Resilience Design in Practice: Future Climate Visions from California’s Bay Area

Abstract

This study discusses the implications of resilience design for questions of economic and social resilience, and for equity. Resilience design proposals for California’s Bay Area, resulting from the Resilience by Design project and published in 2017, were evaluated through content analysis and interviews with design teams and plan authors. Findings from the study indicate that these proposals offer visions and strategies for large-scale infrastructural projects that rely on a land-as-ecosystem framing to adapt to extreme weather events, but that they also attempt to direct the impact of these ecological processes on surrounding social systems such as planning processes and landscape regenerations for adaptation purposes. However, findings also indicate that the design process does little to address equity beyond proposing access to those new landscapes and green infrastructure spaces, and to a much lesser degree homeownership and labor models for wealth accumulation. Ecology is consistently deployed in the data analyzed to normalize and propose socio-environmental relationships, implicating questions of equity that are often not addressed. These findings matter for urban design projects and processes that are increasingly pursued by municipalities and public agencies in an effort to secure funding and implement strategies for a climate just future.