Friendly Fire
It's time for designers to embrace fire as the ecological and cultural force that it is
"Spurred by disasters like Hurricane Katrina and Superstorm Sandy, cities across the country have, over the past 15 years, learned to “live with water.” After more than a century of filling wetlands, damming rivers, and diverting streams and stormwater flows into concrete channels, public officials, influenced by a coterie of landscape architects and planners, have embraced the opposite strategy, investing in open space networks that use dynamic natural systems to slow, store, and absorb floodwaters.
Fire and fire control is a central point of study for UCLA’s newly launched ArcDR3 (Architecture and Urban Design for Disaster Risk Reduction and Resilience) Initiative. (Hongzhi Zhang) Out of this shift has sprung an entire vocabulary: rain gardens, sponge parks, living shorelines, hydrologic urbanism. Inspired in large part by Dutch planners, many of these terms are now part of the American planning lexicon. The idea of living with water is mainstream. Now, there are glimmers of a similarly paradigmatic shift taking place around another destructive force: fire.
Wildfires have become a startling fixture of life in the West. As I write, not one but three of the largest wildfires in California history are raging just outside of San Francisco, blanketing the city in smoke and giving the sky a preternatural, ghostly red glow. Smoke from still other fires has inundated Los Angeles, Portland, and Seattle, keeping pandemic-weary residents trapped indoors. In California alone, the fires have killed at least 25 people and gobbled up more than 2 million acres, an increase of 2,000 percent over 2019 figures. In Oregon, air quality dipped so low that it fell below the recommendations of the EPA’s Air Quality Index. By mid-September, the smoke from the fires stretched from Hawaii to Newfoundland.
Design and planning professionals are not ignorant of the threat that wildfires pose to communities. However, many responses rely on defensive strategies deployed at the residential scale—using nonflammable materials and landscaping, for instance. There is mounting evidence that communities need to literally fight fire with fire, embracing periodic burns as a way to protect public health and safety. During last year’s devastating fire season in Australia, a period that became known as the Black Summer, wildfires consumed close to 45 million acres but were noticeably less severe in predominantly Aboriginal areas. As The New York Times reported, Aboriginal use of “cool burns,” i.e., low-intensity fires, helped halve the number of destructive wildfires.
Architects and urban designers can help cities think through the spatial implications of wildfires. This fall, UCLA participated in launching the ArcDR3 (Architecture and Urban Design for Disaster Risk Reduction and Resilience) Initiative, a new global design studio and series of symposia led by Hitoshi Abe, director of the school’s xLAB. The multidisciplinary partnership includes 11 universities located along the Pacific Rim and aims to establish “an international platform for the production and exchange of knowledge on environmental design that reduces the risk of recurring disasters.” UCLA’s Jeffrey Inaba, who with David Jimenez Iniesta is leading a studio focusing on fire, pointed out that wildfires have the potential to reshape large swaths of cities like Los Angeles, as land values in those areas that are most desirable but also wildfire-prone plummet. “The potential impact of fire is huge, not just to the hillsides but to all of L.A., because it’s going to mean a reorganization of the hierarchy of land value in the city,” he said." —Timothy A. Schuler, Oct. 29, 2020
This post is an excerpt. Read the full article on the Architects' Newspaper website.
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