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The Importance of Local Food Production for Resilience
Célia Blauel is the Deputy Mayor of Paris who is in charge of the Prospective Paris 2030. This urban design is focused on helping the city of Paris increase its social and ecological resilience within the next decade. According to Blauel, the goal of a resilient city is to build and transform urban places to face 21st-century challenges better. Like many urban areas worldwide, Blauel believes that climate change will lead to longer heatwaves, floods, and other ecological problems. She also finds that these ecological stresses could lead to a scarcity of natural resources, a drop in biodiversity, and a threat to urban food and energy supplies.
To face these threats, the city of Paris is the first in Europe to have its own agricultural program. Understanding that ecological crises pose a severe threat to global supply lines, Paris's agriculture plan focuses on renewing local food production and commercialization.
Similarly, Kotchakorn Voraakhom, a landscape architect and Founder of the Porous City Network in Thailand, is working on helping cities in Thailand create productive green public space. They want these spaces to create local food sources while simultaneously tackling climate change in dense urban areas and climate-vulnerable communities. In 2019, Voraakhom helped to develop the Thammasat University Urban Rooftop Farm. The project repurposed wasted rooftop space to address food and water scarcity in preparation for future climate challenges.
"Resilience is not about (finding) the perfect solution," Voraakhom says. "It's about living with change and being willing to survive in any circumstance." Reimagining how public, urban areas can be turned into green spaces that provide food and other ecological services should be a policy priority for every municipality. "When I designed my rooftop urban farm…I was actually thinking about the problem of wetlands in the city," she says. All these concrete rooftops (in Bangkok) were creating an urban heat island leading to higher energy consumption." By turning concrete rooftops into productive urban farms, Voraakhom helped increase the city's resiliency via greater food security and helped reduce energy consumption by improving the building's energy efficiency and thermal performance.
What is Doughnut Economics?
Kate Raworth, the author of the award-winning book Doughnut Economics participated in the Resilient cities panel. Doughnut Economics presents a detailed economic framework that aims to ensure nobody falls short on life's essentials. These essentials include items from food and housing to healthcare and political voice. At the same time, the goal is to ensure that collectively we do not overburden the planet's life-supporting systems, on which we fundamentally depend, including climate stability, arable land, and the ozone layer.
The Role of Doughnut Economics in Resilient Urban Design
According to Raworth, "we've inherited economies that assume that the shape of progress is endless growth…We were told that things grow and grow and grow and they go through the ceiling, but nobody ever asked what happens when we go through that ceiling."
Instead of focusing on endless economic growth without considering the ecological implications of growing indefinitely within a limited biosphere, the Doughnut Economics approach focuses on recognizing limits and needed constraints. "The doughnut sets out boundaries," Raworth explains. "It says there is a social foundation, a boundary below which no human being should fall. And there is an ecological boundary beyond which we cannot grow."
Rather than seeing these boundaries as hindrances or obstructions to our way of life, Raworth believes that recognizing these boundaries can be profoundly liberating. "People sometimes think that boundaries get in the way, but boundaries unleash our creativity," she says. When we begin to take these boundaries seriously, that is when governments and civic society can start to unleash creative proposals, policies, and incentives that allow for a more resilient urban design.
For example, the Doughnut Economic framework begins by ensuring that all people have access to healthy, affordable housing. However, Raworth asks: "How do we create housing that is affordable for all but does not exacerbate the climate change we're already facing?"
The doughnut economic model combines social and ecological boundaries to help communities invent a sustainable economic model. On one side of the "doughnut," there is a social foundation above which all people should reside. In terms of housing, this foundation should ensure that every resident of a resilient city has access to safe, healthy, affordable, and dignified housing.
On the other side of the doughnut, however, there is an ecological ceiling. Our endless growth economic model has "overshot" that ceiling, thus leading to the myriad of ecological crises we face. Creating resilient urban areas requires individuals, communities, and policymakers to consider this ecological ceiling in the design of affordable and dignified housing alternatives.
Tobias Roberts
Tobias runs an agroecology farm and a natural building collective in the mountains of El Salvador. He specializes in earthen construction methods and uses permaculture design methods to integrate structures into the sustainability of the landscape.
