Community Resilience to Climate Change: Theory, Research and Practice

11 NYU, and Cooper Union in developing basic studies of our traffic pattern, our weather and air currents, and a host of new devices that may hold down pollution at its source. With a change of mayor, climate policy went off the agenda in New York City for four decades and the leading urban climatology unit on the Bronx campus of New York University was disbanded. The city’s observation networks and the research partnerships were only revived after 2002 with the election of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who positioned New York for leadership of the new wave of global climate change awareness (Corburn, 2009; Rosenzweig et al., 2011). For consistent long-term application of climatological principles to urban management, we must look to German-speaking countries, particularly the southern zone of Germany, together with neighbouring Swiss cantons and Austria. This is the only part of Europe which has an extensive literature of urban climatological monographs and where city plans will routinely cite air movement as a basis of planning policies. Both theory and practice having common origins in a national culture of weather sensitivity—Wetterfüligkeit—which extends far beyond awareness of Licht und Luft and the atmospheric dimension of public health. Factors include a conscious reaction against the negative object-lesson of industrial Britain in Germany’s late industrialisation; collective memory that Stadtluft has cultural as well as chemical properties; a legal system that clearly allows constraint of private property rights in the environmental interest; and a decentralised constitution which requires the Deutsches Wetterdeinst to engage more than most national meteorology agencies with services to state and local governments. Two examples can be mentioned. Munich has an important place in the history of climatology. Max Joseph v. Pettenkofer, creator of the Archiv für Hygiene, founded the first institute for urban hygiene in Munich in 1879. Several of the foundation texts of micro-climatology originate in the city’s university, especially the seminal The Climate Near the Ground of Rudolf Geiger—first published in 1927 and still in print today (Geiger et al., 2009) and the Das Stadtklima of his pupil Albert Kratzer. Planning regulation has been shaped by considerations of light and air ever since the late 18th century, when Prince Elector Karl Theodor declared Munich an ‘open city’, demolished the 17th-century fortifications, created the Englischer Garten as a public park and instituted building regulations based on separation distance. The 1904 Staffelbauplan der K.Haupt- und Residenzstadt München by Theodor Fischer was a remarkable synthesis of enclosed street corridors along principal roads with open layout along side streets— both elements reflecting the climatic principles of his mentor Camillo Sitte (Collins and Collins, 1965). Fischer’s plan remained in effect until 1980, Munich having deliberately decided to rebuild the gaps in its ruined street plan after World War II rather than open them up, as Hanover and Berlin did, into a modernist ‘stadtlandschaft’. Under the city’s Stadtentwicklungplan of 1963 (the Jensen Plan) the built-up extensions of the growing metropolis were to alternate with green environmental fingers. And, coming up to date, the city’s present overall strategy die Perspektive München 1998 is based on a triad of principles—kompact–urban–grün—that echo Fischer’s early 20th-century synthesis of urbanity and nature (City of Munich, 2010). Munich’s design strategy is underpinned by climate science. In 1986, the Bavarian urban climate unit Stadtklima Bayern undertook a comprehensive measurement and modelling campaign that demonstrated Munich’s dependence for summer ventilation on cold night-time air draining off the Alps to the south and daytime flows of fresh air from the Danube plain to the east (Bründl, 1988). Soon afterwards, it was decided to relocate the airport from the east to the north of the city, releasing its huge site for a trade fair and urban extension, the Messestadt Reim, which would be the first demonstration project of the ground-rules set out in the city’s ‘compact– urban–green’ strategic vision (City of Munich, 2010). The airport redevelopment concept was devised by one of the three climatologists behind the 1986 study of Munich, Professor Helmut Mayer, now of the University of Freiburg. The entire layout is configured to protect the quality of that slow wind that blows from the Danube plain on sticky summer days. A landscaped band 400 metres wide from east to west of the site serves as a ‘fresh air glade’ (Frischluftschneise) to guarantee the ventilation of the city centre from the east. Then, within the residential neighbourhoods, a secondary system of open spaces runs into the housing blocks to pour cool nocturnal alpine air from the south (City of Munich, 1995, pp. 11–12). It is an unusually direct application of climate analysis to urban design. The seminal example of long-term application of climatology to the practice of urban design is found in Stuttgart, state capital of Baden-Württemberg. As a manufacturing town surrounded by steep hills, Stuttgart has always suffered from air quality problems, exacerbated by exceptionally low wind speeds and weak circulation—locals refer to the city centre as the Kessel (cauldron). Its planning history shows a level of awareness of climatic factors exceptional even by German standards. ‘Unhindered access of light and air’ was the design basis of the first workers’ suburb—das Postdörfe—laid out by the Württemberg authorities for postal and railway workers in 1868. The city extension plan devised by Karl Friedrich Kölle in 1897 was based on through-ventilation (Durchlüftung) principles with houses spaced along one side only of the new streets along the valley sides (City of Stuttgart, 2007, pp. 16–17). The extension plan approved by Mayor Gauss in 1901 included a technical appendix by Dr Fritz Erk on the natural patterns of wind movement in the city’s valleys: this science provided the basis for detailed regulation of building separation and height. As the Daimler-Mercedes works grew along the River Neckar in the first half of the 20th century, so did concern for air-hygeine, to the point where the municipal council decided in 1938 to appoint an in-house meteorologist to ensure that climatic factors were given full weight in the implementation of its 1935 Urban Construction By-law. Paradoxically, with the outbreak of war, Karl Schwalb’s first task was to create a network of rooftop chemical nebulisers and ‘fog