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With Toronto's real estate market booming and unprecedented growth happening across the city, the future is looking bright for the GTA. But with a growing city, there inevitably comes growing concern over the resiliency of our built environment and our economy in the face of climate change and ever more frequent major disruptive events. At Entuitive's CityVision event last week, planning for resiliency took centre stage with a talk by guest speaker Alec Hay, Principal in Risk, Resiliency, and Security Planning at Toronto-based firm Southern Harbour.
The function follows a recent announcement that Toronto and Calgary have joined the 100 Resilient Cities initiative, a global movement that aims to better prepare cities in the face of disasters, not just with their immediate response, but also with the resulting stresses that impact the day to day activities of a healthy city, such as high unemployment, unreliable or inefficient transit systems, power outages, or food and water shortages. By joining the initiative, Toronto will now receive funding to hire a full-time Chief Resilience Officer to begin implementing principles of resilient design in the City's processes.
“Our cities are being increasingly tested by more frequent and unpredictable extreme weather events. And as engineers, we firmly believe that urban design needs to be proactive, not reactive, to the environment,” says Brock Schroeder, Managing Director at Entuitive. “What we can control is the resiliency of our buildings by incorporating these design principals early in the planning process. It’s a critical conversation the industry needs to have."
During a captivating speech, Hay encouraged a more comprehensive approach to the design and planning process, one that takes into account the potential ramifications of disastrous events and how to minimize their impact on our everyday lives. This involves a better understanding of who assumes risk in these scenarios and who carries the liability when things go wrong, with the idea that better confidence in the soundness of your building or business leads to better insurability and durability in the long term. Hay pointed out that many of our codes of practices are antiquated and are based on assumptions that the environment in which we live will remain constant for the foreseeable future, a dangerous assumption given climate change and the speed of technological advancements.
To better explain the principles, Hay provided an anecdote about the flooding in downtown Calgary in 2013, where a business found itself in financial difficulties during the aftermath. Despite its office not being flooded, it was still unable to carry out its business due to the fact that the substation from where it received its electricity was flooded, and therefore lost all power and communications. When the owner claimed insurance, his claim was rejected based on the fact that because the substation was located in a known flood plain, this was a foreseeable occurrence in the event of a flood, and therefore not insurable. When planning for resiliency, scenarios like this can be avoided by identifying risks of all parties involved, and by better design and planning of infrastructure to withstand disruptive events.
As the talk around climate change and its effects on the urban environment heats up, Toronto is taking its first steps toward becoming a more resilient and prepared city. You can find out more about planning for resiliency by visiting Southern Habour's website, here, or by checking out the 100 Resilient Cities initiative, here. Want to get in on the discussion? Leave a comment in the space provided on this page.
