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This Interventions essay presents 14 stories of, and positions on, urban climates in South Asia. We look analytically and linguistically from this region to engage the terms ‘mahaul’, ‘mausam’ and ‘aab-o-hawa’ as critical concepts to conceptualize climate in its political, social, historic, atmospheric, ecological, material, sensory and embodied registers. Gathered together, the stories scaffold a perspective on climate that connects concerns about broader structural conditions (mahaul); local and lived experiences in different temporal registers (mausam) and sociomaterial entanglements that demand new ways of knowing nature (aab-o-hawa). An expansive yet grounded conceptualization allows us to narrate individual cases and local climate stories in their multiplicity and difference, rather than through cumulative effects across much wider geographies. This essay on South Asian urban climates provides an analytical frame based on shared colonial history, and geographies connecting experiences of climate across fraught geopolitical borders. These diverse South Asian urbanisms provide evidence of a range of environmental vulnerabilities, while seeking possibilities in already existing climates—in the seas and airs that reorient the experience of land and atmosphere, in centering marginalized voices, in historical remnants to read contemporary urban change, in exploring planning agency grounded in local politics, and from the position of partial knowledge that being within urban climates entails.

Many of the most ancient technologies of urbanization are meant to control water. While there are examples of settlements interlaced with water, from Venice to precolonial Tenochtitlan to the Benga...

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused unimaginable adversity, with nations across the globe devising ways to cope with the loss of life, economic productivity, and social fabric. Due to the agnostic nature of the virus, no facet of society, whether in the Global North or South, has been left untouched. As beacons of economic and social agglomeration, the pre-pandemic city, in particular, has seen a rapid transformation, in often unforeseen directions. Local businesses have shuttered, while large technology companies have thrived; offices have closed, while their adjacent streets have been opened for active mobility and social activities; apartment rents have decreased, while single-family home prices have increased; the underprivileged have been adversely affected by both the virus as well as the economic reality of the pandemic, while the affluent have been largely untouched in both health and economy. Responses to COVID-19 in various nations have only exacerbated existing socioeconomic inequities, and, expectedly, not all federal, state, or local responses have been beneficial to all strata of society. This white paper focuses on several core themes that have evolved over the course of the pandemic and have behaved differently across geographies: (1) urban economics and equity (2) social and economic power dynamics, and (3) strategies to preserve urban social and economic systems.

Over the 50 years since its publication, Ian McHarg’s Design with Nature has been enormously influential in shaping design and planning in cities and regions around the world, including in the flood-prone cities of New Orleans and Dhaka, Bangladesh. This commentary reviews the influence of Design with Nature in key plans and proposals in Dhaka and New Orleans to highlight the potentials and limitations of applying McHarg’s methods. In both cities, McHarg-influenced urban expansion plans of the 1970s and 1980s were largely not implemented because their focus on geophysical landscape processes did not address considerations of power, politics, and property. More recent green infrastructure proposals have threatened to entrench urban inequalities by labeling low-lying low-income settlements as against natural laws of landscape suitability. Drawing on these cases and on critical environmental scholarship produced in the years since Design with Nature, the commentary argues that McHarg’s work is essential for addressing contemporary urbanization challenges, but that it must be amended with a greater recognition of the politics of urbanization and environmental risk. To do so would require (1) expanding and problematizing the idea of nature, challenging the stable nature–society binary, and embracing pluralistic forms of environmental knowledge; (2) shifting from a conceptualization of design as “revelation” by technical experts to methods centered on synthesizing diverse perspectives and enabling democratic deliberation; and (3) recognizing that the shift to designing with nature is a politically fraught process in which adaptation opportunities and constraints are defined by place-specific historical patterns of urbanization.

Urban design is an essential component of planning for climate transformation. However, the concept of transformation in urban design is complicated by the problematic legacy of design-led mega-projects. Such projects, often called Haussmannization, are criticized as inattentive to existing landscape, built, and social environments. While corrective movements have partially addressed criticisms of Haussmannization, they can also hinder justice-centered climate transformation, by empowering already powerful interests to defend status quo conditions or justifying inequity-deepening interventions in the name of climate action, a phenomenon we label climate Haussmannization. We present a schema connecting transformative urban design with procedural, distributive, and recognitional justice.

New frameworks for “urban resilience” frequently overlook the role of property rights and tenure security in shaping vulnerability, as well as how different property rights regimes shape societal capacity to adapt to environmental and developmental disruptions. We contribute to these discussions by examining how collective urban land tenure affects community-scale resilience, defined as environmental wellbeing, productive livelihoods, and empowered governance. We use urban villages in Shenzhen to study how this widespread phenomenon of collective land ownership in Chinese cities allowed rural villagers to adapt as cities spread around them over time. Drawing on a literature review, interviews, and a field visit to Shenzhen, we find that collective tenure in Shenzhen’s urban villages has helped them avoid some of the limitations seen in household-level tenure formalization efforts elsewhere. Collective tenure enabled rural villages to create self-governance mechanisms that allowed them to transform individual and collective assets into vibrant, well-serviced, and mixed-use neighborhoods. Urban villages house most of Shenzhen’s residents and have helped underwrite the region’s industrialization process. However, collective tenure also has hindered integration with Shenzhen’s urban infrastructure, governance, and taxation systems, resulted in astronomical profits for village elites, and repeated historic patterns of unequal land ownership in China. The promises and perils of collective urban property rights seen in Shenzhen call for research on other such models around the world to further inform whether and how such property rights regimes can support equitable and holistic notions of urban resilience.

Faced with two existential threats – nuclear war and climate change – planners have responded by proposing sweeping reforms for city-regions, often deploying the newfound rationales to re-package e...

The map that would become known as the “green dot map” was published by the New Orleans Times-Picayune on January 11, 2006, and quickly came to hold a central place in the canonical account of post-Hurricane Katrina planning in New Orleans. The map and its swift public rejection became emblematic of the overreach of top-down planning in the immediate aftermath of Katrina’s devastation, taking on a sort of mythical power as a singular artifact whose catalytic power was taken for granted. To better understand how this episode shaped post-Katrina planning, this chapter traces the development of the map through early drafts produced by three different sets of actors. Through critical cartography-informed visual analysis of the maps themselves and their “para-map” materials, the chapter assesses how visual representations and spatial classifications shifted with each subsequent interpretation. The textual and visual framing of the proposal as put forward in the Times-Picayune’s final map reinforced preexisting suspicions that post-Katrina planning would be insufficiently equitable and politically illegitimate. Through interviews with planners, designers, and decision-makers, the chapter considers how the green dot map and its reception have shaped water planning in New Orleans in the years since. The chapter highlights the critical importance of representational politics in an era when visual representations are increasingly central to climate change adaptation and other arenas of urban planning.

On a narrow strip of land between the Mississippi River and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ flood control levees in New Orleans, a squatters’ community called the Batture exhibits an unusual inversion of conventional assumptions regarding hazard awareness and development security. For a New Orleanian to willingly take up residence on the “wrong side” of the levee is to break the most fundamental rule of the city’s spatial economy and collective psychology. This article proposes the existence of a Batture Effect , a mode of insurgent citizenship whereby hidden environmental threats are made visible and small-scale architectural, urban, and psychological adaptation measures are tested. As an adaptive design strategy, organic in its development over time and responsive to the immediate needs of residents, the occupation of the Batture demonstrates a homesteader’s approach to land appropriation. In calling into question land-use and ownership, the urban planning process and its associated spatial agency, and the role of the individual in disaster preparedness, this guerilla urbanism suggests relevant lessons to the practice of landscape architecture and urban planning.

Degraded proprioceptive system due to injury or disease affects standing balance and locomotor ability. This work presents a method combining a robotic exoskeleton and sensory augmentation device (“V-Belt”) capable of compensating for the impaired sensory systems for people with neuromuscular disorders. The “V-Belt” provides real-time vibrotactile feedback to help restore balance information for exoskeleton users. Both able-bodied and non-able-bodied subjects with spinal cord injuries have been recruited to evaluate the effectiveness of additional haptic feedback in balance retraining. Results show that subjects found this vibrotactile cue easily interpretable, useful in adjusting their posture and beneficial for self-rehabilitation.

In the wake of large-scale disasters, architects often step forward with new visions for recovery and rebuilding. The widespread destruction of buildings and human landscapes presents an attractive opportunity to work in an atmosphere of moral clarity: to design and build as an act of defiance against hostile forces. The demands of post-disaster environments give the work of architecture a sense of urgency, both morally and economically. However, such rebuilding efforts can also expose problematic undercurrents, and while widely acclaimed for their altruistic vision, opportunistic architects may, in some cases, do more harm than good.

A growing number of cities are preparing for climate change impacts by developing adaptation plans. However, little is known about how these plans and their implementation affect the vulnerability of the urban poor. We critically assess initiatives in eight cities worldwide and find that land use planning for climate adaptation can exacerbate socio-spatial inequalities across diverse developmental and environmental conditions. We argue that urban adaptation injustices fall into two categories: acts of commission, when interventions negatively affect or displace poor communities, and acts of omission, when they protect and prioritize elite groups at the expense of the urban poor.

The mapping of indigenous lands to secure tenure, manage natural resources, and strengthen cultures is a recent phenomenon, having begun in Canada and Alaska in the 1960s and in other regions during the last decade and a half. A variety of methodologies have made their appearance, ranging from highly participatory approaches involving village sketch maps to more technical efforts with geographic information systems (GIS) and remote sensing. In general, indigenous mapping has shown itself to be a powerful tool and it has spread rapidly throughout the world. The distribution of mapping projects is uneven, as opportunities are scarce in many parts of the world. This review covers the genesis and evolution of indigenous mapping, the different methodologies and their objectives, the development of indigenous atlases and guidebooks for mapping indigenous lands, and the often uneasy mix of participatory community approaches with technology. This last topic is at the center of considerable discussion as spatial technologies are becoming more available and are increasingly used in rural areas. The growth of GIS laboratories among tribes in the United States and Canada, who frequently have both financial and technical support, is in sharp contrast to groups in the South—primarily Africa, Asia, and Latin America—where resources are in short supply and permanent GIS facilities are rare.

The Department of Energy (DOE) is responsible for cleaning up the radioactive and chemical contamination that resulted from the production of nuclear weapons. At more than one hundred sites throughout the country DOE will leave some contamination in place after the cleanup is complete. In order to protect human health and the environment from the remaining contamination DOE, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), state environmental regulatory agencies, local governments, citizens and other entities will need to undertake long-term stewardship of such sites. Long-term stewardship includes a wide range of actions needed to protect human health in the environment for as long as the risk from the contamination remains above acceptable levels, such as barriers, caps, and other engineering controls and land use controls, signs, notices, records, and other institutional controls. In this report the Environmental Law Institute (ELI) and the Energy Communities Alliance (ECA) examine how local governments, state environmental agencies, and real property professionals implement long-term stewardship at two DOE facilities, Losa Alamos National Laboratory and Oak Ridge Reservation.