Community Resilience to Climate Change: Theory, Research and Practice

12 catapults’ that would shroud the entire city and its factories from the view of Allied bombers. Yet the camouflage tactic also provided valuable experimental data on the pattern of air-flows in and around Stuttgart. After the war, Schwalb built up a specialist team which continues today as the Urban Climatology Unit. Dr Jürgen Baumüller succeeded him in 1971 and Dr Ulrich Reuter in 2008. Stuttgart’s municipal teamof 10 urban climatologists maintains a small number of weather stations, carries out ad hoc measurement campaigns— such as an experimental release of tracer-gas SF in the hills above the city in 1981—and operates a comprehensive set of computer models of the city climate. Baumüller and Reuter are both active scientists, well connected not only with research units in German universities but with urban climatologists world-wide (Hebbert et al., 2011). Stuttgart first attracted international attention through a documentary filmentitled Urban Development and Urban Climate: Stuttgart— an example from the Federal Republic of Germany, presented with voice-over in Chinese, Russian, Japanese and English as the official German contribution to the United Nations Habitat I Conference in Vancouver in June 1976. The film’s vivid imagery included long shots of shimmering thermal hazes and three dimensional animations of cold air flows—streams of blue gel pouring down valley sides until blocked by buildings. Above all, the documentary displayed real-life city-scale climate management in the person of Oberbürgermeister Manfred Rommel, pipe-smoking son of the World War II general, scrutinising city maps with his staff of meteorologists and planners. It caused a stir in North America (Spirn, 1984) and yielded extensive long-term links with Japanese scientists and municipalities. Stuttgart’s most significant policy contribution has been a translation device, the Klimaatlas or urban climate map, connecting meteorological analysis of the city’s ‘climatopes’ to policy guidelines for planning. High-resolution mapping of air flows and thermal exchanges provides an evidence base for controls over the siting and massing of buildings, the management of open spaces and the reservation of unbuilt zones as catchments and conduits of the strategic ventilation system (Hebbert and Webb, 2012). It is useful equally for the determination of individual sites and for the spatial planning of the metropolitan region of 2.6 million inhabitants (VRS, 2008). The prosperous Schwabian capital in the Neckar valley, where vineyards co-exist with high-technology car production, might be a special case. Yet under the heading of Environmental Meteorology Climate and Air Pollution Maps for Cities and Regions, its methodology has been adopted as national standard VDI 3787-1 by the Verein Deutscher Ingenieure, the German Institute of Engineers, and applied domestically in (for example) Berlin, Kassel, Freibourg, Frankfurt and Bochum. Its success has prompted international interest, led by Japanese cities such as Osaka, Kobe, Yokohama, Fukuoka, Okayama and Sakai, with many others following world-wide (Ren et al., 2011). The Klimaatlas focus on topography, roughness and the katabatic and anabatic systems of air circulation has particular appeal in dense hot-humid centres such as Hong Kong, Kaohsiung City, Singapore and Phom Pehn, where even the slightest acceleration of air flows may have significant implications for ventilation and human thermal comfort (Hebbert et al., 2011). So a methodology evolved in the temperate zone has found a following in the southern hemisphere—playing a part, for example, in the Hong Kong government’s response to the SARS crisis (McCann and Ward, 2011, ch. 6; Ng, 2012). Recalling the historical precedents, the potential for knowledge transfer which Richard Tobin doubted in 1976 now seems strong. In a context of widespread awareness of urban climatic factors and their significance, the appeal of climate mapping is obvious. Less so are the institutional requirements that underpin it—the resources to mount high-density weather observation campaigns, expertise and computing power for models, institutional capacity to derive and enforce planning guidelines. It remains to be seen how ‘mobile’, in McCann and Ward’s terms (2011), this technology of urbanism really is. CONCLUSION How might these precedents affect our understanding of urban climate change? First, obviously, they shift the time-frame. The urban heat island appears not as an anomalous discovery of the 1990s but in its true light as the longest-studied category of anthropogenic climate change. Instead of seeing adaptation planning as “still only a novelty” (Rosenzweig et al., 2011, p. 238), we have many decades of experiment to draw upon, and not just the overhyped handful that crop up repeatedly in the urban climate literature, such as Mayor Lee Myung-bak’s Cheong-gye stream in Seoul and ARUP’s unbuilt master plan for Dongtang, Shanghai. Secondly, the perspective of urban climatology brings into relief a different set of climate factors. The risk-resilience model highlights high-impact risks such as storm-surge, drought, typhoons and temperature extremes, but has less to say about everyday and localised weather phenomena such as rainfall and wind patterns. Air movement, perhaps the most important micro-climatic variable affecting human thermal comfort, occurs in every city at every hour of day and night and is directly affected by building form and urban layout. Ventilation is not just of interest in heat-waves, it enhances liveability in all weathers. Thirdly, all the successful examples of urban climate management depend upon fine-grained spatial mapping. The repeating patterns of urban weather (i.e. their climates) are complex and spatially specific, requiring observation and analysis of local particularities. Diurnal patterns of urban wind circulation have an intricate spatial distribution linked to topography, building formand landscape. Solar radiation and shade patterns relate directly to street canyon dimensions and the spacing of buildings. Human comfort levels are highly sensitive to air flows and humidity levels dependent on presence or absence of street trees. So the level of resolution is a vital consideration: the urban climate is a meso-scale phenomenon but it can only be usefully understood in micro. The micro-climatic variables at the