I haven't been able to back-track how I came to reading this 2010 blog post by Lebbeus Woods, but I found that it wove together many of my feelings on hazards. (I'm a big Lebbeus Woods fan, he's also a Michigander!)
There are hazards that exist purely because of human design (intentional or not): murder, financial meltdowns, mechanical failures. But when we focus on natural disasters, they are always at an intersection of physical processes and human decisions. We've built homes in deserts where water won't come, roads across fault lines that will slip unanticipated, buildings in hurricane corridors where each storm is a reckoning. I don't believe in the possibility of "undoing" most of our decisions around where urbanity sits, but we can start with major cultural reframing to build more responsibly.
Woods points out how blaming hazards like these on the physical processes allows us to remove fault from engineers, designers, policy-makers, and citizens—thereby anonymizing the human causes of the disaster and offloading cost, in the FEMA model, to the broader taxpayer base. Blaming nature perpetuates a man-nature duality, too. I believe we need to dismantle this dichotomy to find sustainable futures on earth.
This line of inquiry—around disaster, mitigation, blame—is one of the many reasons I'm interested in New Orleans. (I'm ignoring many other cities that are equally interesting—I focus here because I romanticize New Orleans for its rich cultural context.) Every hurricane season, it seems, the city catches its reflection in the mirror and a glimpse of oblivion. Rising seas are coming regardless. Have you seen Glory At Sea! / Beasts of the Southern Wild? There is an attitude portrayed in these that flooding isn't an apocalypse, or even something you try to prevent. The water is always coming: you should just get used to living on a boat.
I'll end quoting Woods' post again, with a statement that resonates with what I hope to work on for the next decades of my life:
There are hazards that exist purely because of human design (intentional or not): murder, financial meltdowns, mechanical failures. But when we focus on natural disasters, they are always at an intersection of physical processes and human decisions. We've built homes in deserts where water won't come, roads across fault lines that will slip unanticipated, buildings in hurricane corridors where each storm is a reckoning. I don't believe in the possibility of "undoing" most of our decisions around where urbanity sits, but we can start with major cultural reframing to build more responsibly.
Woods points out how blaming hazards like these on the physical processes allows us to remove fault from engineers, designers, policy-makers, and citizens—thereby anonymizing the human causes of the disaster and offloading cost, in the FEMA model, to the broader taxpayer base. Blaming nature perpetuates a man-nature duality, too. I believe we need to dismantle this dichotomy to find sustainable futures on earth.
This line of inquiry—around disaster, mitigation, blame—is one of the many reasons I'm interested in New Orleans. (I'm ignoring many other cities that are equally interesting—I focus here because I romanticize New Orleans for its rich cultural context.) Every hurricane season, it seems, the city catches its reflection in the mirror and a glimpse of oblivion. Rising seas are coming regardless. Have you seen Glory At Sea! / Beasts of the Southern Wild? There is an attitude portrayed in these that flooding isn't an apocalypse, or even something you try to prevent. The water is always coming: you should just get used to living on a boat.
I'll end quoting Woods' post again, with a statement that resonates with what I hope to work on for the next decades of my life:
Most needed now are new ideas and approaches that go beyond the defensive reinforcement of existing conceptual and physical structures and open up genuinely new possibilities for architecture integrating earth’s continuing processes of transformation.
Getting wet feet,
Lukas
P.S. Lots of links to my own newsletter here. Feels kind of funny, but one of my goals in weekly writing was to weave together my lines of thinking. So it is partly for myself.