We’re almost two weeks past Hurricane Ian. Most of us weren’t in its path and so it just becomes another disaster that happened to other people, but to those people most impacted it is an ongoing challenge: over a hundred people dead, hundreds of thousands still without power, tens of thousands facing a housing crisis due to destroyed/damaged homes, and estimated $67b in damages. It will take years of rebuilding to recover.
Credit: International Union of Architects
In the wake of a natural disaster like a hurricane –
or a tornado, a flood, even a pandemic – it’s easy to shrug our shoulders and say,
well, it’s Mother Nature, what can we do?
There’s some truth to that, but the fact is there are choices -- design
choices -- we can make to mitigate the impacts. A Florida community called Babcock
Ranch helps illustrate that.
Babcock Ranch is located a few miles inland from Ft.
Myers, which was devastated by Ian. It bills
itself as “America’s first solar-powered town,” with an impressive array of almost
700,000 solar panels. More than that, it was built with natural disasters in
mind: all utilities are underground, it makes use of natural landscaping to
help contain storm surges, streets are designed to divert floodwaters, making
use of multiple retaining ponds.
Credit: Babcock Ranch
It survived Ian with no loss of power, no flooding, and
no major damage. Its community center is
serving as a refuge for people from communities that were not as fortunate. A
spokesperson for Syd Kitson, the man behind the development, told
CNN: “It’s a great case study to show that it can be done
right, if you build in the right place and do it the right way,”
Mr. Kitson told
60 Minutes: “So as soon as the sun came up the next morning, I
jumped in my car and I started driving out. And the only damage were a few down
trees and a few shingles off the roofs. That's it. And so our recovery was
maybe a day.”
Good luck, or good design? As NPR said about one Babcock Ranch family
whose home escaped damage: “But it wasn't just luck that saved Wilkerson and
his wife, Rhonda, or prevented damage to their well-appointed one-story house.
You might say that it was all by design.”
The project was begun in 2015, with first residents
moving in in 2018. It currently has some
2,000 homes – ranging from condos to starter homes to estate houses – and 5,000
residents (which Mr. Kitson expects will grow to 50,000).
Jennifer Languell, a sustainability engineer who helped design the project and now lives there, told NPR:
We felt you could develop and improve land, not just develop in a traditional way where people think you are destroying the land.
The things that we do, you don't see. The strength of the buildings, or the infrastructure that deals with stormwater, or the utilities. You don't see that stuff. Which is good, because most people don't need or want to think about it.
One could argue, well, Babcock Ranch was further inland, it had more recent
construction with more stringent building codes, it didn’t have mobile homes, it
wasn’t built in floodplains. To which I’d
argue: Those. Are. Design. Decisions.
Babcock Ranch was designed not just to withstand hurricanes but also:
…to offer residents multiple ways to improve their physical and mental wellbeing. From the Lee Health Healthy Life Center, to carefully planned greenspaces and nature trails, to our robust resident programming, there are countless ways to get active, expand your social circle, and build a life that positively shapes your overall wellbeing.
It’s all about design,
about the choices we make…or don’t think to make.
 |
| As hurricane damage goes, not so bad Credit: Nancy Chorpenning/CNN |
--------------
I’ve been thinking about the role of design in health
since I was fortunate enough to get to know Steve Downs, then at Robert Wood
Johnson Foundation and now at Building H.
Back in 2017 he wrote
about how it was important to “build health into the OS of our daily lives.” As
the Building H website warns:
Modern life is great at
making us happy – in the short term.
In the long term, it’s
killing us. By design.
From cheap calories to
free freeways, from second cars to second refrigerators, our everyday environment
is engineered for convemience, passivity, and gratification.
The result: An epidemic
of obesity & diabetes, depression & chronic pain.
And if you’re thinking
healthcare can solve this…you’re already too late.
To this point, The
New York Times recently reported
about how trying to contain the epidemic of diabetes through medical care is
doomed to failure. In words Steve would
agree with, Dr. Dean Schillinger, a professor of medicine at UCSF, told NYT:
“Our entire society is perfectly designed to
create Type 2 diabetes. We have to disrupt that.”
The article further asserts:
There is no device, no drug powerful enough to counter the effects of poverty, pollution, stress, a broken food system, cities that are hard to navigate on foot and inequitable access to health care, particularly in minority communities.
Dr. Schillinger was one of numerous experts who was part
of the National Clinical Care Commission, which issued
a report earlier this year urging Congress to put more focus on the social
and environmental factors that contribute to diabetes and make managing it more
difficult. They called for a “health-in-all-policies” approach, whether those
are health, housing, nutrition, or environmental policies.
 |
| Credit: National Clinical Care Commission |
As Dr. Schillinger told NYT:
It’s about massive federal subsidies that support producing ingredients that go into low-cost, energy-dense, ultra-processed and sugar-loaded foods, the unfettered marketing of junk food to children, suburban sprawl that demands driving over walking or biking — all the forces in the environment that some of us have the resources to buffer ourselves against, but people with low incomes don’t.
Steve would urge that this approach should not just
apply to diabetes.
--------------
Babcock Ranch isn’t Utopia. I doubt there aren’t many low income people
there. I suspect it doesn’t have many people of color. I’d be interested to
know what happens to its sewage and trash. Its residents probably still drive
too much, eat too much (of the wrong foods), and get too much medical
care. It may have survived Ian very
well, but it is still in Florida, where there will always be another hurricane,
which might prove more damaging.
But still. Babcock
Ranch is an example that design can make a difference in our lives, in our safety,
and in our health. Let’s hope it doesn’t
take too many more disasters for us to learn that lesson.
No comments:
Post a Comment