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.

1. Introduction

Resilience designs, or proposals that combine planning processes with urban, landscape, and ecological designs meant to increase resilience towards future climate risks, are able to generate or inform public discourse around our future resilient landscapes. In this sense, design representation are more than passive images, and instead are active tools for potentially reconfiguring, contesting, or reinforcing socio-environmental relations. Though design proposals represent the designers’ normative visions, the images of urban futures that resilience designs present embody larger principles surrounding idealized relationships between people and surrounding ecosystems and landscapes [1,2]. Proposals to transform the built environment, whether they are eventually realized or not, are directed by social values and collective visions for engaging with and managing the environment.

The Resilient by Design Bay Area Challenge (RbD) competition launched in 2017 and was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. The goal of the competition, which focused on Northern California’s Bay Area, was to develop resilience design proposals for specific neighborhoods and regions around the Bay that are especially prone to sea level rise and extreme weather events. The RbD process was modeled after Rebuild by Design, which propelled a number of resilience projects for New York after Hurricane Sandy hit the US northeast coast in 2012. Rebuild by Design was sponsored by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (Washington, DC, US) and funded in part by the Rockefeller Foundation’s Resilience initiative, and the planning and design process was celebrated as unique because of its emphasis on collaboration with community stakeholders and engagement with government processes and entities, and because it required that proposals show community support, clear timelines, and funding mechanisms, among other. Despite this outreach effort during the brief 9-month competition process, if they even reached the implementation phase original design proposals were largely diluted because of funding constraints, begging the question of how such designs address equity and justice on the ground [3].

The RbD Challenge differed from the Rebuild by Design process mainly because its goal was to proactively develop regional resilience design proposals for climate change adaption before a disaster rather than as a response to one, and because it was a project that developed without the promise of federal funds for implementation. Despite the visibility in the public eye that the Rebuild by Design proposals gained and their potential influence on governance processes [4], the planning process was unable to adjudicate the joint goals of equitable planning at the community/local scale with the large-scale infrastructural demands of climate change adaptation strategies [3].

With this context in mind, this research explores the impact of the RbD process and asks what the nature of the resilient landscapes it envisions for this region is, as well as how these plans implicate equity. Can design, inherently an act that transforms the materiality and space of cities, address historic and entrenched inequalities that contribute to uneven climate change risks and vulnerabilities? If so, how does it do so? What aspects of equity is it willing to discuss and bring to light, and what sorts of transformations does it propose for an equitable climate future? The findings from the study matter for municipalities, agencies, and organizations and stakeholders actively engaged with planning for climate-just futures by working with multi-disciplinary teams of renowned designers, engineers, and landscape architects, among other.

The study contributes to the literature on spatial justice by paying particular attention to resilience design planning in relation to equity. Uneven socio-ecological transformations are inscribed in urban space and are processes that intersect with race, gender, and class [5]. Geographers have consistently called attention to the fact that planning and development, arguably the result of a design process, is the result of uneven power relations, but also that this unevenness is embedded in space—its infrastructures, materials, and built environment: “cities have been produced through racialized logics that have been engineered into their building blocks, facades, plumes of dust, streams, forests, and air circulation” [6]. Design proposals that do not foreground the systems that brought about unequal exposure to risk and vulnerabilities in the first place may entrench and perpetuate inequalities. The question of whether design processes can help move resilience in a direction that offers alternative pathways forward, ones that can catalyze a shift in power towards under-resourced and underrepresented populations, is therefore an important one to answer. In this sense the nine proposals offered by RbD, though not yet fully implemented, yield power by directing how resilient futures are understood and framed through design.

The evaluation of these plans, through stakeholder interviews and content analysis, shows that resilience is understood and is to be achieved quite differently from one proposal to the next. It also shows that equity was taken up in equally different ways, at times explicitly (i.e., directly stated as a goal and defined) and at times implicitly (i.e., the strategies proposed were driven by equitable outcomes, but equity as a term was not stated as a goal or defined). Importantly, those plans which did not explicitly acknowledge the systemic inequalities that expose under-resourced communities of racial and ethnic minorities to severe climate impacts also did not conceive of resilience as a process and outcome involving a social transformation that could address equity. This was consistently the case even when such plans proposed ecologically sound practices for mitigating and adapting to future climate threats.

2. Literature Review

Since design is fundamentally a spatial discipline, research work needs to evaluate the ways in which resilience is deployed in resilience design proposals in order to normalize, contest, and direct conversations on socio-environmental relationships, and to understand how these proposals reveal, disguise, or otherwise address equity. Though urban design research has highlighted the integration of resilience, ecology, and adaptive management strategies with design [7], less studied are the implications of this integration for questions of social resilience and equity, particularly for advocating the shifting of power relations for communities of color. In other words, can design that offers redirecting waste, remediating soil, and retaining water also direct the impact of these ecological processes on larger economic, labor, and political systems? This study aims to contribute to the literature on urban design and resilience by showing that where and how we expand or alter the physical space of cities reflects environmental and social values that are contingent, contested, and entangled with equity.

While at first glance the RbD proposals depend heavily on eco-based design, the visions of those plans rely as much on housing, education, economic growth and homeownership models as they do on ecological principles for landscape remediation. It is in this broader definition of design, one that captures design as process, theory, and outcome, that the RbD project matters. This research into RbD builds on Carmona’s discussion of urban design as a practice that is too preoccupied with the image of the vision itself, an apolitical illusion of sorts [8]. Urban design, Carmona contends, must acknowledge that the physical changes it proposes matter not only on aesthetic grounds but on social and political grounds as well, because it arises from, and is embedded in, a social and political context [8]. Within this context, initiatives such as the RbD one, as well as Rebuild by Design before that, are often vague and contested in large part because designing for resilience is contestable [9,10].

Even though the RbD project proceeded without the promise of federal funds committed to its implementation, the scope and scale of each proposal was incredibly ambitious, linking ecologically driven geographic regions with each other, proposing major infrastructural components, and restoring multi-acred watersheds, wetlands, and other ecosystems, all of which assume and promote new social and governmental partnerships and relations in order to implement. Recognizing that urban landscapes are ecologically connected to surrounding regions, resilience design proposals view those landscapes as critical infrastructure when considering adaptation and mitigation measures. However, if, ultimately, design is to be thought of as a “theory of process“ [8], the challenge is to reconcile the ambitious scope of proposals such as RbD with the hyper-local scale of place-based processes.

2.1. Urban Landscape as Critical Infrastructure

Spatial design responses to extreme weather events catalyzed by climate change typically address environmental risks [11], from stormwater [12,13] to rising sea levels, and from extreme heat mitigation strategies to the rehabilitation of ecological processes [14]. Where traditional approaches to urban development sought to stabilize environmental conditions [15], extreme and unpredictable climate events require design that is adaptable and can incorporate ongoing change [16]. They also require design at multiple scales, from the individual household and site to the region, while acknowledging the interdependencies among them. Resilience design has emerged as a way to address social-ecological systems by responding to their non-linear nature through adaptive measures [17].

Recent catastrophic events have yielded a series of relatively high-profile design proposals at the regional scale, notably those as a response to Hurricane Sandy in New York, particularly the Rebuild by Design proposals, and those responding to Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans [18]. Such proposals foreground ecological processes as part of urbanization. In privileging ecological thinking, design proposals also change how landscapes are traditionally known and understood by recasting them as moving, evolving and shifting in relationship to the ecological changes accelerated by climate change. It is within this context, one of urgency felt by the unpredictable and extreme effects of climate change, that urban places are increasingly seen as infrastructures that incorporate socio-ecological processes in their making [19].

This turn to urban-landscape-as-critical-infrastructure in terms of climate change points to the belief that urban space plays a critical role in mitigating climate change and in adapting to extreme and weather events [20]. Ecological systems embedded in urban environments capitalize on environmental processes at the scale of the urban in an effort to mitigate climate risks, such as by designing the direction of water and its infrastructure. These are neither entirely green (i.e., soft infrastructure) nor strictly gray (i.e., hard infrastructure) categories [21]. Instead, such designs represent a conceptual shift from creating isolated and discrete architectural and urban objects to modulating flows within larger urban ecological systems [20].

Resilience design reconceptualizes the urban as an ensemble comprised of discourses, laws and regulations, architectural and landscape forms and design, and technologies, among other [22]. Concurrently, environmental planning and design is meeting the scale and scope of designing for resilience through expertise and practices that are globally constituted [23]. The impact of these endeavors, driven by internationally renowned design and engineering firms, remains elusive. Resilience design proposals may provide visions of sustainable futures, but their inability to be implemented highlights the intransigence of unjust dominant development processes [24]. The initial question, then, is how these resilience design plans propose that local communities reach resilience (i.e., what strategies are deployed and who benefits), and the ensuing question is whether and to what extent these resilience design proposals address inequalities.

2.2. Design and Equity

One of the underlying themes in justice frameworks is that people ought to be active managers of the environments in which they live, referred to as self-determination [25]. Scholars point to the need to involve local communities in adapting to climate unpredictability and weather extremes: as a way to foster design innovation, experimentation, and to promote transdisciplinary knowledge [7], as a way to avoid perpetuating socio-spatial inequalities [26], and as a way to build social connections and resilience, as well as policies and institutions for climate change adaptation [27].

Climate change is particularly complex in terms of procedural justice insofar as not every individual in a region is vulnerable to different climate risks in similar ways. Coastal communities may be exposed to sea level rise while inland communities in the same region, and under the same jurisdiction, to increasing extreme heat events. Within each of these communities, low-income populations are consistently exposed more than their middle and higher-income counterparts to those risks, an intersection of both vulnerability and exposure. Decisions that lead to climate change take place at different levels and across jurisdictions, from individual consumption behaviors to national environmental and energy laws, requiring a cross-scalar political commitment and sustained stakeholder engagement driven by local contexts [28]. Both state and non-state actors are necessary for generating and facilitating adaptation actions [29,30], but who is represented at each of these levels of decision-making is not entirely clear, and remains contested.

In this context, design disciplines can perpetuate or exacerbate inequalities by making proposals that are either not driven by, and do not represent, community needs or the needs of those most vulnerable, or propose interventions that do not take account of structural and historic inequalities by responding to those inequalities in ways that can empower community members towards self-determination. So even when design proposals take place in and for communities of racial and ethnic minorities, as with the RbD proposals, when they do not recognize the structural issues behind racial inequality as an integral part of their proposed strategies, they risk perpetuating those inequalities [31]. In resilience literature, specifically, scholars are wary of a framework that purports to return communities back to a business-as-usual state in the face of a climate disturbance, when it is that very state that created climate risks, structurally upheld them, and inequitably dealt them to vulnerable populations [32,33,34].

Planning and designing for climate change may lead to transformations that produce ecological enclaves, or sites that are better equipped to deal with climate change risks than others [35], leading some scholars to argue that adaptation efforts can align with investment and growth to mask inequalities [36]. This, in turn, entails that in order to better prepare societies and environments for climate change risks we ought to pursue large-scale transformative measures that involve addressing socio-spatial inequalities, not simply spatial ones [37].

These concerns guided the research objectives of this work. First, one of the goals in this study is to determine how resilience strategies are defined and envisioned. Second, the goal is to determine whether visions of future resilient landscapes address the equity concerns outlined above. In asking whether resilience design pays attention to structural and historically upheld inequalities in the communities in which these proposals take place, the aim is to understand the associated implications of these processes and proposals for equity. These are critical questions for design disciplines in large part because of the power of their visions to steer not only conversations about, but also the implementation of, certain proposals over others in pursuing climate just futures.

3. Materials and Methods

3.1. Study Area

RbD was launched in 2017 and was comprised of interdisciplinary teams working in and with communities in the Bay Area for six months. The RbD process began with an open competition where interdisciplinary teams could provide proposals for a specific region in the Bay Area, from which the competition organizers selected nine teams to move forward by funding the next phase. The next phase required visiting various neighborhoods around the Bay Area and conducting initial research that led to preliminary proposals by each team on areas they were interested in working with (Figure 1). The final phase involved the submission of a comprehensive resilience design proposal for a neighborhood or region in the Bay Area by each of the nine teams.

The plans studied and analyzed here are not a reaction to a disaster that has already occurred, but instead envision resilient landscapes towards future climate risk. We know less about these contexts, what form the climate risks will take when they materialize in short or long-term disasters, and what impact those events will have. As such, the visions are speculative but also generative, and they both draw from and frame larger discussions surrounding the nature of resilience design and equity.

3.2. Data Sources

3.2.1. Resilience Design Plans

The proposals from each of the nine teams take several forms: the primary and most comprehensive document analyzed were the official resilience reports posted on the RbD competition website after the completion of the competition (Supplementary File S1); secondary sources of analysis included images and reports documented on the lead team members’ websites, which were either architecture or landscape architecture firms.

3.2.2. Interviews

Additional sources that were incorporated in this analysis included semi-structured interviews with team members, ranging from one to three representatives, from four of the teams. Interviewees were asked to reflect on the process by which they selected neighborhoods or regions to work with, the nature of their relationship with those communities, and the influence of various stakeholders over the strategies incorporated in the plans.

3.3. Methodology

The content analysis part of this research began with parsing through each of the proposals and drawing out specific themes. Much of the literature on resilience involves defining what it is, how best to achieve it, and who is affected by resilience plans and policies. Actual plans that envision and inform the design and change to large-scale urban and regional landscapes receive considerably less attention, though their imagery invariably generates societal support or opposition, or some combination thereof, which informs policy and funding.

The analysis began with the following question: how do the plans approach resilience, i.e., how is resilience framed and what are the strategies proposed to achieve it? Beginning with a grounded theory approach, themes that emerged consistently from the plan documents were used to codify resilience strategies across three categories: social, ecological, and socio-ecological. None of the proposals were purely infrastructural or technological in nature, but rather a combination of social and ecological approaches.

An initial analysis of this first set of data led to axial coding by further refining the ecological resilience categories as either ecological restoration, green infrastructure, or grey infrastructure. Though gray infrastructure strategies are not necessarily always purely ecological in nature, they can rely on bio-based processes such as in the case of wastewater management and treatment. Through this act of categorizing the proposed strategies within each plan, it became clear that only a very small number of strategies involved gray infrastructure, which took the form of strengthening vehicular transportation and pedestrian networks, various forms of pumping water, and a wastewater treatment plant. Most strategies in these resilience design proposals involved nature-based solutions that combined green infrastructure with ecological restoration projects, positioned as mitigating solutions for a future of extreme and unpredictable weather events (Supplementary File S1, Table S1). The strategies are too varied to sum up into distinct categories, and instead point to the myriad ways in which resilience design fundamentally implicates new and renewed ecosystems in its visioning process.

Whether, and in what ways, the proposed new resilience landscapes address equity became another emerging question based on the initial rounds of analysis, given the potential of the proposed changes to the built and natural environments to affect social and ecological systems. Axial coding of spatial equity as a theme was subsequently applied to the next round of data collection and analysis. Visions that each plan put forth for an equitable climate-resilient future, as well as the strategies proposed to achieve those visions, were analyzed. In this work are included strategies that were not reflected directly in vision statements, such as those that involved providing affordable housing, public space, and employment opportunities, but which were developed either by the team members themselves or in partnership with community stakeholders and documented in the plans (Supplementary File S1, Table S2).

As with the resilience strategies, the ways in which equity is proposed to be achieved varies substantially from plan to plan. To better assess equity, then, each equity reference in the resilience documents was coded to correspond to one of the following equity frameworks which are established in, and drawn from, the literature: distributional equity, concerned with the uneven impact of climate change on vulnerable populations, procedural equity, focused on the equitable representation in the visioning and planning process itself, and recognition equity, which recognizes the historic and system context that gives rise to the unequal distribution of climate risks in the first place [38]. Recognition justice is of particular importance in the context of resilience design, since it can potentially focus design strategies on overcoming, to the extent possible, current and structural forces that persist and are supported by current policies, rather than on only mitigating certain population’s disproportionate exposure to climatic, environmental, and social risks as if such risks were a matter of individual choice.

4. Results

The RbD competition resulted in nine resilience design proposals for different geographic areas in the Bay Area. The competition, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, began with a broad call for interdisciplinary teams to respond to the specific Bay Area region on broad terms, though related to climate change, driven by the interests of each team. From this process, nine interdisciplinary teams were selected by the competition organizers to continue to the official first phase of the competition, which involved touring ten counties around the Bay Area to familiarize team members with specific areas first-hand. It is not clear what the criteria for the selection of these teams were, though expertise and team comprehensiveness seemed to be a component in the final team composition. Two teams were led by firms who also participated in New York’s Rebuild by Design initiative (SCAPE, whose offices are in New York, New Orleans, and San Francisco in the US, and Bjarke Ingels Group, with offices in Denmark, UK, Spain, US, and China), and all teams but one had large design firms who were well-established.

Teams were expected to select a specific neighborhood or region to work in for the next, and final, phase of the process, which resulted in a resilience design proposal for their selected area. The selected regions are comprised of predominantly working-class communities of racial and ethnic minorities, and they were selected by the teams in collaboration with the competition organizers. Chosen communities and regions all share similar climate vulnerabilities that center primarily on water issues: degraded watersheds, sea level rise, toxicity, and associated low water quality, habitat loss, and erosion.

4.1. Resilience Framings

The themes that emerged from the initial content analysis of the proposed strategies for addressing resilience involved social, ecological, and socio-ecological ones. This aligns with existing scholarship on how resilience can be framed to correspond to both social and ecological concerns, particularly relevant for nature-based solutions for mitigation and adaptation measures [39]. How well social resilience was addressed in the final design proposals tended to be a function of how well the design team integrated, worked with, and supported the efforts of local community members. All of the plans, on the other hand, were much more directly engaged with design proposals that addressed ecological resilience, work that developed through collaborations with engineers, hydrologists, and landscape architects. Where social resilience was presented as separate from environmental resilience, equity was referenced in a generic and cursory way. One example of this separation is where access to housing or financial empowerment is not framed as dependent on eco-based design strategies that might include restoring eroded coastal landscapes or daylighting creeks. Those plans that specifically foregrounded equity were the same plans that drew out the interdependency of social and ecological resilience.

Given the direct physical relationship to the San Francisco Bay that all of the communities involved in these proposals have, and the proliferation of nature-based strategies that design firms access in responding to climate adaptation work, it’s perhaps unsurprising that all of the plans give significant attention to ecological restoration as a means to provide environmental resilience and security. While the strategies captured in this table are not meant to be comprehensive and inclusive of all the strategies captured in the plans, they are representational of the variation between plans in how they approach resilience. In part some of this variation can presumably be explained by the differences in the degree and nature of public engagement, as well as in differences in the local environmental and ecological conditions of each neighborhood. However, these differences cannot explain all the variation given that many of these neighborhoods are part of the same region, and therefore share similar climate risks, as well as similar demographics. The variation in strategies from plan to plan speaks, at least in part, to the power of the designer in directing and framing how resilience is to be implemented in the communities they serve.

Each proposal references restoring wetlands, marshland, and creeks, and several proposals further explicitly address wildlife habitat and species connectivity as an integral part of these restoration efforts. These ecological restoration aspects of the proposals, such as softening shorelines, daylighting creeks, and restoring wetlands and marshes, are efforts that encompass large-scale landscapes and related bodies of water. Over the last few decades, several such reclamation projects implemented around the globe envision the regional landscape, and the ecological processes that comprise it, as the primary mediator for urban life [40]. Similarly, the RbD proposals envision reconnecting disparate and disconnected ecosystems, such as creeks, marshes, and wetlands, into a continuous landscape that could benefit adjoining racial and ethnic minority populations of low-income households, with an emphasis on sea level rise and corresponding large-scale adaptation strategies.

The RbD proposals focus on strictly eco-based or socio-ecological strategies. This is in line with much of the relatively recent integration of landscape ecology with urban planning and design in order to address resilience [41]. Landscape remediation projects are explicitly coupled with social urban life, achieved mainly through the following strategies: access to renewed eco-based landscapes designed to mitigate the effects of extreme weather events, educating people on the specific landscape they live on or near, as well as on how to best adapt to the anticipated climate changes of the future, and through the stewardship of these landscapes.

The proposals also, however, include distributed green infrastructure projects that take the form of green roofs, rain gardens, and other green infrastructure projects on distinct sites which collectively can act as a mitigating measure for floods while also helping to manage stormwater. Taken collectively, the design proposals replace the idea of infrastructure that acts as a reliable and consistent purveyor of resources, including water, electricity, food, and waste for the idea of infrastructure that accommodates adaptation and flexibility, feedback loops, self-management and reorganization, able to persist in a climate-risk future. Coupled with a changing view of the urban-as-infrastructure, all nine proposals envision a combination of green, blue, and grey infrastructure that can adapt to a changing climate and extreme weather events.

4.2. Resilience Design and Equity

By focusing on populations in the Bay Area that are particularly vulnerable to climate risks, the plans implicitly take on equity, offering design roadmaps and visions for resilient and climate-just futures. More concretely, each of the nine proposals envisions what an equitable climate-resilient future entails, though specific visions of equity vary substantially from plan to plan. At times equity is framed as access to renewed, resilient landscapes by community members. Given the lack of access to open space and clean air that frontline and fenceline communities face, ensuring that the resilient landscapes proposed have physical access points for community members is, indeed, a matter of equity.

At other times equity is a procedural concern, with plan authors explicitly outlining steps for ensuring public outreach in the development of the plans. An initial quantification of equity references in the resilience plans shows that the primary concern for the plan authors, and presumably the competition funders, was procedural equity, which accounted for nearly half of all equity references (Figure 2). The plan documents contain specific sections dedicated to describing their process of engagement and outreach, which could account for the predominance of this particular equity framework. Recognition justice, on the other hand, was the next most frequent reference to an equity framework but was subsumed in the introduction and history parts of the resilience plans. It’s also worth noting that three plans, the Grand Bayway, Our Home, and Islais Hyper-Creek ones, referenced recognition equity more than any other equity framework, and the latter two of these plans contain strategies that bridge social and ecological resilience. Those strategies are discussed in more detail below and highlight the ways in which equity was brought to bear on the strategies proposed.

Despite these immense restrictions, it is clear, based on interviews and on the content of published plans, that some of the teams were aware of the need to work closely with community stakeholders and made efforts to engage as many organizations and representatives as they could. The resilience design plans, broadly speaking, focused more on forming collaborations and partnerships with other agencies with an eye towards the implementability of the proposals, and much less so on ongoing collaborations and partnerships with the public. Community engagement during the competition process took various forms: working groups, toolkits for engagement and visioning processes, equity checklists, stakeholder design charrettes, field trips, public events, and engagement with local schools, among other.

In these resilience design plans, equity is recognized as a distributional concern over communities’ exposure to short and long-term climate risks, but also as a procedural issue that is mitigated through the efforts outlined in each plan that describe the ways in which community members were engaged in the design process. However, the efficacy of these processes remains elusive. While procedural justice in climate adaptation is a critical foundation for an equitable outcome, and though public participation efforts can focus on being inclusive of marginalized and vulnerable populations, these processes continue to be less than influential in giving those same populations political power to enact and shape the climate adaptation decisions they make [42]. With this in mind, the question of how resilience design considers equity beyond the timeline of the RbD project, and whether design for resilience defines equity beyond access to resilient landscapes, is an important one.

5. Discussion

5.1. Do Eco-Based Strategies Address Social Resilience?

Proposed future resilient landscapes envisioned and described in the RbD plans are conceived of as visible and public spaces. Ecosystem processes that might otherwise only be accessible to environmental scientists become public space, are incorporated into the performance of urban landscapes, and are made visible in order to mitigate weather extremes, while creating a place of identity. All of the RbD proposals discuss explicitly the need to involve people from impacted communities in the restoration processes at hand. Social benefits are not only addressed by layering recreational activities, such as walking and biking trails, on top of restored watersheds and coastal landscapes, but these critical landscapes also become sources of knowledge and opportunities for education for those directly impacted by their restoration.

Most notably, the People’s Plan team working in North Richmond foregrounds the transfer of knowledge from soft/green infrastructure restoration projects to other projects and processes that would empower people and promote social resilience. Towards that end, the People’s Plan proposal emphasized the need to not only involve community members in restoring degraded landscapes but to provide ongoing technical expertise and education opportunities in order to strengthen within the community their ability to collectively interpret and solve future climate-related challenges, such as flooding or storm surges. Here, ecological and social resilience build on each other.

Another form that socio-ecological resilience takes in the proposals is through recommendations to establish various social institutions, groups, and networks that can have an ongoing and direct relationship to the neighborhood’s changing ecology. The Estuary Commons proposal, for example, suggests that a Joint Powers Authority be established across different cities connected through a concern over shared climate change impacts. Such an authority would manage adaptation projects on a collective regional, rather than individual city, basis. Unlock Alameda Creek proposes that multiple agencies be involved in ongoing engagement with key stakeholders, including landowners and operators, for the short and long-term planning of the regional baylands. In addition to enhancing the connectivity of environmental systems and the ecological functions across jurisdictions, the Grand Bayway proposal also emphasizes that plan implementations should foreground the regional workforce.

The design strategies that the plans offer, in other words, highlight the need for multi-jurisdictional and cross-scalar collaborations and partnerships that address urban and environmental processes as mutually constituted. Urbanization is not simply meant to be supported by environmental processes; implied in the proposals is the recognition that eco-based design strategies must frame urban processes as inseparable from ecological ones. It is not surprising, then, to see that many of the plans emphasize affordable housing units, investment in schools, and requirement for local hiring practices amid eco-based proposals for stormwater, air, reservoirs, and soft infrastructures for rising sea levels. This is similar to recent findings on Climate Action Plans, where researchers highlight a correlation between references to equity and the inclusion of more systemic policy proposals that involve housing, coupled with green infrastructure [43].

The RbD plans that highlight equity, and that emphasize historic and systemic disinvestment in communities, there is also a more comprehensive approach to the proposed strategies. This mix of strategies involves affordable housing, investment in infrastructure upgrades, resilient ecosystems and landscapes that can absorb climate risk, and a framework for supporting existing and creating new social groups and networks to interface with governance processes and agencies.

Social resilience, or the capacity of populations to respond to and recover from a crisis, is not officially defined in any of the design proposals. Instead, its definition is implied through design ideas on how to strengthen social ties. All the plans address social resilience in different ways that range from recommendations to create resilience hubs (i.e., Our Home), building existing community-based organizational capacity (i.e., Estuary Commons), and managing the future of vacant parcels through community land trusts (i.e., Elevate San Rafael). The plans as a whole do not, however, offer concrete proposals that are based on an on-the-ground assessment of existing social networks and community groups or organizations. This is the case even for those design teams who worked with local community members directly throughout the design process. The plans also lack a concrete framework that comprise social resilience attributes, such as existing knowledge and skills, people-place connections, community infrastructure, a diverse economy, and engaged governance [44].

A design process can serve as a tool through which to promote collaborative networking relationships that can survive the publication of the resilience plans, if such relationships and networks are identified and incorporated into the design process. The People’s Plan proposal, for example, worked exclusively with community-based organizations and community members to generate a process and methodology for equitable and sustainable community development that focused on using the community’s assets to build local solutions to local challenges. The Our Home team, also particularly successful in building social resilience, created a Citizen’s Advisory Board that is comprised of community members, institutional actors, and environmental experts and advocates, which continued to meet well after the end of the competition. The majority of the proposals, however, aimed to support the community in generating design ideas but it is not clear whether these collaborations continued beyond the publication of the final design reports. As one team member noted, given the few months the teams had to prepare design proposals that would address historic and ongoing systemic environmental and social inequalities, “we simply didn’t have enough time to work with organizations and community members to build the kind and depth of understanding needed to do the kind of work we were trying to do” (Anonymous, personal communication, 17 August 2020).

5.2. Does Equity Matter in Resilience Design?

Beyond a reference count on equity, of particular importance in this study is the impact that equity has on specific resilience strategies proposed. Does a plan that came about, for example, through an involved public outreach process that relies heavily on procedural equity lens contain strategies that differ from the plans that recognized historic injustices in the communities in which they are working in, through the lens of recognition justice? While the relationship between the equity framework emphasized in the plans and the resulting resilience strategies is complex, in part because the resilience strategies cannot be neatly categorized and vary substantially from plan to plan, there are two notable plan exceptions where the relationship between recognition justice and a more comprehensive and community-based approach to resilience design strategies is clearer.

Access to employment opportunities and careers, along with access to financial capital and wealth-building opportunities, are given rare attention in the plans. Though jobs are referenced, such references are in light of employment opportunities that are far enough away to prove a mobility burden for residents. An exception is the Islais Hyper-Creek plan in which equity was specifically framed as a function of access to affordable housing and to economic opportunities. Specifically, the plan calls for migrating to ‘clean’ technologies and energy sources that can be coupled with youth education programs, building a long-term local workforce that can participate actively in a green transition economy.

The Our Home proposal is another exception worth highlighting here in that it pays substantial attention on how to create opportunities for North Richmond residents to access financial capital, and provides concrete steps that build on the work of community-based organizations in this neighborhood on how to achieve such access. These steps, which include generating shared homeownership opportunities and offering policies for local hiring practices, also aim to mitigate existing vulnerabilities faced by residents, from increased asthma rates to poverty. Access to homeownership, for example, is presented not only as an affordability issue but also as a means for wealth-building, while shared bicycles can reduce carbon emissions while allowing for greater mobility.

Many strategies in the plans seem to address equity in a narrow sense, insofar as they avoid discussions on how the proposal may lead to further inequalities if not managed properly. For example, all but two of the plans include affordable housing as a fundamental part of an equitable climate-resilient future, and a number of plans even offer concrete steps on how to build affordable housing and open space. Those strategies include active and ongoing engagement with community members on how to best address underutilized land, building community land trusts, and advocacy and training at various institutional scales and agencies. Despite the emphasis on affordable housing, though, only one-third of the plans acknowledge gentrification and displacement as issues that need to be addressed alongside proposals for affordable housing, open space, new infrastructures, and habitat and watershed restorations.

5.2.1. The Design of Engagement

Though each of the plans references equity and community engagement as necessary parts of the process for achieving an equitable resilience future, it is unclear what impact that engagement had on co-creating a framework for generating and assessing resilience design strategies. The disproportionate burden and impact of climate risks is not a matter of individual choice, so to overcome exposure to risk would require a shift in not only voice but in the power to enact resilient and climate just futures that communities envision.

Yet, according to several individuals interviewed for this research, each from different teams, teams were told not to interface with community representatives or organizations during the initial phase of the competition, and were driven to different neighborhoods around the Bay Area on buses. Because of this lack of transparency and communication, residents were confused and upset, particularly when seeing a large number of white people touring and taking notes in communities of color around the Bay Area (Anonymous, personal communication, 7 August 2020). In the second phase of the competition, once teams chose a specific geographic area to work in, team members were encouraged to make connections with residents and organizations working in the communities chosen for their proposals. However, the competition organizers did not facilitate those relationships, nor did they reach out to any of the communities before the competition launch to solicit interest or feedback, or to foster connections with residents and community organizations (Anonymous, personal communication, 24 July 2020).

The implication is that equity concerns are minimized insofar as procedural justice does not guide the design process. Procedural justice has long been established as a fundamental component of working towards more equitable outcomes insofar as its focus on representation and recognition aims to overcome unequal power in decision-making processes [45,46] It is also especially critical for climate change responses in that it enables people, especially those who are marginalized and vulnerable to climate risks, to collectively generate and enact decisions over how they and their communities can adapt [47].

This effort involves a capabilities approach, drawing out and emphasizing existing knowledge, capacities, and experiences of the communities engaged in local climate adaptation as a foundation for responding to climate risks [48]. Four interviewees in this study, each of whom belonged to a different team, reinforced the need for working with communities to draw out networks, connections, and capabilities. Each agreed this was not enabled by the RbD process, in part because they were not given enough time to engage with the communities before the final design product was to be delivered, and in part because they were not given funds to pay team members and community members for the time needed to engage with community members. When asked about funding, three teams explained that their contribution to the project exceeded what their allotted funding allowed, but that the community members remained unpaid entirely, and one team gave all of the full funds they received by the Rockefeller Foundation to participate in the competition to the community representatives they worked with.

One team member from one of the teams involved questioned the lack of attention the RbD process gave to the infrastructure needed for social resilience:

“everyone talks about ecology and economy, but what did RbD do to strengthen the social dimensions of communities and organizations, to understand what their goals are and who they speak for, and to ensure that the competition resulted in a community-organizing model that could last beyond the RbD process, a community that has power?”

(Anonymous, personal communication, 21 July 2020)

Echoing this loss of opportunity in designing an enduring social resilience proposal, one team member acknowledged two years after the competition had ended that “that project sort of ended and we’re busy working on other things, and it’s been difficult to stay involved and engaged and in touch in a way that I was hoping could be helpful with those communities, to follow their leads and help them get where they want to go” (Conger, K., from Roundtable Discussions webinar, 29 January 2020).

5.2.2. Equity beyond Access

Beyond questions of access to affordable housing and open space, whether these proposals design a process that shifts the power of decision-making to include community members in a way that can persist into the future is unclear at best. However, there are the beginnings of such aspirations in some of the plans. The Our Home group worked with local residents and community-based organizations to create a Citizens Advisory Board, mentioned earlier in this article, to become the leading entity driving the RbD effort, as well as the North Richmond Living Levee group, a working group responsible for addressing wastewater and shoreline management. According to an interview with one of the team architects, throughout the process the team members, in partnership with these newly formed organizations and existing ones, worked on funding mechanisms that could resist gentrification. A member of a prominent community-based organization explained in an interview that they continue to work with the Our Home design team members, collaborating on future financing opportunities for implementing the visions outlined in the plan.

The Estuary Commons team also worked extensively to build relationship with community-based organizations, residents, and agencies to implement adaptation strategies. Their work highlighted community-led investments as pathways for socioeconomic equity, acknowledging the responsibility of designers to shift the conversation surrounding equitable design to incorporate longer-term implementation strategies that could help shift power relations on behalf of vulnerable populations. In an interview with the team’s members, it became clear that “everyone understood that the issues of finance and governance need to lead—we can find solutions to the landscape problems but we won’t be able to do any of that unless we address underlying structures.” One of the drawbacks of the RbD process that they, and two other teams, described was that the process of pairing the design group with the community they designed for did not allow for a co-creative process to take place. In part this had to do, all teams interviewed agreed, with the time restriction given to the designers and in part with the lack of funding for community members to participate in the design process. This sense of urgency is paradoxical given the long-term nature of the climate-related problems taken on by these design visions, but can also prove useful insofar as some of the short-term strategies in the plans can be implemented with relatively fewer obstacles in the near future, and can then jumpstart associated proposals that require more time and resources.

The People’s Plan team also framed equity as an issue beyond access to housing and open space. Members of the team described how their work centered on strengthening community advocacy through ecoliteracy, which they define as an understanding of how ecological functions are integrated and connected to each other, thereby offering additional economic and material benefits (The People’s Plan, 14). Their efforts were founded on a mutual long-term vision that the team and community came up with, which involved enabling community members to take ownership of implementing their version of a climate-just future driven by self-determination. Promoting advocacy took the form of system thinking and building capacity training, while ecoliteracy was driven by permaculture tenets: ethical boundaries, integrated functions, pattern to details, small and slow solutions, and diversity and redundancy. The team members and community stakeholders took on permaculture as a model for these efforts. In the plan they describe permaculture as a design system based on Indigenous practices incorporating ecosystem knowledge and human needs, and emphasize the need to build capacity in this community by addressing defining characteristics of permaculture design. Namely, a care of people and the earth, limits to consumption, integrated eco-based strategies with multiple benefits, efficient design and implementation strategies, small and slow solutions, and diversity and redundancy (The People’s Plan, 14).

The People’s Plan proposal does not involve design in the traditional architectural or urban design sense of formulating a vision for a specific place or region. Instead, the plan calls for reconceiving design itself. It proposes a framework that can be adapted to the specific aspirations of a community that has been denied access to general or specific planning as a result of structural discrimination and oppression:

“… an unconventional approach—a social design process to build community capacity and ecoliteracy to address the challenges of coastal adaptation and resilience planning, especially in vulnerable communities that have experienced generations of marginalization and exclusion”

(The People’s Plan, 3)

The public determined their own vision, risk assessments, strategies, and timeline for addressing coastal adaptation and flooding issues. The People’s Plan puts forth the Community Partnership Process meant to identify local leadership, promote education, and build social capacity through a series of six steps: listen and asset map, assess and strategize, propose–discuss–feedback, establish a plan with phasing, implement aspects of the plan, and review and recalibrate. According to an interview with one of the leading members of the team, the RbD organizers resisted this proposal, questioning repeatedly who the designers on the team were and where the design was. The team explained to the competition organizers that The People’s Plan was a process that the community of Marin City owned, and that after the competition would close the organizers would need to continue funding and supporting this effort. Such an effort did not ultimately materialize. Though the plan makes clear that the steps for building capacity involve giving participants the tools they need for designing their own solutions, for developing their own planning strategies, and for interacting with more ease with external organizations and government institutions, Marin City remained a pilot study.

Equity is referenced in each of the plans either directly, through statements that foreground its importance in conceiving of climate just and resilient futures, or indirectly, through strategies proposed that promote equitable access to housing and amenities. However, despite the fact that inequalities in these communities are a result of ongoing and structural discrimination, only one-third of the plans acknowledge structural racism or discrimination as a fundamental aspect of the resulting social and environmental injustices faced by the communities in which the proposals take place. One team member, part of a team whose proposal identified racial segregation as a fundamental factor in lingering environmental and social injustices pervaiding their selected neighborhood, explained in an interview that the team kept returning to the question of whether resilience design continues to ask communities of color to keep enduring these inequalities (Anonymous, personal communication, 24 July 2020).

Both The People’s Plan and the Our Home plans took on racism and discrimination directly and used the resilience proposals to highlight the importance of self-determination as an act of resistance. These two plans expanded how design could empower community members by transferring knowledge and skills to their publics so they could develop their own strategies to address short and long-term climate change impacts in their communities. Conversely, beyond highlighting access to new resilient landscapes, the plans that did not take on issues of racism and discrimination directly did not capitalize on the power of design to lay the foundation for uplifting vulnerable communities in ways that allow for ongoing and persistent self-determination.

6. Conclusions

This research into the content of the design plans resulting from the RbD competition in the Bay Area was driven by the question of whose resilience is being addressed and in what ways resilience design engages with envisioning and building a climate-just future. How, exactly, resilient futures are envisioned, understood, and framed through design is a critical question as the design disciplines continue to deal with climate change and engage with communities in visioning processes. This research analyzed how resilience design purports to mitigate climate risks ecologically and socially, and outlined the implications of resilient landscapes for equity.

First, this study found that where social resilience was directly tied to ecological resilience, design proposals foregrounded equity concerns more concretely. The environmental implications of climate change, particularly in terms of sea level rise, are central to each of the plans. Adaptation and mitigation measures took the form of green and gray infrastructure projects at different scales, from distributed to centralized and interconnected systems. Significant attention was given to restoration efforts, also at different scales, from household to region. Social resilience was also addressed in the plans, with suggested policies ranging from access to housing and open space to job training in green energy. The plans that emphasized the role of eco-based solutions in potentially addressing both ecological and social resilience, equity was addressed more frequently and comprehensively.

Second, findings show that very few plans take on how to shift decision-making and implementation of resilient landscapes to community members, and how to make that power shift outlast the end of the competition timeline. As evidenced by these resilience plans, designers take on equity in different ways. The proposals are complex, touching on a number of aspects on what constitutes a climate just future and always returning to the question of equity. Equity, however, is framed as either access to resilient landscapes, mobility, and housing or is addressed through a participatory design process that led to final resilience proposals. RbD is certainly much less about dismantling power and much more about wealth, homeownership, and landscape mitigation models, but its emphasis on centralizing marginalized populations from the start is a promising model. The promise fell short in implementation, particularly in terms of the demands placed on the very communities designers sought to work with and in, but it’s worth noting that RbD jumpstarted several pilot projects and new social relations at various levels that continue to persist.

Third, and in terms of resilience design as process, the proposals that deemphasized design-as-site or design-as-landscape did so by focusing on design-as-process that could institute new, but also reinforce existing, social and environmental relations. Corresponding strategies involved opening new paths of communication among stakeholders, new paths for wealth accumulation, and otherwise generating authority among community members across policy-making and governance levels at different scales. Design as an ongoing practice that can support institutional and community-based relations may not fall in line with traditional outcomes of a design process, but is an aspect of design that planners and designers would benefit from paying attention to, especially given that physical transformations are embedded in political and social processes. Whether design should be involved in addressing social and environmental inequities is not in question—the resilience design proposals discussed here do just that. The question is what the nature of that involvement is, or what it could be. Where teams were willing to alter their position of authority (insofar as they were chosen and funded by the competition organizers to lead this design effort) beyond incorporating community feedback into design frameworks, design proposals provided a roadmap for equity that could outlast the publication of the proposals.

6.1. Limitations

The analysis of the RbD proposals rests on the published plans and on interviews with team members. A serious limitation to this study is the lack of input from community stakeholders themselves, the recipients of these proposals, with the notable exception of one community-based organization whose experience was entirely positive, and one community-based organization whose experience was entirely negative. Seven of the plans analyzed did not have corresponding community stakeholders offering a voice that could add nuance to the two who agreed to be interviewed for this study.

Though these findings may be significant, they may not be relevant for different regions that my be facing other climate and social risks. Similarly, and despite the wide reach of the concept of resilience as well as the national and international of the design firms and consultants working in this field, given the local nature of nature-based solutions these findings may not be relevant to other places where social and cultural contexts may differ, even if environmental conditions are similar.

Finally, while this study respects the value of design proposals as generative instruments, the analysis is silent on the question of implementation and the politics of actualizing these design proposals. This is an important limitation to consider because even the most equitable of proposals that make claims of environmental and social responsibility can exacerbate social inequalities when implemented.

6.2. Recommendations and Future Work

The strategies embedded in the RbD proposals are comprehensive as a whole, though individual plans may focus on either social resilience or ecological resilience, or a combination of both. While there are several land policies already in place in California’s Bay Area, those policies can be revised to incorporate findings from this work. Specifically, as funding for adaptation and mitigation strategies increase, particularly for under-resourced communities and regions, there is much knowledge in eco-based strategies included in these plans that are worth studying.

Also relevant for future land policies are findings involving equity. This analysis of the RbD plans and process points to the fact that designers are in a position to address questions of equity, not simply in terms of envisioning who can access basic housing and living needs, resilient landscapes, knowledge, and economic opportunities, but in terms of proposing design processes that shift decision-making to communities themselves and give them ownership over their surrounding living environments. For this reason, design proposals that envision climate just futures need to foreground the question of equity.