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April 11, 2021Fight or Flight? Rethinking the Urban Footprint (2020-2021)
Fight or Flight? Rethinking the Urban Footprint
DfRR Program Series on Managed Retreat
Illya Azaroff, FAIA, and Gretchen Bank, Associate AIA, Co-chairs
2020-21Introduction
“Fight or Flight? Rethinking the Urban Footprint” is a six-part series that will address how the urgency of climate change requires design professionals to rethink the built environment. Rising seas, extreme heat, drought, and wildfires are among the environmental stressors that will continue to affect communities throughout the United States and the world. We are now confronted with the urgent need of creating relocation strategies for individual households, communities, and cities.
As architects, planners, landscape architects, and related professionals, it is our ethical responsibility to integrate thinking about relocation into our practices. The extreme complexity of the economic, social, and environmental impacts associated with climate migration and relocation will be a large part of this conversation, along with equity and environmental justice. We recognize that it is incumbent upon us to find appropriate pathways forward as swiftly as possible, and to continue these conversations.
- Session One – Fight or Flight? Communicating Science, Risk, and Urgency – December 14, 2020
- Session Two – Fight or Flight? Overcoming the Crisis of Climate Grief – January 21, 2021
- Session Three – Fight or Flight? Pathways from Around the World – March 16, 2021
- Session Four – Fight or Flight? Navigating Roadmaps to Success – April 1, 2021
- Session Five – Fight or Flight? Stemming the Tide – June 4, 2021
- Session Six – Fight or Flight? Climate Justice and Equity – June 11, 2021
Design for Risk and Reconstruction
The Design for Risk and Reconstruction Committee (DfRR) harnesses the design community's expertise to address disaster mitigation and adaptation in situations caused by major events that threaten people in the built environment, such as major storms, extreme heat, climate change, sea-level rise, terrorist attacks, etc. Our mission is to foster awareness within the profession and the public of the necessity of anticipating risk at multiple scales, from a single building to comprehensive regional planning. Our goals: To formulate programs that engage the profession, stakeholders (public), and policymakers in important conversations around these issues; To develop appropriate professional-public partnerships to bring leaders and innovators together; To examine the design sequence to address mitigating natural and human-made disasters, developing disaster preparedness scenarios, mobilizing disaster relief response and recovery, and planning and executing reconstruction projects; To improve the designed environment to protect the health, safety, and welfare of its inhabitants—functionally, technically, economically, and aesthetically. Illya Azaroff, FAIA, and Lance Jay Brown, FAIA founded DfRR in recognition of the growing need to address the increasing vulnerabilities that communities face across the world. The Board of the AIA New York Chapter formally established DfRR on May 17, 2011, and sanctioned the committee name on June 21, 2011. Meetings typically occur at 6:30 pm on the second Wednesday of each month.