976, p. 255). Standards for an optimised built environment could perhaps be applied to new towns (as in Olgyay, 1963) or post-disaster reconstructions but were of little use for actually existing cities. WMO Technical Note No. 149 acknowledged the problem: Many ancient towns of Europe and elsewhere still retain their basic mediaeval plan in their central areas and this resistance to fundamental change, in spite of urban renewal, imposes a severe constraint upon the successful application of urban climatological principles to city design … Urban climatology is relevant only in cases of major expansion, urban redevelopment, or most obviously, in new town design (Chandler, 1976, p. 39). The author, Tony Chandler, had compiled the WMO’s first comprehensive bibliography of urban climatology (1970). His account of optimised climatic design drew extensively on the meteorological state-of-the-art but, tellingly, contained not a single reference to city planning literature. Even more remarkably, the same was true of a bibliography of 250 entries on The Urban Environment: A Climatological Anomaly (Berlin, 1972) compiled specifically for use in planning education and research by the Council of Planning Librarians. The difficulties of translation were compounded as post-war climatology shifted from empirical observation towards more sophisticated mathematical understandings of energy budget, radiation and street canyon properties. Melvin Marcus’s presidential address to the AAG in New Orleans in 1979 reproached his physical geography colleagues for their tendency to operate in: a natural science isolation booth expressing little concern for the relevance their microclimatic fluxes and anomalous precipitation statistics may have to urban planning or quality of life (Marcus, 1979, p. 531). Theproblemwas two-way. Urbanprofessionals, for their part, hadbecome strangelyuninterested in the three-dimensional environment, especially its invisible atmospheric layers (Spirn, 1984). It was not always so—the nexus between human wellbeing and physical setting had been a central concern of early 20th-century planning theory. Planning meant a physical shaping of morphology, density, layout, street form and land use pattern. Yet the tendency of planning theory after 1970 was to regard ‘environmental determinism’ as a fallacy. The mainstream of planning, particularly in the Anglo-Saxon world, was being redefined as a mode of social intervention based upon the methods of social science (Hebbert, 2006). An equally significant shift was occurring at the scale of building design as professional responsibility for many aspects of thermal performance shifted from architects to heating, ventilation and air conditioning engineers. Neither of the two main target audiences for Fundamental Knowledge on Urban and Building Climatology was in receptive mode for insights into their climate-shaping role. POLICY PRECEDENTS—ACHIEVED Cities which did incorporate urban climatic analysis into planning were the exception rather than the rule: but some did. The Building Research Station at Haifa Technion provided important climatological support of new settlement design in Israel (Givoni, 1969). The Japanese architect Kenzo Tange undertook wind-tunnel experiments of different layout options for his successful entry for the reconstruction of the Yugoslavian city of Skopje after the earthquake of 1961 (Tange, 1967). Major cities tended to commission climatic investigations episodically in response to critical events. Concern over urban ‘dust domes’ or ‘haze hoods’ was a typical trigger (Lowry, 1967). A three-day inversion episode in 1966 caused 168 deaths in New York City. Mayor John Lindsay appointed the public health expert Austin N. Heller as the Commissioner of the Department of Air Pollution Control (DAPC). Heller set up an ‘air resource management’ (ARM) network of 37 aerometric stations across the five boroughs to measure sulphur dioxide, carbon monoxide, smoke shade, suspended particulates, dust fall, wind direction and air temperature. University partners were also involved in the interests of “cross-fertilization of the academic and operational branches of applied science and basic research”. Heller noted that “our department is probably the first city agency in the nation to effect such an arrangement” (DAPC, 1968). For a brief while, New York was a climate- aware city. As Mayor Lindsay commented in a TV broadcast: A few years ago, it would have taken a meteorologist to tell you what an ‘inversion’ of the weather was. Now any New Yorker can tell you that it’s when the layers of air above us arrange themselves in such a way that our pollution can’t float away—and instead just hangs at street level in a stagnant pool … Until [Heller] came, the department never had a meteorologist on its staff. Imagine that. No meteorologist in a department whose job is the air around us. Not only do we now have a meteorologist, but a department is already working with Columbia,