New York City’s boroughs also take disaster precautions. The city has 578 miles of coastline, which includes fourteen miles of beaches,50 and beachfront neighborhoods need to be on special alert when a hurricane is approaching. Hurricane Sandy took an especially hard hit on the northern part of the Rockaways neighborhood, located in the city’s Queens borough, so with the support of federal and local government, the coastal neighborhood planted six miles of sand dunes and built a five-and-a-half-mile boardwalk. The community is also raising money to fund an Army Corps of Engineers project that would include floodwalls, levees, jetties, dunes, and a larger sand barrier to defend against rising sea levels.51
Residents of the Rockaways are also developing new infrastructure projects to strengthen the neighborhood. The Rockaways Courthouse, for example, was built in 1932 and is a twenty-four-thousand-foot building that has been vacant for thirty years. Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the New York City Economic Development Corporation selected a developer to renovate the building into a medical center. It will house doctors providing medical and outpatient surgical services in specialties including ophthalmology, urology, obstetrics, gynecology, and orthopedics. It will be open all year and will also be an active medical center helping residents in the event of another natural disaster. Representative Gregory Meeks said, “Hurricane Sandy underscored the importance of having storm-secured, flood-protected, state-of-the-art medical facilities readily accessible to Rockaway neighborhoods and communities.”52
Another good example to look to is the Netherlands, where sustainable development makes optimal use of geography and existing structures. The Netherlands has a very low elevation, with about one third of the country below sea level—the lowest point being twenty-two feet below sea level. By necessity, the country had to develop creative solutions to avoid flooding from nearby rivers after storms; this was tantamount to its survival and prosperity. To do this, the country developed an extensive system of dikes (natural and man-made drainage ditches), sand dunes, water pumps, and floodgates.
The Netherlands’s port city of Rotterdam has implemented innovations worthy of the aspirations of the fourth industrial revolution. Its lakes, roadways, garages, and city parks can double as emergency reservoirs when seas and rivers spill over, preventing flooding that could otherwise cause human tragedy and billions of dollars in damage. New York Times writer Michael Kimmelman wrote about this in his article titled, “The Dutch Have Solutions to Rising Seas. The World is Watching”:
Lately the city, accustomed to starting over, has reinvented itself as a capital of enterprise and environmental ingenuity. It has pioneered the construction of facilities like those parking garages that become emergency reservoirs, ensuring that the city can prevent sewage overflow from storms now predicted to happen every five or 10 years. It has installed plazas with fountains, gardens and basketball courts in underserved neighborhoods that can act as retention ponds. It has reimagined its harbors and stretches of its formerly industrial waterfront as incubators for new businesses, schools, housing and parks.53
Another city working on plans to prevent destruction in the wake of natural disasters is Mexico City. Mexico City was one of the Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities initiative, which opened in 2013 and helped eighty cities around the world implement “comprehensive resilience strategies . . . projects that will make cities more livable, sustainable, and resilient.54 Michael Berkowitz, the president of 100 Resilient Cities, described the mission by saying, “It is about building better infrastructure, community cohesion, and taking advantage of the natural environment.”55
Mexico City has more than eight million residents, making it the twenty-third-most-populated city in the world. When I visited, I was amazed by the city’s energy, beauty, culture, and abundant humanity. Its architecture is also incredible, with centuries-old stones surrounded by mortar that has been reapplied over the years. The broad, tree-lined boulevards recall European ones, and it has a rich cultural scene. But while the city has a wealth of good qualities, it also has an Achilles heel: it is highly susceptible to natural disasters. Mexico City began as the city of Tenochtitlan, an artificial island built by the Aztecs who dumped soil into the center of Lake Texcoco. After, the Spaniards built Mexico City atop the ruins of Tenochtitlan. Today, Mexico City’s location—sitting on a massive landfilled lake—makes it a prime spot for earthquakes and floods. As you walk around the city, you can see the settling that has occurred at some of the its oldest structures, including government buildings, museums, and cathedrals—testament to past earthquakes and the minimal support the soft bed of Lake Texcoco provides for the city’s buildings. According to the 100 Resilient Cities project:
Mexico City faces significant danger from natural phenomenon. Its geographical conditions make it continually susceptible to seismic hazards, and being located on land that was once a lake makes the city prone to flooding. Runoff from the nearby mountains is improperly managed, which, in addition to flooding, can lead to mudslides and diseases born from standing water.56
Arnoldo Kramer, Mexico City’s chief resilience officer, explains:
Climate change has become the biggest long-term threat to this city’s future. And that’s because it is linked to water, health, air pollution, traffic disruption from floods, housing vulnerability, to landslides—which means we can’t begin to address any of the city’s real problems without facing the climate issue.57
With the help of the 100 Resilient Cities project, Kramer and his team, and Miguel Ángel Mancera, the head of government of Mexico City at the time, developed a strategy to mitigate worst-case scenarios and build resiliency. The government launched a program named Resilient CDMX: Adaptive, Inclusive and Equitable Transformation, and Arnoldo Kramer was appointed its director of resilience. According to the 100 Resilient Cities project, the Resilience Strategy of CDMX was structured around five priorities, described as follows:
1 Regional Coordination: The plan aims to create an institutional strategy for 2030 and promote cross-cutting agenda between institutions.
2 Water Resilience: The main objective is to create a “Water Fund” for Mexico City, develop a culture of responsible consumption, and rescue aquifer zones.
3 Urban and Regional Resilience: This priority seeks to promote the recovery and development of green urban areas, build green infrastructure that can drive hydrologic restoration in iconic public spaces, and provide environmental education.
4 Comprehensive, Safe, and Sustainable Mobility: The aim is to create an integrated public transport system through increasing quality and quantity as well as promoting innovative transport models.
5 Innovation and Adaptive Capacity: The city will seek to drive innovation for integrated risk management.58
Mexico City’s initiatives were incredibly meaningful, just as the ones developed in New York and Rotterdam were, and as cities build their own plans they need to keep in mind their unique landscape, economy, building stock, transportation options, climate, and geographic size. Communities face different challenges, so there is no set formula when it comes to outdoor planning and disaster-prevention planning. But we can take lessons from cities that are already making strides toward long-term sustainability.
Tree Challenges
In the early 1970s, Dutch elm trees were dying by the thousands from Dutch elm disease, a fungus from elm bark beetles that made its way from Europe to the United States. The American elm had been one of the United States’ fastest-growing trees and was commonplace in many towns. In New England and elsewhere, canopies of elm trees blanketed some of the cities’ most beautiful streets. But the very ubiquity of the trees proved fatal. They were planted very close together, and the trees spread the fungus through their tangled underground roots. The decimation was quick and difficult to contain. The first case of Dutch elm disease reported in the United States was in 1928, and the outbreak in the 1970s and 1980s was
