Flooding and the city: The big picture
After Harvey, will Houston start asking the tricky questions?
We’re still trying to figure out what Harvey means for the city and the region going forward.
But before we ask any questions, let’s state a fact as plainly as possible: This is the worst storm the U.S. has ever seen.
“[It’s] off the charts by many measures,” writes Mark Fischetti in Scientific American. Stunning, almost cartoonish graphics show the volume of water and scale of a storm worsened by the impact of climate change on a vulnerable region that just keeps getting inundated, one once-in-a-lifetime event after another.
“It’s hard to explain the stupefying vastness,” Matt Pearce writes in the Los Angeles Times.
Now, though, a few days in, as the rains blow east and away, as armies of volunteers mobilize in boats and form lines at shelters to help those in need and as those of us trapped with no way out scroll through the internet and squirm in our private anxieties, questions about the implications of Harvey are beginning to form.
Some are wondering whether the design of the city, all 627 square miles of it, is to blame. Ian Bogost in the Atlantic questions what he calls “the pavement of civilization.”
“Many planners contend that impervious surface [i.e., roads, parking lots, sidewalks and other pavements, along with asphalt, concrete, brick, stone and other building materials] itself is the problem. The more of it there is, the less absorption takes place and the more runoff has to be managed. Reducing development, then, is one of the best ways to manage urban flooding.”
Bogost also talks to experts in stormwater management who question the typical strategies that Houston employs:
Thomas Debo, an emeritus professor of city planning at Georgia Tech who also wrote a popular textbook on stormwater management, takes issue with pavement reduction as a viable cure for urban
These are tricky questions, anyway, questions that Houston hasn’t always been good at answering. Is the city developing responsibly? What would that look like? Is the region managing stormwater as well as it can? Who should we be listening to?
What should we be building, as we rebuild?
If business as usual is, at least in part, to blame, another question is whether any of these tricky questions themselves will summon enough force to guide the city and region into what Gov. Greg Abbott calls “a new normal.” As the Chronicle’s Mike Snyder asks in his recent column: Will Harvey strike us as bad enough that it leads to “new ways of thinking about how Houston should grow?”
And how should Houston grow?
“Our officials are going to have to get used to hearing things they don’t want to hear,” Rice University’s Jim Blackburn tells the Daily Beast. “(Houston’s) engineering is based on old statistics that don’t take climate change into account. We spend all our time in this part of the world denying climate change, but that keeps us from asking the important questions. I think this event has opened up that issue.”
And if we ask those important questions, there might be a way to build the city that we must build, Eric Holthaus suggests in Politico:
“It’s possible to imagine something else: a hopeful future that diverges from climate dystopia and embraces the scenario in which our culture inevitably shifts toward building cities that work with the storms that are coming, instead of Sisyphean efforts to hold them back. That will require abandoning buildings and concepts we currently hold dear, but we’ll be rewarded with a safer, richer, more enduring world in the end.”