Amid the jagged peaks of the San Juan Mountains, in the northeast quadrant of the Four Corners regional border, is a cluster of five southwestern Colorado counties whose names evoke the region’s rich and diverse history: Montezuma, San Juan, La Plata, Dolores, Archuleta.

Diverse, too, is the way of life and the economy of the region—from tourism and agriculture to fossil fuel extraction. Fewer than 100,000 people populate the varied and mountainous area. The cities of Durango and Cortez represent a bit of relatively bustling semi-urban life, while small mountain towns and two Native American reservations occupy outposts across the 6,500-square-mile area, roughly the size of Connecticut.

For these far-flung communities, planning for the future has become much more uncertain in the 21st century, as the wildcard of climate change and the vagaries of the energy industry have minimized sure bets. Educated guesses about the coming decades are getting harder to make across many dimensions: from unpredictable prices and revenues within the natural gas industry to swings in the size of the snowpack, affecting river flow, crops, and skiing alike. And many variables are highly interconnected.

“Our biggest question is our vulnerability to drought,” says Dick White, city councilor in Durango. “Our agricultural and tourism industry could be totally disrupted if we go into long-term drought and have lots of wildfires.”

Recognizing the need for wider policy coordination, a regional group of governing bodies formed the Southwest Colorado Council of Governments in late 2009, to address larger challenges and to seek out collaborative opportunities. Yet, in terms of policy, the road-map to stability, sustainability, and economic prosperity has not necessarily become clearer.

The conundrums at hand may simply surpass the conventional planning tools themselves, observers say. Regional planning as a discipline, of course, stretches back decades, but the procedures, templates, and models employed—from “visioning” to “normative,” “predictive,” or “trendline” methods—are not always up to the task of grappling with irreducible uncertainties. So, last year, the Southwest Colorado Council embarked on an intensive process in partnership with Western Lands and Communities—a joint program of the Sonoran Institute and the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy—with an emerging policy tool that embraces the very idea of uncertainty: exploratory scenario planning, or XSP. Unlike the normative or traditional planning processes, it is not about what is preferred—an expression of community values—it is about what may happen beyond the control of planners involved.

XSP requires participants to identify the greatest causes of uncertainty in their community and use those challenges to envision alternative scenarios of the future. Whereas two to four scenarios would typically result from more traditional forms of scenario planning, the Southwest Colorado Council created eight scenarios during their XSP sessions.

Early in 2015, consultants, experts, and regional policy makers converged in the city of Durango to unpack a crucial question that would generate relevant scenarios: “Given the possibility of extended long-term drought and its potential environmental impacts, how could the Five-County Region develop a more adaptable economy?”

The question—which the group worked out through a careful, community-oriented process—became the focus of an extensive process of fact-gathering and analysis. This research culminated in two workshops structured to explore a variety of regional “futures”—the possible and plausible ways in which life in southwest Colorado could play out. The time horizon was to be 25 years, through 2040.

Participants considered the interrelated impacts of several critical areas of uncertainty, including the length of potential drought, local production levels of natural gas, and the cost of oil.

The central idea behind XSP is to bring together stakeholders to advance a multistep planning process that imagines many futures and formulates strategic insights accordingly. Its methodological steps are roughly: first, formulate a core set of questions; then, precisely identify and rank the forces of change; next, create narratives around possible scenarios and their implications; and, finally, formulate active responses and discern actions that would help address multiple scenarios. The process, says Miriam Gillow-Wiles, executive director of the Southwest Colorado Council of Governments, furnished a fresh way to help planners and policy makers imagine regional dynamics. “I think it set the council of governments up to be not just another economic development organization or government organization, because we are doing something different,” she says.

The project was also another step by Sonoran and Lincoln toward fine-tuning the concept and ultimately testing the value of exploratory scenario planning—which has its early roots in the business management and military spheres—in the context of urban and regional planning. Other recent case studies have been explored in central Arizona, in the Upper Verde River Watershed and the Town of Sahuarita, just south of Tucson, Arizona.

“This is something that is not only a good idea intellectually,” says Peter Pollock, manager of Western Programs at the Lincoln Institute. “It will add real value to your community planning process to deal with real problems.”

A Range of Futures

Dealing with real—and really tough—problems is the name of the game in southwest Colorado, as the region faces a “daunting” array of changes all at once, according to a 2015 report, “Driving Forces of Change in the Intermountain West,” prepared as part of the exploratory scenario planning process. Some are demographic—inflow of population, with more Hispanics, coupled with urbanization. Others relate to the “uncertain and complex” nature of the energy industries, which are affected by volatile global economic patterns.

Durango City Councilor White says he and fellow policy makers have been forced to think a lot about these shifts as their city considers a variety of infrastructure projects, from expanding the sewer treatment system to growing the size of the airport. White, a former Smith College astronomy professor who retired early and moved West to get involved in environmental policy, was a key member of the group that met last year in Durango as part of the Southwest Colorado Council of Governments.

“You’ve got this range of possible futures, and you really don’t know which road you’re going to go down,” he says. “The idea is to identify the biggest risks and best ‘no regrets’ policies.”

For White, the entire exercise of gaming out how varying drought conditions might affect the whole regional economy helped clarify issues. “Conceptually, I find that an extraordinarily useful policy tool,” he says. The sewer and airport infrastructure questions have subsequently been cast in a new light: “I have seen both of these decisions through the lens of [exploratory] scenario planning.” Given future uncertainties, White says he is determined to make investments that will give future policy makers flexibility should they need to make further infrastructure changes.

The final “low-regret” actions and strategies that stakeholders identified included: better coordination with federal agencies on forest management, public-private partnerships to promote use of biomass and biofuel, assessments of available land for development, identifying new opportunities to augment water resources from groundwater, the charging of real costs for water service and realistic impact fees, and support for small business and agriculture incubators.

Those insights and associated new perspectives are often hard-won, planners and participants concede. Exploratory scenario planning, as the southwest Colorado project demonstrated, can be a demanding process.

Hannah Oliver, who co-facilitated the scenario planning effort as a program manager with the Sonoran Institute in the Western Lands and Communities program, recalls driving all over the southwest Colorado region to get a feel for its land and its people and conducting many interviews with stakeholders. And that was just to prepare the groundwork—the “issues assessment”—for the stakeholder meetings.

The goal of the workshops themselves is to push the boundaries of the possible while staying within the bounds of the realistic. “You don’t want the scenarios to be so outlandish that community members can’t see themselves in it,” she says. The process aims to generate what Oliver, who was joined as a facilitator by Ralph Marra of Southwest Water Resources Consulting, calls “Ah-hah” moments. In this case, participants came to understand the profound implications of lower gas production, severe drought, and swings in oil prices—with ripple effects across the tourism and agriculture industries and with deep overall impacts on the regional economy. Southwest Colorado, they realized, could face a very different future under certain plausible conditions.

“You come out exhausted,” Oliver says of the typical initial workshop. “For the participants, it’s like going to a boot camp. People coming out of that workshop say, ‘I’ve never had to think like that before.’”

For community members, it can certainly take a lot of concentration to juggle the variables. “I think the whole way of scenario planning—if X, then Y—is a really useful way to look at things,” says Gillow-Wiles. But “the whole process itself can be challenging, because there are so many unknowns.”

Lessons Learned

A key to success, in any case, is to gather a broad range of people into the same room. In a wide and geographically dispersed region, that can be challenging. “Having a diversity of opinions is really important,” says Oliver, who is now a village planner in Phoenix. “Because the stuff you get out of the workshops is only as good as what goes in.”

Some southwest Colorado participants suggest that framing the exercise more directly around economic development or a more specific infrastructure issue (opposed to drought) might have attracted more participation from policy makers. “It’s sometimes hard to get your board members to buy into that kind of pie-in-the-sky type of thing,” says Willow-Giles, “versus something more tangible like ‘What do we do with our population growth in terms of transportation 25 years from now?’”

Likewise, White cautions that the ability to create momentum and community energy is not a given. “If I had a lesson to draw,” he notes, it’s that “you have to really work hard to make sure that you continue to have appropriately diverse representatives at both ends of the process.”

The southwest Colorado region has its share of political hot-button issues—including the politics of climate change and the dynamics of the fossil fuel companies there—but participants report that they steered clear of the land mines during the XSP process. (Drought, many note, has long afflicted the region, even prior to the Industrial Revolution; indeed, the ancient Puebloans likely left their famed cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde because of dry conditions.)

Pollock says that one of the virtues of XSP is that it allows in and even encourages conflicting views that can make it more inclusive, both in terms of process and outcomes. It minimizes arguments about which future is “right,” and it helps build support for action among the diverse group that has come together to develop the strategies. “We think it is a way to defuse some of the political questions that make our public process overly rancorous and difficult,” he says.

By bringing diverse ideas into the process early and openly embracing uncertainty, exploratory scenario planning can yield fewer surprises in the end for a community, according to Uri Avin, research professor and director of the Center for Planning and Design at the National Center for Smart Growth, University of Maryland. “The opponents of your end-state vision may, at the end of your visioning plan, come out of the woodwork and fight you,” he says. “Whereas exploratory scenarios explicitly tend to invite dissention and debate, and the construction of scenarios that embrace other viewpoints.”

One of the stark truths that can emerge from such a candid process is the reality that negative change may be likely under very plausible future conditions. Oliver says that participants in fact came to the realization that certain linear assumptions about the region’s economic future may need to be scrutinized.

“I think what struck them is the understanding that the oil and gas industry may not be around forever,” says Oliver. One of the biggest things they realized was how much they relied on money from natural gas production for basic services, she says. “They realized they might not be able to offer as many services if oil and gas were gone.”

Avin says that XSP operates as a kind of antidote to the traditional notion of plans-as-silver bullets. But, politically, that realism can be a challenging sell. “It may include accepting decline or change that may not be palatable but may be inevitable if certain things happen,” he says. “So the initial hurdle for planners is getting their arms around it and persuading their bosses who are elected officials that this is a good way to plan, and the payoff is in the long run.”

Armando Carbonell, chair of the Department of Planning and Urban Form at the Lincoln Institute, says that, in an era when factors like climate change are now in play, planners and the public must increasingly rethink the way they conceptualize the future. “The key is how one thinks about uncertainty,” he says. “We’re better off to accept uncertainty, and the fact that uncertainty is irreducible. We need to learn to live with uncertainty, which is not at all a comfortable position for people and planners.”

The process can be, so to speak, “longer in the short run,” Avin notes, yet it’s “shorter in the long run,” as communities strategize based on realistic conditions. “It may be more rigorous and difficult, but it pays off because you have explored a range of outcomes that protect you from the future to some degree,” he says.

The Lincoln Institute’s 2014 working paper “Exploratory Scenario Planning: Lessons Learned from the Field,” authored by Eric J. Roberts of the Consensus Building Institute, provides some preliminary insights gleaned from a variety of other projects nationally, focusing both on what worked well in other contexts and typical challenges encountered. The process design and scenario framing work are often rated highly by participants, Roberts finds, but the capacity of the convening organization must be up to the demanding challenges.

An Adaptive and Evolving Tool

Step back from the Colorado project and other recent pilot applications, and it becomes clear that the migration of exploratory scenario planning into mainstream land planning is still far from complete, despite its power and potential. Part of the solution is wider dissemination and increased access to the method’s instruments. The Lincoln Institute’s 2012 report Opening Access to Scenario Planning Tools surveys the evolving landscape. It notes, “The emergence of new and improved scenario planning tools over the last 10 years offers promise that the use of scenario planning can increase and that the goal of providing open access to the full potential of scenario planning tools is within reach.”

One of the report’s coauthors, Ray Quay, a researcher with the Decision Center for a Desert City at Arizona State University, says that he has been using the exploratory scenario planning methodology for 20 years now. While he sees it being used by planners in the resource, water, and forestry communities, it has not yet taken hold among land planners and urban planners. “I think there are certainly situations where it can be very useful,” Quay says.

Another barrier to wider adoption is the general failure to distinguish the methodology from other, more familiar kinds of scenario planning, according to Carbonell of the Lincoln Institute. “When you say ‘scenario planning’ to most people in the planning world, they think of Envision Utah—the big regional vision plans that got people to agree on some preferred vision of the future,” he says.

The intellectual “genealogy” of XSP traces back to the Global Business Network in the early 1990s, and its deepest roots lie in the scenario planning work of Royal Dutch Shell—which, as legend has it, produced very successful strategies, Carbonell notes. “The challenge is taking it out of the world of corporate planning and business strategy and getting participation by more than a few wonks,” he says. “That’s why working on the method, making it more accessible and efficient, is important.”

Overall, the challenge remains to bring the methodology fully into the planning world. “I think we’re primarily trying to do two things,” says Carbonell. “We’re trying to transfer a business planning model to a community planning model, so there are definitely differences in governance and the number of people to deal with. The other thing is scale, the size of the community and the area you deal with. Scenario planning has really come more out of the regional level.”

The pertinent questions will be whether or not smaller-scale communities have the expertise, data, and willingness to participate; but ultimately it will be about whether XSP is “appropriate to the decisions being made,” Carbonell says.

As exploratory scenario planning is used more often in regional and urban planning, further best practices will certainly emerge. And the methods of devising strategies in the final phase of XSP may vary from situation to situation. Summer Waters, program director of Western Lands and Communities, says, “The resulting strategies have to be politically acceptable. That is to say, the people we work with have to be able to convince their constituents to buy in.”

Quay says the process leading to the production of scenarios through XSP has been largely “perfected” at this point. But there’s work to be done on the final step of identifying actions that address multiple scenarios and formulating an appropriate strategy. “The problem is that distilling the strategic insights … has been different on all the projects I’ve worked on,” Quay says. “There’s both structure and art within it.”

Avin, of the University of Maryland, agrees that some aspects of these powerful methods are still being worked out. But that’s no reason, he argues, to delay their adoption. “XSP is not supported by tools and models in the way that visioning is supported,” he says. But enough scenarios have been developed that planners can benefit from considering them and adapting them, rather than starting from scratch, he says.

For examples of parallel work in another field, experts note some of the advanced scenario work by the Transportation Resource Board and the associated software tool developed, Impacts 2050. Planners interested in more context and examples will find a diversity of deep sources in the Lincoln Institute’s 2007 book Engaging the FutureShaping the Next One Hundred YearsJournal of the American Planning Association.

Holway, Jim. C. J. Gabbe, Frank Hebbert, Jason Lally, Robert Matthews, and Ray Quay. 2012. Opening Access to Scenario Planning Tools. Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Hopkins, Lewis D., and Marisa A. Zapata. 2007. Engaging the Future: Forecasts, Scenarios, Plans, and Projects. Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Lempert, Robert J., Steven W. Popper, Steven C. Bankes. 2003. Shaping the Next One Hundred Years: New Methods for Quantitative, Long-Term Policy Analysis. RAND.

Quay, Ray. 2010. “Anticipatory Governance: A Tool for Climate Change Adaptation.” Journal of the American Planning Association 76(4).

50 años de planificación para la recuperación ante catástrofes

Laurie Johnson es una planificadora urbana internacionalmente reconocida, especializada en la recuperación y gestión de riesgos por catástrofes. Es científica visitante encargada de proyectos en el Centro de Investigaciones de Ingeniería Sísmica del Pacífico de la Universidad de California-Berkeley; es presidente del directorio del Comité Nacional de Asesoramiento de los EE.UU. para la Reducción de Riesgos Sísmicos; y forma parte del comité directivo de la organización Geotechnical Extreme Event Reconnaissance.

Robert Olshansky es profesor y director del Departamento de Planificación Urbana y Regional de la Universidad de Illinois en Urbana-Champaign. Su campo de docencia e investigación gira en torno al uso del suelo y la planificación medioambiental, con énfasis en la planificación ante catástrofes naturales. Ha publicado gran cantidad de material sobre planificación para la recuperación posterior a las catástrofes; planificación y políticas para el riesgo sísmico; planificación de laderas y políticas sobre deslizamiento de tierras; y evaluación del impacto medioambiental.

A lo largo de los años, Laurie y Rob han sido coautores de varias publicaciones, tales como Opportunity in Chaos: Rebuilding After the 1994 Northridge and 1995 Kobe Earthquakes (Una oportunidad en medio del caos: la reconstrucción después de los terremotos de Northridge en 1994 y Kobe en 1995) y Clear as Mud: Planning for the Rebuilding of New Orleans (Tan claro como el barro: Planificación para la reconstrucción de Nueva Orleáns). En el presente artículo, los autores hablan sobre su colaboración y su trabajo en un libro y en el informe sobre Enfoque en Políticas de Suelo del Instituto Lincoln de próxima aparición, After Great Disasters: How Six Countries Managed Community Recovery (Después de una gran catástrofe: cómo hicieron seis países para gestionar la recuperación de sus comunidades).

Land Lines: Ustedes dos juntos suman más de 50 años de experiencia trabajando en el campo de la planificación para la recuperación ante catástrofes. ¿Qué los llevó a cada uno a especializarse en esta área?

Robert Olshansky: Siempre he estado interesado en los aspectos de la planificación urbana en las catástrofes: cómo diseñar ciudades que coexistan con estas fuerzas, cómo ser más estratégicos y pragmáticos a la hora de generar políticas de reducción de riesgos, y cómo responder adecuadamente a los acontecimientos naturales cuando ocurren. Sin embargo, hasta mediados de la década de 1990, siempre me enfoqué en la planificación y las políticas previas a las catástrofes.

Todo cambió con los “terremotos gemelos” que tuvieron lugar el 17 de enero de 1994 en Northridge, California, y el 17 de enero de 1995 en Kobe, Japón. Observaba detenidamente el proceso de recuperación en Los Ángeles cuando, al cumplirse un año de la catástrofe de Northridge, el terremoto de Kobe me ayudó a entrever lo que una catástrofe de verdaderas grandes proporciones podría infligir a un área urbana moderna. Un mes más tarde, me encontré con Laurie Johnson en una conferencia, donde descubrimos nuestros intereses en común en aprender algo de estas dos catástrofes, y así comencé este camino.

Pronto me di cuenta de que la recuperación es, paradójicamente, la manera más efectiva de mitigar los riesgos a largo plazo, ya que las catástrofes aumentan la conciencia sobre las fuerzas naturales y ayudan a generar los recursos para atacar el problema. También descubrí que las catástrofes brindan a los planificadores oportunidades únicas para mejorar el entorno urbano. A la inversa, si no estamos preparados para estas oportunidades, podríamos llegar a atascarnos en nuestros nuevos errores por años. Como planificador, veo la recuperación como uno de los mayores desafíos de nuestra profesión, ya que abarca todas las complejidades multidisciplinarias de nuestro campo y nos brinda algunas de las mayores oportunidades para corregir nuestros errores del pasado. Sin embargo, el proceso transcurre en un marco de tiempo muy estrecho, en medio de tensiones y frustraciones de consideración, lo que lo vuelve particularmente difícil de gestionar. Cada nueva situación de recuperación representa un caso de estudio multifacético en sí mismo.

Laurie Johnson: Antes de comenzar a colaborar con Rob, estudié Geofísica y, luego, Planificación urbana. Poco después de graduarme en 1988, me mudé al área de la Bahía de San Francisco, donde trabajé para William Spangle y George Mader, pioneros en la planificación del uso del suelo en áreas geológicamente peligrosas. Cuando ocurrió el terremoto de Loma Prieta en 1989, nos involucramos más activamente con las ciudades del área de la Bahía en la recuperación posterior a la catástrofe y las cuestiones de reconstrucción.

Con el apoyo de la Fundación Nacional de Ciencias, realizamos una de las primeras conferencias de su clase sobre la reconstrucción posterior a un terremoto, que tuvo lugar en la Universidad de Stanford en 1990. Asistieron a la conferencia planificadores de ciudades de todos los Estados Unidos con probabilidad de sufrir terremotos, quienes aprendieron de planificadores que habían liderado las medidas de reconstrucción posteriores a los mayores terremotos urbanos del mundo, ocurridos en Skopje, Macedonia (antigua Yugoslavia, 1963); Managua, Nicaragua (1972); Friuli, Italia (1976); El Asnam, Argelia (1980); Ciudad de México (1985); y Armenia (1988). Fue precisamente durante esos años cuando comencé a interesarme por la reconstrucción de las comunidades, particularmente por cómo mejorar la capacidad de los gobiernos municipales para gestionar y liderar la recuperación posterior a una catástrofe.

LL: Laurie, usted tiene un doctorado en Informática por la Universidad de Kioto. ¿Por qué decidió ir a estudiar a ese lugar?

LJ: Ya había intentado comenzar con un trabajo de doctorado un par de veces a comienzos de mi carrera; sin embargo, finalmente las estrellas se alinearon en 2006, cuando el profesor Haruo Hayashi me invitó a unirme al centro de investigación de catástrofes que él lideraba en la Universidad de Kioto. Me retrasé nuevamente cuando fui a trabajar con el plan de recuperación posterior a Katrina durante el período 2006–2007. No obstante, resultó que la experiencia de recuperación en Nueva Orleáns ofreció una oportunidad de intercambio enriquecedor con colegas japoneses que habían estado profundamente involucrados en la recuperación de Kobe. Al principio, mi idea era comparar los enfoques que los Estados Unidos y Japón tenían sobre la gestión de la recuperación ante catástrofes de gran escala y utilizar este análisis para mi tesis, pero finalmente realicé un análisis comparativo de la gestión de recuperación en tres ciudades de los Estados Unidos: Grand Forks (Dakota del Norte), Los Ángeles (California) y Nueva Orleáns (Louisiana). Realmente valoré la oportunidad que tuve de reflexionar sobre los distintos enfoques adoptados por los Estados Unidos con mis colegas de Japón, quienes, debido a que provenían de un sistema de gobierno diferente, me ayudaron a identificar varios elementos conflictivos derivados de las políticas y otros vacíos que, de otra manera, no hubiera podido apreciar.

LL: Rob, después del huracán Katrina, usted y Timothy Green llevaron a cabo una investigación para el Instituto Lincoln sobre el programa Road Home, que entregó más de 8 mil millones de dólares a propietarios de viviendas en Nueva Orleáns para reparar sus hogares o vendérselos al estado. En esta investigación, ustedes observaron que los residentes de las áreas más inundadas eran los que con mayor probabilidad se mudarían de esas zonas (ver Green y Olshansky, “Homeowner Decisions, Land Banking, and Land Use Change in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina”, 2009). ¿Sabe usted si ese patrón (que sugiere una respuesta muy racional ante el riesgo) ha permanecido en el tiempo?

RO: De hecho, observamos que la profundidad de la inundación era la variable que mayor correlación tenía con la decisión de vender y mudarse. El valor de la vivienda, los ingresos, la raza y los años de ocupación no fueron factores significativos, al menos a la escala de los datos que manejamos. Este es un resultado positivo en términos de políticas destinadas a las inundaciones y, ciertamente, es mejor que haber descubierto que la profundidad de la inundación no tenía efecto alguno sobre el comportamiento de los propietarios. Sin embargo, aún no queda claro si los patrones reales de reconstrucción han cambiado, ya que los datos sencillamente no están disponibles. No obstante, visualmente, las áreas de la ciudad que presentan un menor nivel de reconstrucción se encuentran, generalmente, en las zonas más bajas, donde se produjo la mayor cantidad de daños. Así que puedo responder que sí: esta situación parece reflejar una respuesta racional ante el riesgo de inundación.

Por otro lado, los motivos de dicha respuesta pueden variar entre los diferentes grupos de ingresos. Creo que muchos de los lotes en zonas bajas pero de altos ingresos fueron adquiridos posteriormente por compradores que construyeron viviendas en ellos, mientras que muchos propietarios de bajos ingresos que intentaron reconstruir sus hogares no tuvieron los recursos económicos para hacerlo. Por lo tanto, para poder afirmar que la mayoría de las personas se comportó de manera “racional” frente al riesgo de inundación deberíamos tener en cuenta un contexto más amplio. Además, aunque la profundidad de la inundación tuvo una correlación positiva con la decisión de vender, la mayoría de los propietarios de viviendas en las zonas más inundadas de la ciudad (del 52 por ciento al 79 por ciento, dependiendo del lugar) optaron aun así por permanecer en el lugar y reconstruir sus hogares.

LL: ¿Cuáles son los desafíos que enfrentan los programas de compra de propiedades, como Road Home, y otras estrategias de reubicación destinadas a evitar la recurrencia de pérdidas catastróficas?

LJ: En los Estados Unidos, la práctica de la compra de propiedades en terrenos inundables posterior a una catástrofe está bastante establecida. Los programas de compra voluntarios están dirigidos por lo general a hogares unifamiliares que se encuentran dañados en más del 50 por ciento a raíz de una inundación, o que se encuentran dentro de la zona inundable con proyección de 100 años establecida por la Agencia Federal de Gestión de Emergencias (FEMA). Sin embargo, las fuentes federales de financiamiento para catástrofes, como el programa de subsidios para la mitigación de riesgos de FEMA, también requieren que las áreas en las que se encuentran las viviendas que se comprarán permanezcan como espacios abiertos o tengan algún otro uso sin ocupación. De esta manera, si las comunidades inundadas tienen pocas viviendas disponibles o pocas oportunidades para construir en terrenos baldíos, tanto los precios de alquiler como de venta de las viviendas en esa área pueden aumentar de manera considerable, y los residentes pueden tomar la decisión de mudarse, lo que representaría un freno a las economías municipales.

Por su propia naturaleza, las grandes catástrofes trastornan los sistemas físicos, sociales, económicos e institucionales de las comunidades a las que afectan. Un programa de compra de propiedades de gran alcance puede crear otra ola de trastornos que se propague a todos estos sistemas si no se diseña y gestiona de manera adecuada. En tiempos de normalidad, dichos sistemas no se encuentran bajo tal estrés ni están tan estrechamente relacionados, por lo que los trastornos causados por un proyecto de redesarrollo o abandono del mismo generalmente no son tan graves como en los tiempos de catástrofe.

El caso de Grand Forks, en Dakota del Norte, es uno de los mejores ejemplos de planificación y administración integral de la recuperación, tanto de lugares como de personas. Después de la inundación de 1997, la ciudad trabajó junto con socios federales y estatales y con el sector privado con el fin de adquirir terrenos e instalar infraestructura y servicios para un nuevo barrio residencial que se construiría en tierras más altas, y los propietarios de las viviendas sujetas a compra tuvieron la prioridad de reubicarse en dicho barrio. Esto ayudó a mantener a los residentes dentro de la comunidad y estabilizar los precios de las viviendas. Grand Forks también se asoció a su municipio vecino, East Grand Forks, en Minnesota, así como también a agencias federales y estatales, para agregar más de 890 hectáreas de suelo que se obtuvieron mediante la compra de viviendas y los proyectos de protección de diques. La posterior construcción de áreas verdes permanentes a lo largo del río Rojo ha posibilitado un cambio a mejor en los centros administrativos y económicos de ambas ciudades. Sin embargo, debo enfatizar que esta transformación de ninguna manera fue fácil: llevó más de 10 años lograrla, y requirió un liderazgo, una colaboración y un apoyo sostenidos.

LL: Laurie y Rob, el Instituto Lincoln ha estado preocupado durante algunos años por dos fuerzas a nivel mundial: el cambio climático y la urbanización. ¿Es probable que los acontecimientos climáticos y los desarrollos urbanos en lugares de riesgo aumenten la exposición a las catástrofes? ¿Estamos preparados para enfrentar esto?

RO: Las catástrofes, particularmente las que se dan en las áreas costeras, actualmente representan un problema internacional importante, independientemente de estas dos fuerzas impulsoras. Es un problema actual, no futuro. Muchas de las ciudades más pobladas en todo el mundo son puertos en deltas fluviales o estuarios, y muchos sectores de estas ciudades se encuentran por debajo del nivel del mar. Además, muchas personas viven en islas barrera costeras. Estas zonas costeras son azotadas por grandes tormentas varias veces en un siglo. Después de cada una de estas tormentas, aprendemos importantes lecciones que luego olvidamos rápidamente. Mientras tanto, las ciudades de todo el mundo están creciendo (tanto en población como en una mayor urbanización), lo que empeora el problema, ya que muchas más personas están expuestas, gran parte del crecimiento urbano se da en las zonas más bajas y, en muchas ciudades, la construcción rápida y densa es de baja calidad. Aunque el cambio climático exacerba toda esta situación, permítanme utilizar el cambio climático como un signo de exclamación que cierra este argumento, en lugar de abrirlo. Así que mi respuesta es no: la mayoría de los lugares no están preparados adecuadamente, ni para las tormentas que experimentamos actualmente ni para la creciente cantidad de marejadas ciclónicas costeras que se esperan en el futuro.

LL: Ustedes han concluido recientemente un importante proyecto de investigación para el Instituto Lincoln, partiendo de casos de estudio relacionados con la recuperación ante catástrofes en seis países. ¿Podrían comentarnos algo acerca de estos casos y la razón por la que los seleccionaron?

RO: Nos enfocamos en las medidas de recuperación implementadas en China, India, Indonesia, Japón, Nueva Zelanda y los Estados Unidos. El punto que tienen en común estos casos es que se trató de catástrofes de grandes proporciones que afectaron gravemente las áreas urbanas, y todos ellos ofrecen lecciones que resultan relevantes para otros países, particularmente los Estados Unidos. Con excepción de China, todos los países con los que trabajamos poseen instituciones democráticas, en las que participan una gran variedad de organizaciones gubernamentales y no gubernamentales para llevar a cabo la recuperación. Mi interés particular tenía que ver con los casos de reubicación, que siempre son difíciles de lograr en sociedades democráticas. Elegimos el terremoto de 2001 en Gujarat, India, debido al proceso de readjuste de suelo que llevaron a cabo y la cantidad de daños que provocó en las áreas rurales, a una escala similar a la de la zona central de los Estados Unidos. India es también un caso interesante porque sus antecedentes de catástrofes ilustran un proceso de aprendizaje en cuanto a las políticas, en un país de grandes proporciones sujeto al riesgo de catástrofes. Indonesia es interesante por la misma razón: probablemente es el mejor ejemplo de una evolución rápida de las políticas y la práctica como resultado del aprendizaje obtenido de muchísimas catástrofes. Además, el terremoto y el tsunami ocurridos en 2004 en Banda Aceh, en medio de un conflicto armado, es una de las mayores catástrofes sufridas en la historia moderna. Al momento de ocurrir esta catástrofe, decidimos investigar el tsunami en el océano Índico, ya que nos proporcionaba una oportunidad para observar cómo se llevaban a cabo medidas de recuperación en varios países simultáneamente. En China, nos atrajo la gran escala del terremoto ocurrido en 2008 en la provincia de Sichuan y su relación con los procesos continuos de urbanización y cambios en el uso del suelo.

LJ: Tanto Rob como yo ya habíamos escrito numerosos trabajos sobre la planificación de la recuperación ante catástrofes de muchas ciudades de los Estados Unidos y Japón. Por lo tanto, para este nuevo libro, decidimos adoptar un punto de vista más amplio de los enfoques de ambos países acerca de la gestión de la recuperación. Con respecto a los Estados Unidos, abordamos la evolución de las políticas de recuperación posteriores a los ataques al World Trade Center, al huracán Katrina y al huracán Sandy; todos estos casos involucraban una considerable cantidad de fondos federales y la centralización de las autoridades federales y estatales. En el caso de Japón, consideramos brevemente la reconstrucción de Tokio después del terremoto y el incendio que devastaron la ciudad en 1923, los cuales marcaron a fuego tanto la filosofía como las políticas de gestión de catástrofes del país. Analizamos, además, de qué manera esta experiencia influyó en el enfoque adoptado por el gobierno para financiar y gestionar la recuperación posterior al terremoto de 1995 y al terremoto y el tsunami de 2011.

En nuestro libro también revisamos la recuperación ante catástrofes adoptada en Christchurch, Nueva Zelanda, a raíz de la devastadora serie de terremotos ocurridos entre 2010 y 2011, que causaron una continua y generalizada licuación del suelo, desprendimientos de rocas y hundimiento del suelo. Al investigar acerca de este caso de estudio, recordé cuál había sido mi primera pasión profesional: encontrar distintos enfoques en la planificación del uso del suelo en áreas geológicamente peligrosas. El gobierno de Nueva Zelanda ha adoptado un liderazgo muy activo en la recuperación, lo que convierte a este país en un muy buen caso de estudio para compararlo con otros enfoques nacionales que describimos en el libro.

LL: Teniendo en cuenta estos casos de estudio, ¿cuáles son los aspectos clave que pueden mejorar los planificadores y gestores de políticas con el fin de prepararse para la recuperación después de una catástrofe?

RO: En cada uno de estos casos, los gobiernos enfrentaron una gran incertidumbre y tuvieron que equilibrar las tensiones entre restaurar rápidamente lo que ya existía y realizar mejoras de forma deliberada. Los planificadores y gestores de políticas deben reducir dicha incertidumbre mediante la búsqueda de diferentes formas de financiamiento, la elaboración de procedimientos claros, la simplificación de procesos burocráticos, la divulgación de información al público y la participación de todas las partes interesadas, con el fin de brindar fundamentos para tomar buenas decisiones y diseñar buenas políticas. En el libro proporcionamos varias recomendaciones que reflejan ciertos principios en común: prioridad de la información, participación de las partes interesadas y transparencia.

LJ: La recuperación después de una catástrofe de grandes proporciones siempre es compleja y nunca es lo suficientemente rápida para los residentes afectados. Sin embargo, este proceso puede mejorarse estableciendo expectativas realistas desde el principio de una catástrofe y trabajando para restaurar las comunidades y sus economías de manera rápida y equitativa, mediante la convocatoria de todas las partes interesadas (residentes, comerciantes, propietarios, aseguradoras, empresas de servicios públicos, etc.) para que participen en el proceso. De esta manera, los gobiernos pueden resolver los problemas preexistentes, garantizar la gobernabilidad de la recuperación a largo plazo y reducir el riesgo de futuras catástrofes.

RO: No obstante, antes que pretender una recuperación inteligente, deberíamos pensar de antemano las estrategias para gestionar futuras catástrofes. Esta es una buena manera de mejorar la resiliencia comunitaria: la capacidad de sobrevivir, adaptarse y recuperarse de acontecimientos extremos.

Fotografía: Ikuo Kobayashi

50 Years of Disaster Recovery Planning

Laurie Johnson is an internationally recognized urban planner who specializes in disaster recovery and catastrophe risk management. She is a visiting project scientist at the Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center at the University of California-Berkeley, chairs the U.S. National Advisory Committee for Earthquake Hazards Reduction, and serves on the steering committee of the Geotechnical Extreme Event Reconnaissance organization.

Robert Olshansky is professor and head of the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His teaching and research cover land use and environmental planning, with an emphasis on planning for natural hazards. He has published extensively on post-disaster recovery planning, planning and policy for earthquake risks, hillside planning and landslide policy, and environmental impact assessment.

Over the years, Laurie and Rob have coauthored several publications, including Opportunity in Chaos: Rebuilding After the 1994 Northridge and 1995 Kobe Earthquakes and Clear as Mud: Planning for the Rebuilding of New Orleans. In this article, they discuss their collaboration and their work on a forthcoming Lincoln Institute book and Policy Focus Report, After Great Disasters: How Six Countries Managed Community Recovery.

LAND LINES: Together, the two of you have more than 50 years of experience working in the field of disaster recovery planning. What led each of you into this specialty?

Robert Olshansky: I have always been interested in the urban planning aspects of disasters—how to design cities to coexist with these forces, how to be more strategic and pragmatic in creating policies to reduce risks, and how to respond appropriately to natural events when they occur. But up until the mid-1990s, my focus was always on pre-disaster planning and policy.

All that changed after the twin January 17 earthquakes, in 1994 in Northridge, California, and in 1995 in Kobe, Japan. I was closely observing the recovery process in Los Angeles, when, on the first anniversary of the Northridge disaster, the Kobe earthquake provided a glimpse of what a truly large event could do to a modern urban area. A month later, I ran into Laurie Johnson at a conference, where we discovered common interests in learning from these two events, and my path was set.

I soon realized that recovery is, paradoxically, the most effective path for long-term hazard mitigation, because disasters increase awareness of natural forces and bring resources to bear on the problem. I also discovered that disasters provide planners with unusual opportunities for urban betterment. Conversely, if we are not prepared for these opportunities, we might find ourselves stuck with our new mistakes for years. As a planner, I see recovery as one of our profession’s greatest challenges. It encompasses all the multidisciplinary complexities of our field, and provides some of our greatest opportunities to right past wrongs. But the process transpires in a compressed time frame amid considerable tensions and frustration, which makes it particularly hard to manage. Each new recovery situation is a multifaceted case study of its own.

Laurie Johnson: Before Rob and I began collaborating, I studied geophysics and then urban planning. Shortly after graduation in 1988, I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area to work for William Spangle and George Mader, pioneers in land use planning for geologically hazardous areas. When the Loma Prieta earthquake struck in 1989, we became more actively engaged with Bay Area cities on post-disaster recovery and rebuilding issues.

With support from the National Science Foundation, we hosted one of the first-of-its-kind conferences on rebuilding after earthquakes, at Stanford University in 1990. Planners from cities prone to earthquakes across the United States came to learn from planners who led rebuilding efforts following some of the world’s major urban earthquakes, in Skopje, Macedonia (then Yugoslavia, 1963); Managua, Nicaragua (1972); Friuli, Italy (1976); El Asnam, Algeria (1980); Mexico City (1985); and Armenia (1988). It was in those years that I became interested in rebuilding communities—and particularly in enhancing local government capacity to manage and lead post-disaster recovery.

LL: Laurie, you have a doctorate degree in informatics from Kyoto University. Why did you decide to go there to study?

LJ: I had tried to start work on a doctorate a couple of times earlier in my career, but in 2006 the stars finally aligned when Professor Haruo Hayashi invited me to join his disaster research center at Kyoto University. I was delayed again when I went to work on the post-Katrina recovery plan in 2006–2007. But it turned out that the New Orleans recovery experience offered an opportunity for a richer exchange with Japanese colleagues who had been deeply involved in Kobe’s recovery. I initially hoped to compare the U.S. and Japanese approaches to large-scale disaster recovery management for my dissertation, but eventually settled on doing a comparative analysis of recovery management in three U.S. cities: Grand Forks, North Dakota; Los Angeles, California; and New Orleans, Louisiana. I really valued the opportunity to reflect on the U.S. approaches with my Japanese colleagues, who, coming from a different governance system, helped me to see many elements of conflicting policy and gaps that I may not have appreciated otherwise.

LL: Rob, after Hurricane Katrina, you and Timothy Green conducted research for the Lincoln Institute on the Road Home Program, which dispensed more than $8 billion to New Orleans home owners to either repair their homes or sell them to the state. You found that residents in the worst-flooded areas were most likely to move away (see Green and Olshansky, “Homeowner Decisions, Land Banking, and Land Use Change in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina,” 2009). Do you know if that pattern, which suggests a very rational response to risk, has held up over time?

RO: We did find that flood depth was the variable most correlated with the decision to sell and move. Home value, income, race, and years of occupancy were not significant factors, at least at the scale of our data. This is a positive finding in terms of flood policy, and it is certainly better than finding that flood depth had no effect at all on home owner behavior. But whether actual reconstruction patterns have changed is unclear, because the data are simply not available. Visually, however, the parts of the city with the least rebuilding are generally at the lowest elevations, where the most damage occurred. So, yes, this does appear to reflect a rational response to flood risk.

But the reasons for that response may vary among different income groups. I suspect that many low-lying lots in the wealthier areas were subsequently acquired by buyers who built homes on them, whereas many lower-income owners who intended to rebuild were not financially able to do so. So the assertion that most people behaved “rationally” in the face of flood risk needs to be seen in a broader context. Furthermore, although flood depth was positively correlated with the decision to sell, the majority of home owners in the most flooded parts of the city—52 to 79 percent, depending on location—still opted to stay and rebuild.

LL: What are the challenges faced by buyout programs like the Road Home Program and other relocation strategies aimed at avoiding repeated catastrophic losses?

LJ: In the United States, the practice of post-disaster floodplain buyouts is fairly well established. Voluntary buyout programs typically target single-family homes that are more than 50 percent damaged by flood or within the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s 100-year flood zone. But federal post-disaster funding streams, like FEMA’s hazard mitigation grant program, also require that the buyout areas remain as open space or have some other nonoccupied use. Thus, if flooded communities have few available houses or infill opportunities, both rental and for-sale housing prices in the area may rise sharply and residents may decide to move away, creating a drag on local economies.

By their very nature, large disasters disrupt the physical, social, economic, and institutional systems of the communities affected. A major buyout program can create another wave of disruption that ripples through all these systems if it’s not designed and managed properly. In normal times, these systems are not as stressed or tightly coupled, so the disruption caused by a land redevelopment or retreat project is typically not as acute as in post-disaster times.

Grand Forks, North Dakota, provides one of the better examples of comprehensive recovery planning and stewardship of both people and place. After the 1997 flood, the city worked with federal and state partners and the private sector to acquire land and install infrastructure and services for a new residential neighborhood on higher ground, and they gave priority to the buyout property owners to relocate there. This helped to keep residents in the community and stabilize housing prices. Grand Forks also partnered with its neighbor, East Grand Forks, Minnesota, as well as federal and state agencies, to aggregate more than 2,200 acres of land obtained through the buyouts and levee protection projects. Subsequent construction of a permanent greenway along the Red River has helped change the downtowns of both cities and their economies for the better. But I should emphasize that this transformation was by no means easy. It took over a decade to accomplish, requiring sustained leadership, collaboration, and support.

LL: Laurie and Rob, the Lincoln Institute has been concerned for some years with two global forces: climate change and urbanization. Are climate events and urban development in hazardous locations likely to increase exposure to disasters? Are we prepared to deal with this?

RO: Disasters, particularly in coastal areas, are a significant international problem right now, regardless of these driving forces. This is a present-day problem, not a future problem. Many of the world’s most populated cities are ports on river deltas or estuaries, and many parts of these cities are below sea level. Many people also live on coastal barrier islands. Large storms strike each of these coastal areas several times each century, and after each storm we learn important lessons that we quickly forget. Meanwhile, cities worldwide are growing through both population growth and increasing urbanization. This makes the problem worse because more people are exposed, much of the urban growth occurs in the lowest places, and rapid, dense construction in many cities is of low quality. Although climate change exacerbates all of this, I would use climate change as the exclamation point to this argument rather than its starting point. So no, most places are not well prepared for either present-day storms or for the elevated number of coastal storm surges expected in the future.

LL: The two of you have just finished work on a major research project for Lincoln based on case studies of disaster recovery in six countries. Tell us about the cases you selected and why you chose them.

RO: We focused on recovery efforts in China, India, Indonesia, Japan, New Zealand, and the United States. The common thread is that these were extremely large disasters that severely affected urban areas, and they offer lessons that are relevant for other countries, particularly the United States. With the exception of China, the countries we focused on have democratic institutions, in which a variety of governmental and nongovernmental organizations participate in carrying out recovery. I was especially interested in cases of relocation, which are always difficult to accomplish in democratic societies. We chose the 2001 Gujarat earthquake in India both because of the land readjustment process and because of the widespread damage in rural areas similar in scale to the central United States. India is also of interest because its history of disasters illustrates a process of policy learning over time in a large and hazard-prone country. Indonesia is of interest for the same reason—it is probably the best example of rapid evolution of policy and practice as a result of learning from multiple disasters. In addition, the 2004 earthquake and tsunami in Banda Aceh, occurring in the midst of armed conflict, is one of the greatest disasters in modern history. At the time it occurred, we decided to investigate the Indian Ocean tsunami, because it provided an opportunity to view recovery efforts taking place simultaneously in several countries. In China, we were drawn to the immense scale of the 2008 earthquake in Sichuan Province and its relationship to ongoing processes of urbanization and land use change.

LJ: Rob and I had already written extensively about post-disaster recovery planning in many U.S. and Japanese cities. So, for this book, we decided to take a longer view of both countries’ approaches to recovery management. In the United States, we look at the evolution of recovery policy following the World Trade Center attacks, Hurricane Katrina, and Hurricane Sandy—all of which involved considerable federal funding and a centralization of federal and state authority. For Japan, we look briefly at the rebuilding of Tokyo after the devastating earthquake and fire of 1923, which made an indelible mark on the country’s disaster management philosophy and policy, and how that experience influenced the government’s approach to funding and managing recovery from the 1995 earthquake and the 2011 earthquake and tsunami.

Our book also includes a look at disaster recovery in Christchurch, New Zealand, following the devastating sequence of earthquakes in 2010–2011 that caused repeated and widespread liquefaction, rockfalls, and ground subsidence. Researching this case study brought me back to my original professional passion: land use planning approaches in geologically hazardous areas. New Zealand’s government has taken a very active leadership role in the recovery, which provides a very good case for comparison with other national approaches that we describe.

LL: Drawing on these case studies, what are some of the key things planners and policy makers can do to better prepare for recovery after disaster strikes?

RO: In each of the cases, governments faced considerable uncertainty and had to balance the tensions between quickly restoring what was there before and deliberately creating betterment. Planners and policy makers need to reduce this uncertainty by finding funds, establishing clear procedures, streamlining bureaucratic processes, providing public information, and involving all stakeholders so that they can help inform good decision making and policy design. We provide several recommendations in the book that reflect a common set of principles: primacy of information, stakeholder involvement, and transparency.

LJ: Recovery after a major disaster is always complex and never fast enough for affected residents. However, the process can be improved by setting realistic expectations at the outset and by working to restore communities and economies quickly and equitably, empowering the full range of stakeholders—residents, businesses, land owners, insurers, utilities, and others—to participate in the process. In this way, governments can resolve preexisting problems, ensure governance for recovery over the long term, and reduce the risk of future disasters.

RO: Even better than smart recovery, however, is thinking ahead about strategies to manage future disasters. This is a good way to improve community resilience—the ability to survive, adapt, and recover from extreme events.

Photograph: Ikuo Kobayashi

Climate-related impacts vary across regions, affecting communities economically, socially, and environmentally. While all regions of the United States are expected to experience temperature increases, the eight states located between the Rocky Mountains and the Cascade and Sierra Nevada mountain ranges are in a region forecast to be hard-hit by a variety of climate impacts that may expose vulnerabilities different from those in other U.S. regions. Western communities also face an uphill battle when attempting to plan for these future challenges.

Given the significant implications associated with a changing climate in the Intermountain West, this article takes a closer look at some innovations and tools designed to help communities plan and prepare for the uncertainty and risk attributed to a changing climate, and to increase community resilience.

The Intermountain West

Characterized by its scenic beauty, wide open spaces, abundant wildlife, mild climate, and countless recreational opportunities, the Intermountain West encompasses urban, rural, and amenity communities situated within large-scale intact open lands. The region’s eight mountain states—Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming—are home to 22 million people, approximately 8 percent of the total U.S. population. Western cities are generally in arid or semi-arid environments, and although the footprints of some urban centers are large, the built environment of the major cities is decidedly dense and largely concentrated in megaregions such as the Arizona Sun Corridor and Colorado Front Range.

The vast expanses of open space between metropolitan centers have intrinsic economic, cultural, and biological value. More than half the region’s land is in public ownership and is managed by the Bureau of Land Management, U.S. Forest Service, National Park Service, or U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (figure 1). In mountainous regions, some counties are 80 percent publicly owned, and in states like Arizona and Nevada the land is more than 90 percent publicly owned. Tribal lands make up a large part of the region, and state trust lands cover approximately 46 million acres in both rural and urban areas. One of the most extensive land uses in the region is agriculture, which includes ranching and other agricultural services.

Growth and Change

Over the past few decades, the West has experienced dramatic population growth as communities shift away from resource extractive industries such as agriculture, forestry, and mining and instead attract amenity-seeking retirees and telecommuters, as well as new professional businesses, tourism, construction, and consumer service industries (Winkler et al. 2007).

The high rate of urban growth has changed both the demographic and economic make-up of the West and also the allocation of resources. Land that was once used for grazing and agriculture has transitioned to residential and commercial uses. The proliferation of housing and industry requires the development of more energy and water resources to accommodate the growing population. Many western communities are dependent on the Colorado River, which serves the water supply needs of 30 million people in seven U.S. states and Mexico. More than 70 percent of this water is used to irrigate 3.5 million acres of cropland. In addition to natural resource changes, the increase in growth has caused an expansion of housing in and near forests, an area known as the wildland urban interface, to take advantage of the West’s natural amenities.

However, the changes in the region are not only attributable to growth; the climate is also changing. Since the 1880s, scientists have been measuring the Earth’s surface temperature at thousands of locations, taking into account instrument deviations and local temperature factors such as urban heat islands. The analysis of this data shows that the Earth’s average temperature has increased by more than 1.4° over the past 100 years, with much of this increase experienced over the past 35 years, and it is evident that the temperature is continuing to rise.

Although the temperature changes appear to be marginal, they have significant impacts on local climate. For example, winters are now shorter and milder, snow and ice cover are decreasing, heat waves are becoming more frequent, and many plant and animal species are moving to cooler or higher altitudes to escape the warmer weather.

Although climate change is a highly complex issue that varies from region to region, the following impacts have been identified as overarching changes that will occur because of rising temperatures in the West:

• higher frequency of prolonged heat waves and drought;
• increased number and severity of forest fires;
• biodiversity changes, including the severity of disease outbreaks and other disturbances;
• prolonged and wider impacts of vector-borne disease; and
• damage to infrastructure due to unexpected and extreme weather events.

Changes are already in progress. There have been widespread temperature-related reductions in snowpack over the last 50 years, leading to changes in the seasonal timing of river runoff. Feng and Hu (2007) have demonstrated that the dates of peak snow accumulation and peak snowmelt runoff are occurring 10 to 40 days earlier than in previous years. The Colorado River is especially vulnerable, often receiving a large portion of its water from a hydrological system dependent on snowmelt precipitation from three basin states: Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming.

Precipitation patterns also are changing and becoming more variable. Drought is becoming more prolonged along with the frequency and intensity of heavy downpours. Large wildfires are more frequent, and the fire season is getting longer (figure 2). Wildfires burn twice as much land area each year as they did 40 years ago with a burn season two and half months longer than 40 years ago (Climate Central 2012).

As the climate becomes increasingly variable and shifts further and further from the relative stability experienced by humankind to date, the resulting changes will make communities more vulnerable and may put their health and livelihood at risk. Even one season of drought can have dramatic repercussions, notably higher basic food prices that put considerable strain on vulnerable populations including the elderly and financially disadvantaged. Increasing temperatures, prolonged drought, and incidences of wildfire and biodiversity changes due to migration of invasive species play a significant role in the accelerating transformation of the landscape. With so many effects felt at the community scale, local governments have an important role to play in planning for intensifying climate changes.

Planning for Change

Climate action occurs at multiple levels of governance and in a variety of different capacities. The federal government plays a significant role in responding to large-scale disasters that affect multiple states, such as the recent Hurricane Sandy. Regulatory federal actions that coincide with climate change, such as vehicle fuel efficiency standards or proposals for a national carbon tax, apply to the entire population. At the same time, state governments and regional groups are implementing regional strategies such as cap-and-trade systems and multijurisdictional transportation planning projects.

In terms of effective action on the ground, local governments are most suited to tackle local impacts and planning efforts relating to the issue of climate change. They are in a prime position to create comprehensive strategies that directly alter city functions to support mitigation and adaptation efforts. Local action plays an extensive role as city governments have direct authority over essential functions such as waste management, public transportation, public works, and facility management, as well as land use and zoning. For example, Boulder County recently adopted its Climate Change Preparedness Plan to help local residents and communities prepare for changing environmental conditions. This plan identifies local impacts, explores how these impacts will affect resource management, and outlines opportunities for adaptation planning.

The Context for Climate Planning in the West

Western Lands and Communities, a joint venture of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and the Sonoran Institute, has developed a large body of resources and reports to gain a better understanding of the needs and challenges facing western communities (Carter 2008; Richards 2009; Bark 2009; Metz and Below 2009). The seminal report, Planning for Climate Change in the West, identifies key barriers to implementing local climate action policies (Carter and Culp 2010). A review of these reports, along with interviews with western sustainability directors, revealed three key challenges associated with climate action:

• political context;
• communication of multiple values and beliefs; and
• lack of funding and resources.

Climate change can be a politically polarizing topic in the West. The clash of multiple viewpoints creates barriers in terms of building political support and conducting effective educational outreach, thus reducing the potential for civic engagement and limiting capacity for collective action in pursuit of common interests. Long-held cultural beliefs about limiting the role of government and protecting private property and citizens’ rights contribute to the resistance to zoning and other policies that would change land use patterns or regulate growth.

Without the backing of significant decision makers, such as the mayor or city manager, or strong support from the municipal council, moving climate action forward can be a difficult proposition. There are also internal communication obstacles in bringing different city departments together to discuss local climate change impacts and the best approach to work collaboratively to ensure that the programs and policies address the adverse impacts effectively.

With local governments scrambling to accommodate shortfalls related to the recent recession, cities lack the financial resources needed to invest in current climate action in order to avoid the high cost of future climate impacts. Often, communities discount future impacts, which place the burden and expense of climate planning (or inaction) onto future generations. Dealing with rapid population growth and fiscal pressures to provide infrastructure makes it increasingly difficult to obtain funding to underwrite climate planning. Even communities that adopt climate plans may encounter obstacles in implementing those plans. Some communities may be overwhelmed by the task of deciphering climate science, and many are unfamiliar with policies and actions necessary to mitigate and adapt to climate change.

Unlocking Climate Action in the West

While some local governments in the Intermountain West, such as Salt Lake City, Flagstaff, Tucson, Denver, Las Vegas and Boulder County, are making concerted and laudatory efforts to address climate change, they represent a small sampling of the region. Overall, the West is behind the curve on implementation efforts to adapt to climate change and create communities that are more resilient.

However, the West is feeling the heat, literally and figuratively. After a summer of record temperatures, raging wildfires, and crippling drought, a large and growing majority of Americans believe that global warming is affecting weather patterns. They understand that droughts and heat waves are becoming more common and the weather is becoming increasingly volatile (Leiserowitz 2012). One of the main challenges facing communities is how to integrate new information about the risks of climate change into existing planning frameworks in order to plan effectively for an uncertain future.

Tools for Change

To help address the challenges associated with climate action, there are many tools that western communities can use to guide community resilience. Organizations such as ICLEI–Local Governments for Sustainability, the Institute for Sustainable Communities (ISC), and the Urban Sustainability Directors Network (USDN) provide information and trainings that offer sample policies and plans, peer networking opportunities, technical tools, and resources on vulnerability and risk. However, many of these organizations have a broad geographical focus and a target audience in large cities. It is important to address the needs of smaller communities that have political, fiscal, and resource constraints. In addition, there is a large need to better integrate climate adaptation policies into existing city departments and plans.

The Lincoln Institute and the Sonoran Institute are developing tools and resources that support efforts to plan and prepare for the ever-changing landscape of the West, including: information exchange and training; value setting planning tools; and anticipatory governance methods and tools. These tools offer promise for working in a variety of community types, including the underserved rural and amenity regions, and supplying the support and training that local planners need to integrate climate resilience planning holistically into current planning processes and encourage collaboration among multiple departments.

Information Exchange and Training

Communities often look to their peers that are similar in size, capacity, and geography to get a better understanding of planning efforts that will be successful in their own region. Local governments, institutions, and planning firms are encouraged to publicize their experiences so other communities can learn from their successes and missteps, and then modify and adapt their own plans as needed.

The Successful Communities Online Toolkit information exchange, also known as SCOTie, is an example of a tool that caters to western communities by encouraging the exchange of vital information in the form of best practice case studies and resources (figure 3). The case studies in SCOTie are organized by state, community type, and planning issue. To build and disseminate the toolkit’s case studies and resources, SCOTie partners with state chapters of the American Planning Association and nonprofit organizations working to build stronger, more resilient communities. Educational webinars like the Planning in the West adaptation series offer a way for communities to learn about climate-related planning and interact directly with representatives from model communities.

Value Setting Planning Tools

To move past political debates over climate science, tools are needed to facilitate collaborative planning efforts that include stakeholders with varying values and beliefs. Facilitating a process that focuses on engaging the public and finding common ground in moving forward with action to mitigate climate variability can neutralize the polarizing debates that are often stuck on the causes of climate change and scientific uncertainty.

Value setting is a particularly useful resource for informing management decisions where communities have to make tough decisions when resources are stressed by demand and climate variability. For example, in January 2012 the Sonoran Institute, the Morrison Institute, and the University of Arizona hosted the Watering the Sun Corridor pre-conference workshop where 100 participants saw presentations from experts, engaged in interactive discussions in small groups, and interacted collectively using live polling. Participants explored value tradeoffs between competing uses of water for urban development, agricultural production, and the environment in a water system stressed by drought induced by climate change. This collaborative, interactive format brought together stakeholders with many different viewpoints to gain a better understanding of collective values regarding the distribution of water in Arizona.

Anticipatory Governance Methods and Tools

As the future becomes less certain and more risky, traditional planning approaches that involve making educated predictions and developing plans and tools to reach that desired result will likely prove to be inadequate. Cities need tools to “anticipate and adapt” to change rather than “predict and plan” in order to better incorporate the uncertainties and complexities of future conditions (Quay 2010). Scenario planning is a technique that cities can use to think about climate impacts and develop ways to adapt to them. The use of scenarios can enable planners to grapple with complex issues, think about how trends and changes will play out across multiple scenarios, and plan for policy options that are robust under many future scenarios.

Western Lands and Communities is collaborating with partners including the Consensus Building Institute to develop coherent methodologies, identify driving forces of change, and develop educational tools to support community adaptation using scenario planning tools and techniques. Computer-based planning tools are valued because they help communities gain a better understanding of how particular planning ideas and strategies will shape their future. Building better plans that adapt to challenges like climate change will require communities to make decisions in the face of competing economic interests, different cultural values, and divergent views about property rights and the role of government.

Over the years, planning tools have evolved to help professional and citizen planners analyze and develop options and scenarios. Some tools are available commercially and others are free to the public, with varied user and output complexity. Although these tools are gaining traction, the current use of interactive planning tools is limited and faces a number of challenges. For example, the complex tasks of selecting a tool, collecting data, calibrating the tool, developing scenarios, and using the tool to assess various scenarios present significant barriers to many potential users. Western Lands and Communities is collaborating with tool developers to address the near and long-term challenges and expanding the use of scenario planning tools (Holway et al. 2012).

Conclusion

The Intermountain West is a complex region with changing demographics, rapid population growth, and increased economic and cultural diversity. Western Lands and Communities is working to develop and disseminate educational tools and methodologies that will help western communities plan holistically for climate change, build capacity for understanding risk and managing uncertainty in an inclusive manner, and engage communities of disparate stakeholders. To accomplish these ambitious goals, planners need effective tools to shape the future of their communities. We will continue to explore new approaches and methods for assisting planners in the effort to anticipate and adapt to change, engage communities in the effort to develop and adopt adaptation policies, and ultimately create more resilient communities that are prepared for the impacts of a changing climate.

About the Authors

Erika Mahoney is a program associate at Western Lands and Communities, the Lincoln Institute’s joint venture with the Sonoran Institute, where she develops planning tools, delivers trainings, and conducts research on local climate action efforts.

Hannah Oliver is a research associate at Western Lands and Communities, the Lincoln Institute’s joint venture with the Sonoran Institute, where she conducts research on local climate action efforts and assists with program development of the Successful Communities Online Toolkit information exchange (SCOTie).

References

Bark, R. H. 2009. Assessment of climate change impacts on local economies. Working paper. Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Carter, R. 2008. Land use planning and the changing climate of the West. Working paper. Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Carter, R., and S. Culp. 2010. Planning for climate change in the West. Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Climate Central. 2012. The age of western wildfires. Princeton, NJ.

Feng, S., and Q, Hu. 2007. Changes in winter snowfall/precipitation ratio in the contiguous United States. Journal of Geophysical Research 112.

Holway, J., C. J. Gabbe, F. Hebbert, J. Lally, R. Matthews, and R. Quay. 2012. Opening access to scenario planning tools. Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Leiserowitz, A. M.-R. 2012. Extreme weather and climate change in the American mind. New Haven, CT: Yale Project on Climate Change Communication.

Metz, D., and C. Below. 2009. Local land use planning and climate change policy: Summary report from focus groups and interviews with local officials in the Intermountain West. Working paper. Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Quay, R. 2010. Anticipatory governance. Journal of the American Planning Association 76 (4): 496–511.

Richards, T. 2009. Driving climate change mitigation at multiple levels of governance in the West. Working paper. Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Winkler, R., D. R. Field, A. E. Luloff, R. S. Krannich, and T. Williams. 2007. Social landscapes of the Inter-mountain West: A comparison of ‘Old West’ and ‘New West’ communities. Rural Sociology, 478–501.

Web Links

Western Lands and Communities: http://www.sonoraninstitute.org/where-we-work/westwide-research-tools/lincoln-sonoran-joint-venture.html

Successful Communities Online Toolkit information exchange (SCOTie): http://scotie.sonoraninstitute.org

Planning in the West webinars: http://www.sonoraninstitute.org/where-we-work/westwide-training-leadership/planning-in-the-west-webinars.html

When one looks at fiscally distressed cities, it is easy to conclude that insolvency is simply a product of ineffective management, a lack of financial discipline, or the incompetence or corruption of local government. However, several important countervailing facts are worth considering: fiscal insolvency of municipalities today is often the artifact of bad planning decisions made decades ago; many events that led to local fiscal insolvency, including bad planning decisions, were beyond the control of municipalities; and the delicate dance of matching irregular revenues against unpredictable expenditures challenges even the best-run municipalities.

Many planning decisions that catalyzed the decline of Detroit and other Rust Belt cities were made at higher levels of government. For example, construction of federal interstate highways in the 1950s often ran slipshod over local plans and preferences and greased the skids of urban exodus for families, enterprises, and wealth—motivated by the tax advantages of jumping municipal borders. The city of Detroit lost some 60 percent of its population and much of its industry and commerce between 1950 and 2000, while the population of the metropolitan area remained fairly stable. Tax bases and populations of nearby municipalities grew substantially while Detroit’s evaporated during that half-century.

Similarly, policies at state and federal levels imposed unpredictable and often unmanageable spending requirements on local governments. Over decades, localities were buffeted by revisions in revenue-sharing formulae of higher-level governments or unfunded mandates. The Clean Water Act, for example, established a much-needed regulatory framework that has cleaned up waterways and protected citizen health since 1972. It also imposed draconian financial demands on local governments, saddling them with the costs of expensive water systems upgrades to meet ever more stringent standards, and the seemingly impossible challenge of separating storm water and wastewater in commingled underground systems built a century ago.

As municipalities internalize the message that poor financial performance is a local problem, they often take remedial actions that inflict more serious damage on their economic and social futures. One of the underreported aspects of the unfolding tragedy in Ferguson, Missouri, is the extent to which the violence and recrimination there is rooted in fiscal challenges. Ferguson, like many jurisdictions in St. Louis County, chose to supplement insufficient local revenues with traffic fines that were harshly enforced. Many similar jurisdictions derived 30 percent or more of their general revenues from enforcement of traffic violations. It is best left to the courts and the Justice Department to determine whether the pattern and practice of enforcement in Ferguson was discriminatory. But there is a separate issue involving the conflation of public safety and revenue generation, which can lead to perverse outcomes.

St. Louis County is not unique in its creative use of local courts as a revenue generator; it is pattern and practice in municipalities across the United States and other continents. In a 2006 study of North Carolina counties by the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank, humorously named Red Ink in the Rear View, the authors found that a 10 percent decrease in annual revenues led to a 6.4 percent increase in traffic citations. Interestingly, there was no reversion to fewer citations when revenues rose. In one astounding case, the town of Waldo, Florida, derived half of its general revenues from traffic fines. New York City netted $624 million in general revenues in 2008 using aggressively priced and enforced parking violations. On the international front, the BBC and The Guardian accused London’s Hammersmith and Fulham Council of using traffic courts as a major revenue source in 2013.

Another dangerous way that municipalities shore up finances is through the sale of tax liens to investors. Although this practice attracts needed revenue, conveying powerful tax liens leads to unintended consequences that are difficult to manage. The dominance of tax liens over all other liens gives extraordinary power to those exercising foreclosure. Savvy investors who pay a small share of outstanding arrearages to purchase liens can acquire properties at pennies on the dollar of actual value. These new owners manage their holdings to maximize return, which often runs counter to public interest when it promotes naked speculation on vacated properties or accelerated neighborhood decline through widespread absentee ownership.

Municipalities make desperate choices like these to improve fiscal status in part because of popular opposition to property taxes, the dominant source of local revenue. Any municipality that considers raising property taxes to cover obligations faces the prospect of local tax revolts or increased pressure to relieve residents and businesses of tax burdens. In this issue, Adam Langley analyzes the property tax credits and homestead exemptions that provide individual relief from this unpopular tax, but further constrict local public budgets (p. 24). Constraints imposed by property tax limitations often lead to more reckless measures to make ends meet.

Perhaps there are other approaches available to municipalities to restore fiscal health. In Detroit, an unprecedented partnership among the public, private, and civic sectors supported a participatory planning exercise called Detroit Future City. More than 100,000 residents contributed to the design of this extraordinary land use and economic redevelopment strategy. John Gallagher reports on early implementation of projects that are intended to bring this community vision to reality in the Motor City and turn around decades of decline (p. 14).

Municipalities in developing countries confront a different set of fiscal challenges. In many countries, as national governments devolve responsibility for supplying public goods and services to localities, municipalities must invent new local public finance systems; most see property taxation as a promising revenue option. However, effective property tax systems are built on foundations such as land registries and value assessment tools. The difficulty of building these systems is magnified in cities with expansive informal settlements, where residents and their homesteads are not officially registered or recognized. Ryan Dubé reports on some of the challenges of establishing and maintaining a property registration system in Lima, Peru, where an upgraded system has not delivered on hypothetical benefits proposed by theorists (p. 6).

The challenges of attaining and sustaining municipal fiscal health are manifold and complex but not insuperable. During the 1960s and 1970s, today’s hottest American urban economies also struggled with population flight, urban blight, and insurmountable fiscal challenges: the cities in or near bankruptcy then were Boston; New York; Washington, DC; Seattle; and San Francisco. Their renaissance might have had less to do with their intrinsic greatness than the work of larger forces at higher levels of geography. This is not to cast aspersions on our great coastal cities; it is simply to make the larger point that municipal insolvency is a structural problem, not necessarily a product of any particular deficiency in local leadership.

Sound planning and effective public management lay at the heart of municipal fiscal health. A sound fiscal stance is required to finance public investment in projects that build a prosperous and sustainable local economy. A robust local economy grows a tax base that throws off revenues, which local governments need to pay for the public goods and services that support a good quality of life. But chronic and unpredictable variability of both local revenues and expenditures requires effective planning to survive inevitable bumps in the road.

In October, I named redevelopment—the effective reuse of previously developed land—a millennial challenge. Managing and sustaining the fiscal health of local governments is another such challenge. We need a better understanding of the theory and practice of planning, taxation, and valuation that can guide municipalities’ efforts to pursue this elusive goal. The Lincoln Institute of Land Policy is uniquely poised to inform such efforts. In this issue, we’ve touched on a few topics that relate to municipal fiscal health; this millennial challenge will remain a major focus of our work here at the Institute.

Before joining the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, I covered the Detroit beat for almost a decade for the Ford Foundation. There I was able to witness firsthand the unprecedented challenges involved in reversing the fortunes of the most powerful and important U.S. city of the mid-20th century. The enormity of these challenges called forth a coalition of some of the best and brightest community rebuilders with whom I’ve had the privilege to work. The quality and commitment of this strident group of public servants, civic and community leaders, and private-sector visionaries helped Detroit reclaim a bright future.

Signature efforts of this unique public-private-philanthropic partnership (a P4!) included the planning, construction, and funding of Detroit’s first public transit investment in more than five decades—the M1 Rail, which broke ground in July 2014 using a pooled private investment of more than $100 million. Leadership for the effort did not simply build a symbolic 3.3-mile light rail line along Woodward Avenue, the spine of the city, it also leveraged the private investment to secure a commitment from state and national governments to launch the region’s first transit authority.

Local and national philanthropic leaders also assembled more than $125 million to launch the New Economy Initiative—a decade-long effort to rekindle an entrepreneurial ecosystem in the region through strategic incubation of hundreds of new businesses, thousands of new jobs, and enduring long-term collaboration among employers and workforce developers. And, in what might be their most controversial and heroic collective effort, these philanthropies worked with the State of Michigan to assemble more than $800 million for “the Grand Bargain,” which saved both the legendary collection of the Detroit Institute of the Arts from the auction block and the future pensions of Detroit’s public servants.

Stunningly, while social entrepreneurs did gymnastics to bring hundreds of millions of dollars in support to Detroit, the city reportedly returned similar amounts in unspent formula funds to the federal government. A city with more than 100,000 vacant and abandoned properties and unemployment rates hovering close to 30 percent could not find a way to use funds that were freely available; the city needed only to ask for them and monitor their use. Beleaguered Detroit public servants, whose ranks were decimated by population loss and the city’s fiscal insolvency, did not have the capacity or the systems to responsibly manage or comply with federal funding rules. And, in this regard, Detroit is not unique among legacy cities or other fiscally challenged places.

A March 2015 report from the Government Accountability Office, Municipalities in Fiscal Crisis (GAO-15-222), looked at four cities that filed for bankruptcy (Camden, NJ; Detroit, MI; Flint, MI; and Stockton, CA) and concluded that the cities’ inability to use and manage federal grants was attributable to inadequate human capital capacity, staffing shortages, diminished financial capacity, and outdated information technology systems. The report lamented that not only were the cities unable to use formula funds—like Community Development Block Grants that are distributed according to objective criteria such as population size and need—but they routinely forwent applying for competitive funding, as well. A separate 2012 analysis by Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK), Money for Nothing, identified some $70 billion in federal funds that were unspent “due to poorly drafted laws, bureaucratic obstacles and mismanagement, and a general lack of interest or demand from the communities to which this money was allocated.”

How can it be that the neediest places are unable to use the assistance that is available? It’s unsurprising that a city like Detroit, which lost almost two-thirds of its population over six decades, would see diminished staffing and staff capacity in city offices. It is also unsurprising that Detroit did not have state-of-the-art IT systems. When a municipality faces fiscal challenges, infrastructure always gets short shrift. The inability to make use of allocated funding probably isn’t a sin of commission, but a regrettable omission that runs deeper, and needs fixing. But where to start? Let’s see what the data tells us. Which formula programs have the weakest throughput? Where are the places with the worst uptake? By all accounts, we don’t know. If federal agencies know which programs and places might make the best and worst lists, they are not reporting it. Moreover, most citizens in Detroit, who bear one of the highest property tax rates in the country, don’t know that their city is leaving tens of millions of dollars of federal money on the table each and every year.

Last summer, with little fanfare but great ambition, the Lincoln Institute launched a global campaign to promote municipal fiscal health. The campaign focuses attention on several drivers of municipal fiscal health, including the role of land and property taxation to provide a stable and secure revenue base. In this issue of Land Lines, we consider ways that cities and regions are building new capacities—reliable fiscal monitoring and transparent stewardship of public resources, effective communication and coordination among local, county, state, and federal governments—to overcome major economic and environmental barriers. We focus on how places are looking inside and outside their borders to enlist the assistance of others. Hopefully, these stories will inspire us to work toward broader, deeper, and more creative ways to thrive together rather than struggling alone.

Two technology-based tools featured in this issue are changing the way municipal finance information is organized and shared. They empower citizens and voters to hold their community leaders accountable and ensure that once we throw the assistance switch, the circuit is completed. PolicyMap (p. 18) was founded with the goal of supporting data-driven public decisions. Researchers there have organized dozens of public data sets and developed a powerful interface where users can view the data on maps. It includes thousands of indicators that track the use of public funds and their impact. The city of Arlington, Massachusetts, has demystified its city finances through the Visual Budget (p. 5), an open-source software tool that helps citizens understand where their tax dollars are spent. PolicyMap and the Visual Budget have the potential to follow all revenue sources and expenditures for a city and make them transparent to taxpayers. For cities or federal agencies willing to disclose this information, these social enterprises stand ready to track and report on the use, or non-use, of public funds.

Vertical alignment of multiple levels of government toward the goal of municipal fiscal health is not only a domestic remedy. Our interview with Zhi Liu (p. 30) reports on the efforts of the central government of the People’s Republic of China to build a stable revenue base under local governments through enactment of a property tax law, an action to help municipal governments survive the shifting sands of land reform.

In our report on the Working Cities Challenge (p. 25), researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston identify what is possibly the most important capacity needed to promote not only municipal fiscal health, but thriving, sustainable, and resilient places: leadership. Leadership—which might come in the form of visionary public officials, bold civic entrepreneurs, or gritty peripatetic academics—is at the core of other inspiring cases reported in this issue. Leaders in Chattanooga (p. 8) made a big bet on infrastructure—low-cost, ultra-high-speed Internet, provided through a municipal fiber-optic network—to help the city complete its transition from polluted industrial throwback to clean, modern tech hub. And it’s working.

The Super Ditch (p. 10) is another example of multiple governments working with private parties to forge creative solutions to joint challenges. The Super Ditch is innovating urban-agricultural water management through new public-private agreements that interrupt the old “buy and dry” strategies practiced by water-starved cities—continuing to meet municipal water demand without despoiling prime farmland.

Before we endure endless partisan bickering about whether national governments should rescue bankrupt cities, perhaps we should find a way to ensure that they don’t go bankrupt in the first place, by using the help that we’ve already promised. Only a sadist or a cynic would intentionally dangle resources out of the reach of needy people or places. If we invest only a fraction of unspent funds to build the right local capacities, communities will be able to solve their own problems. Whether it is a P4, an innovative technology tool, or a new way of working among governments and the private sector, social entrepreneurs are amplifying human ingenuity to help us overcome the biggest challenge we face: finding new ways to work together so that we do not perish alone.

Los seres humanos han tenido una relación de amor y odio con la urbanización desde hace cientos de años. A mediados del siglo XVIII, en los albores de la Revolución Industrial, los campos y las tierras de pastoreo de uso común estaban cercados con el fin de obligar a los campesinos a realizar trabajo asalariado y vivir en los asentamientos informales de las ciudades industriales europeas. Estas personas, arrastradas en contra de su voluntad a la vida urbana, vivían en pésimas condiciones, hacinadas en viviendas de mala calidad y ahogadas por el humo que emanaba de las fábricas que utilizaban el carbón para funcionar. En el verano, las familias con recursos económicos se retiraban al campo para evitar los ineludibles brotes de peste, cólera, y otras enfermedades. Afortunadamente, al mismo tiempo, muchas de las características negativas de la urbanización comenzaron a tratarse por parte de un nuevo invento: el sector público o gobierno municipal. Las obras públicas se crearon para construir caminos y sistemas de alcantarillado, encontrar y proporcionar agua potable y segregar los usos del suelo para que las viviendas estuvieran separadas de las fábricas contaminantes.

Este progreso desembocó en una época, a mediados del siglo XIX, en la que las ciudades del mundo se vieron pobladas con una creciente ola de residentes voluntarios que eran atraídos por las comodidades y el entusiasmo de la vida urbana. Las obras públicas proporcionaban agua y energía directamente a las viviendas. Los nuevos sistemas de transporte trasladaban alimentos y materiales desde las granjas y minas, además de llevar a los trabajadores desde sus hogares al trabajo. Las ciudades florecieron y se convirtieron en la fuerza motriz de las economías nacionales; sin embargo, este nuevo modelo urbano se vio debilitado por dos contradicciones básicas. A medida que reorganizamos nuestro espacio con el fin de alimentar y brindar combustible a las ciudades, también ejercimos una creciente presión sobre nuestros sistemas naturales. Además, como países urbanizados, redujimos la miseria pero aumentamos la desigualdad. Asimismo encontramos nuevas formas de aislar a los ricos de los aspectos negativos de la vida urbana, creando barrios o suburbios urbanos exclusivos.

Durante la primera etapa de la urbanización, innovamos con el fin de resolver el problema de las pestes y enfermedades que eran resultado del hacinamiento de las personas en espacios mal organizados. Durante la segunda etapa, convertimos a nuestras ciudades en lugares brillantes que atraían a nuevos residentes, pero agotamos nuestros sistemas naturales. Redujimos la pobreza, pero aumentamos la desigualdad y la distancia social entre las personas que habitaban el mismo espacio. Tal vez, en el siglo XXI podamos ser lo suficientemente inteligentes para marcar el inicio de una tercera etapa de urbanización, en la que las ciudades brinden respuestas al estrés mundial por el medio ambiente y los países continúen experimentando una reducción de la pobreza, y también un menor nivel de desigualdad. No obstante, para lograr esto, necesitaremos recalibrar nuestra comprensión de la importante función que cumplimos como individuos a la hora de financiar esta evolución: debemos reafirmar el contrato social mediante el cual pagamos nuestros impuestos al gobierno municipal, quien, a su vez, nos recompensa con bienes y servicios públicos que definen una calidad de vida excepcional.

Fue un reconocimiento a la enorme reputación del Instituto Lincoln y un honor personal que me invitaran a liderar, junto con el Banco Mundial, una de las diez unidades de gestión de políticas dedicadas a la creación de un Nuevo Programa Urbano, que se anunciará en la segunda mitad de este año en Hábitat III, la Tercera Conferencia de las Naciones Unidas sobre Asentamientos Humanos. Con la ayuda de más de una docena de expertos en políticas a nivel mundial designados por sus respectivos Estados miembro, elaboramos el Documento de Políticas sobre Finanzas y Sistemas Fiscales Municipales, que contiene recomendaciones sobre la forma en que el mundo puede financiar el Nuevo Programa Urbano.

Si usted nunca ha oído hablar de las reuniones de ONU-Hábitat, no se sorprenda: se realizan muy esporádicamente. Estas reuniones tienen lugar cada 20 años y su objetivo es brindar asesoramiento para elaborar políticas nacionales que den como resultado ciudades más seguras, más saludables y más habitables. En 1976, la Primera Conferencia de las Naciones Unidas sobre Asentamientos Humanos, realizada en Vancouver, tuvo como oradores a ilustres pensadores a nivel mundial, como Margaret Mead, Buckminster Fuller y la Madre Teresa. El resultado de la conferencia fue el Plan de Acción de Vancouver, que brindó 64 recomendaciones de políticas para que los gobiernos nacionales “adoptaran políticas relativas a los asentamientos humanos y estrategias de planificación espacial que fueran audaces, significativas y efectivas”, con el fin de facilitar un desarrollo urbano de calidad.

En 1996, la conferencia Hábitat II se celebró en Estambul y siguió los pasos de la Conferencia de las Naciones Unidas sobre Medio Ambiente y Desarrollo (Cumbre para la Tierra) de 1992. Hábitat II se centró en conectar el programa de urbanización con las medidas a nivel mundial dirigidas a promover el desarrollo sostenible. En aquel entonces, los urbanistas se encontraban desilusionados debido a que la Agenda 21 (el plan de acción de políticas elaborado por la Cumbre para la Tierra) casi ni mencionaba a las ciudades y, cuando sí lo hacía, estas se consideraban como parte del problema, no de la solución, para la sostenibilidad mundial. La Agenda de Hábitat que surgió de la conferencia de 1996 propuso un marco de políticas para orientar las medidas nacionales en las próximas dos décadas, con el fin de promover asentamientos urbanos sostenibles. Un avance significativo de Hábitat II consistió en la creación de un marco de compromiso de información, para que los gobiernos nacionales se responsabilizaran de dar cuenta sobre los avances de los objetivos establecidos en la Agenda de Hábitat, un aspecto que se había omitido en el Plan de Acción de Vancouver.

Aunque las anteriores conferencias de Hábitat fueron muy importantes, no generaron el impacto o la divisa cultural a la que aspiraban. Este año, existen varios motivos para creer que Hábitat III, que se realizará en octubre en Quito, Ecuador, será diferente. En primer lugar, hoy en día el planeta es predominantemente urbano: alrededor del año 2007, más de la mitad del mundo ya estaba urbanizada, y las tendencias actuales señalan que el planeta estará urbanizado en un 70 por ciento para el año 2050. La totalidad del crecimiento de la población mundial durante las próximas tres décadas tendrá lugar en las ciudades, lo que añadirá unos dos mil millones y medio de personas. Además, a menos que escojamos otro enfoque, se duplicará la cantidad estimada de 850 millones a 1.000 millones de personas que viven en todo tipo de asentamientos informales en las ciudades de todo el mundo.

En segundo lugar, los gestores de políticas internacionales están comenzando a tomar en serio la urbanización. Este cambio puede verse claramente en los Objetivos de Desarrollo Sostenible (SDG, por su sigla en inglés) recientemente elaborados por los Estados miembro de la ONU, con el fin de actualizar los Objetivos de Desarrollo del Milenio (MDG) adoptados en el año 2000 para regir las políticas mundiales de desarrollo económico hasta el año 2015. Los SDG establecerán un marco a nivel mundial con la finalidad de promover un desarrollo más efectivo y responsable para 2030. A diferencia de los MDG, los SDG contienen objetivos e indicadores específicos referidos a la urbanización.

En tercer lugar (y más importante), debido a que las naciones miembro tendrá la obligación de informar anualmente el progreso que han alcanzado para lograr los SDG, se tomará muy en serio el proceso de urbanización. Este acuerdo incluye la admisión tácita de que entender la urbanización de forma correcta es un factor clave para lograr un futuro humano sostenible en el planeta. Entender la urbanización de forma correcta requiere el compromiso de proporcionar servicios básicos a todos los residentes, tanto antiguos como nuevos, de utilizar los recursos naturales de manera más eficiente, y de reducir nuestra huella de carbono. Por último, aunque no menos importante, entender la urbanización de forma correcta significa encontrar formas de financiarla. Tal como se establece en el Documento de Políticas: “La salud fiscal de las ciudades es una condición necesaria para gestionar nuestro futuro urbano mundial. La salud fiscal permite a los gobiernos municipales invertir en la infraestructura social y económica que promueve una mayor calidad de vida, sostiene el crecimiento económico y ayuda a los municipios a prepararse ante cualquier crisis natural o financiera y mitigar sus efectos”.

Con el fin de lograr esto, necesitamos incrementar las fuentes de recaudación existentes y encontrar otras nuevas. Y la mayor fuente —antigua y nueva— de generación de ingresos municipales para financiar la urbanización puede encontrarse en el suelo.

Cuando invertimos en infraestructura urbana, posibilitamos los asentamientos urbanos densos y multiplicamos exponencialmente el valor de dicho suelo. La base fiscal que genera este suelo con más valor, así como las mejoras realizadas en el mismo, es la mayor y más antigua fuente de recaudación municipal que tienen las ciudades, instrumentada mediante el impuesto sobre la propiedad. No obstante, una nueva fuente de ingresos casi no explotada es la recuperación del incremento del valor del suelo que la infraestructura pública genera a favor de los propietarios privados, lo que se conoce como “recuperación de plusvalías”. Como hemos observado en América Latina, el incremento del valor del suelo generado por la inversión pública casi siempre multiplica la inversión en sí. La recuperación de una parte del incremento del valor del suelo puede ser muy útil a la hora de financiar la infraestructura que necesitaremos para recibir en nuestras ciudades a otros dos mil millones y medio de residentes hacia mediados del siglo.

Paradójicamente, nos resistimos mucho más a los impuestos basados en el suelo que a otras fuentes inferiores de ingresos. Aunque el impuesto sobre la propiedad es la fuente de ingresos municipales más estable, continúa representando una parte relativamente pequeña de los presupuestos municipales; además, debido a que este impuesto generalmente es el mayor tributo directo que pagan los propietarios, sufre constantemente el ataque del público. Los electores captan el apoyo de los gobiernos estatales, provinciales y nacionales para limitar la capacidad que tienen los municipios de recaudar el impuesto sobre la propiedad, imponiendo límites a las tasas, jugando con las valuaciones del suelo, o ambas cosas. Y cuando lo logran, socavan el avance del que puede decirse que es el más importante para alejarnos de nuestro pasado salvaje: el gobierno municipal.

El desafío del financiamiento municipal puede resumirse en una simple pregunta: ¿Quién pagará nuestras futuras ciudades y pueblos? Y la respuesta es bastante simple: nosotros, tal como siempre lo hemos hecho. Podríamos pedir prestados billones de dólares para invertir en nueva infraestructura, desarrollar nuevas asociaciones entre entidades públicas y privadas, mejorar las transferencias intergubernamentales u obtener los fondos del suelo (como creo que deberíamos hacerlo). Sin embargo, a la larga, todo gasto que realicemos se pagará con fondos que recaudamos de nosotros mismos de una u otra forma. Presumiblemente, estaremos felices con la calidad de la vida urbana que paguemos. Pero esto requerirá nuestro compromiso colectivo para pagar lo que cuesten los servicios que deseamos y necesitamos, y esto será posible cuando comencemos a recordar la función esencial que cumple el gobierno municipal para proporcionar estos beneficios.

Humans have had a love-hate relationship with urbanization for hundreds of years. In the mid-18th century, at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, common fields and pastures were enclosed to force peasants into wage labor and life in the slums of the industrial cities of Europe. These involuntary urbanites lived in abysmal conditions, crowded into substandard dwellings and choked by fumes belched from coal-fired factories. Wealthy families retreated to the countryside in summers to avoid inevitable outbreaks of pestilence, cholera, and other diseases. Fortunately, at the same time, many of the negative attributes of urbanization were being addressed by a new invention—the public sector or local government. Public Works were created to build roads and sewers, to find and deliver potable water, and to segregate land uses so that residences were separated from dirty industries.

This progress ushered in an epoch, in the mid-19th century, during which the cities of the world grew with voluntary inhabitants who were drawn to the amenities and excitement of urban life. Public Works delivered water and power directly to residences. New transport systems moved food and materials from farms and mines, and moved workers from their homes to jobs. Cities flourished and became the economic powerhouses of national economies, but this new urban model was undermined by two basic contradictions. As we reorganized our space to feed and fuel cities, we put increasing pressure on natural systems. And, as countries urbanized, we reduced abject poverty but increased inequality. We also found new ways to insulate the wealthy from negative aspects of urban life in exclusive urban neighborhoods or suburbs.

During the first round of urbanization, we innovated to address the disease and pestilence that resulted from crowding people into poorly managed space. During the next round, we turned our cities into shiny places that attracted new residents, but we stressed out natural systems. We reduced poverty but we increased inequality and the social distance between people inhabiting the same space. Perhaps, in the 21st century, we can be clever enough to usher in a third round of urbanization, where cities provide the answers to global environmental stress, and countries continue to see declining poverty but also reductions in inequality. To do this, however, we’ll need to recalibrate our understanding of the important role we as individuals play in paying for this evolution—reaffirming the social contract through which we pay our taxes to local government, and it rewards us with the public goods and services that define an exceptional quality of life.

It was a testament to the outsized reputation of the Lincoln Institute and a personal honor to be asked to lead, with the World Bank, one of the ten policy units tasked with drafting a New Urban Agenda, to be announced this fall at Habitat III, the Third United Nations Conference on Human Settlements. With the assistance of more than a dozen global policy experts nominated by their member states, we wrote the Policy Paper for Municipal Finance and Local Fiscal Systems, which recommends how the world will pay for the New Urban Agenda.

If you have not heard of the UN Habitat meetings, it is not surprising. They rarely occur. The convenings happen every 20 years and seek to advise national policies that lead to safer, healthier, and more livable cities. In 1976, the first United Nations Conference on Human Settlements, held in Vancouver, involved such illustrious global thinkers as Margaret Mead, Buckminster Fuller, and Mother Teresa. The Vancouver Action plan generated at the conference provided 64 policy recommendations for national governments “to adopt bold, meaningful, and effective human settlement policies and spatial planning strategies” that would facilitate high-quality urban development.

In 1996, Habitat II, held in Istanbul, followed on the heels of the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (Earth Summit). Habitat II focused on connecting the urbanization agenda with global efforts to promote sustainable development. At the time, urbanists were disappointed that Agenda 21, the policy action plan from the Earth Summit, barely mentioned cities. And where it did, cities were considered part of the problem, not a solution, for global sustainability. The Habitat Agenda that emerged from the 1996 conference proposed a policy framework to guide national efforts for the next two decades to promote sustainable urban settlements. An important advancement of Habitat II was the creation of a reporting framework to hold national governments accountable for achieving the goals set forth in the Habitat Agenda, something missing from the Vancouver Action Plan.

As important as previous Habitat conferences were, they did not generate the impact or the cultural currency to which they aspired. This year, there are several reasons to believe that Habitat III, to be convened in October in Quito, Ecuador, will be different. First, the planet is predominantly urban now. We passed the halfway point for global urbanization around 2007, and current trends suggest that the planet will be 70 percent urbanized by 2050. All global population growth in the next three decades will occur in cities, which will add some 2.5 billion people. And, unless we choose a new approach, we will double the estimated 850 million to one billion people living in slums, favelas, and other informal settlements in cities around the world.

Second, international policy makers are beginning to take urbanization seriously. This shift is best illustrated in recently penned Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) drafted by UN member states to update the Millennial Development Goals (MDGs) adopted in 2000 to govern global economic development policy through 2015. The SDGs will establish a global framework to promote more effective and responsible development through 2030. Unlike the MDGs, the SDGs include specific goals and indicators that reference urbanization.

Third, and most importantly, because member nations will be required to report annually on their progress toward the SDGs, they will be taking the process of urbanization seriously. Built into this arrangement is a tacit admission that getting urbanization right is critical to achieving a sustainable human future on the planet. Getting urbanization right will require a commitment to deliver basic services to all residents, new and old, to use natural resources more efficiently, and to reduce our carbon footprint. And, last but not least, getting urbanization right means finding ways to pay for it. As stated in the Policy Paper: The fiscal health of cities is a necessary condition for managing our global urban future. Fiscal health enables local governments to invest in the social and economic infrastructure that supports a higher quality of life, sustains economic growth, and helps localities prepare for and mitigate the effects of natural and financial crises.

To accomplish this, we will need to grow existing sources of revenue and find new ones. And the biggest old and new source of local revenue to finance urbanization can be found in land.

When we invest in urban infrastructure, we make dense urban settlement possible and we increase the value of that land by many multiples. The tax base that is built from this more valuable land, and the improvements built on it, is the biggest old source of local revenue for cities, through the property tax. But a mostly untapped new source of revenue is the reclamation of land value increments that public infrastructure generates for private landowners, known as value capture. As we’ve seen in Latin America, the increase in land value through public investment is almost always a multiple of the investment itself. Capturing a share of land value increments can help us fund the infrastructure we’ll need to welcome another 2.5 billion residents to our cities by mid-century.

Ironically, we resist land-based taxes more than other inferior revenue sources. While the property tax is the most stable local revenue source, it still accounts for a relatively small share of local government budgets, and, because it is usually the biggest direct tax paid by property owners, it is constantly under attack. Voters enlist the support of state, provincial, and national governments to constrain the ability of localities to collect property tax revenues by imposing rate limitations, or monkeying around with land value assessments, or both. And when they succeed, they undermine the advancement that is arguably the most important for separating us from our barbarian past—local government.

The municipal finance challenge can be summarized in one simple question: Who will pay for our future cities and towns? And the answer is quite simple. We will—just as we always have. We might borrow trillions of dollars to invest in new infrastructure, engineer new public-private partnerships, enhance intergovernmental transfers, or leverage funding from the land, as I think we should. But, in the end, whatever expenditures we make will be covered by revenues we collect from ourselves in one form or another. Presumably, we’ll be happy with the quality of the urban life that we purchase. But that will require our collective commitment to pay what it costs for the services we want and need—and that will start by reminding ourselves of the essential role that local government plays in delivering these benefits.

Después de que Karin Brandt obtuvo su título de Maestría en el Instituto de Tecnología de Massachusetts, notó cierto nivel de frustración en sus antiguos compañeros de planificación. “La idea de generar un cambio, de la que tanto habíamos hablado en la escuela de posgrado, no se estaba concretando”, recordó. Una de las razones era el hecho de que hacer participar al público en general en el proceso de planificación a menudo constituía un desafío.

Mientras tanto, siguió Brandt, sus amigos de otros departamentos de MIT estaban “creando empresas, resolviendo problemas, haciendo cosas realmente interesantes” con la tecnología. Quizás, concluyó, había una superposición útil entre estas dos tendencias divergentes. Quizás se podrían usar tecnologías innovadoras para mejorar los elementos públicos del proceso de planificación. De manera que, en 2013, después de dejar su puesto de analista de investigación en el Instituto Lincoln, Brand fundó coUrbanize junto con su compañero del programa de posgrado de MIT David Quinn, un científico de datos. Este emprendimiento, financiado por capital de riesgo, ofrece una plataforma de comunicaciones enfocada en la planificación y diseñada para facilitar y mejorar la manera en que los planificadores, emprendedores y el público interactúan en proyectos específicos.

El desafío subyacente en este caso era conocido, por supuesto, por cualquier persona involucrada en la profesión, “Una reunión de planificación tradicional, con el micrófono y la lista de oradores, y tres minutos por orador, es importante”, dice Amy Cotter, una veterana del Consejo de Planificación del Área Metropolitana de Boston, y ahora gerente de los programas de desarrollo urbano en el Instituto Lincoln. “Pero su valor es limitado”. En pocas palabras, sólo algunos miembros de la comunidad tienen el tiempo o la predisposición para participar en este tipo de foros, lo cual limita la perspectiva de lo que la comunidad piensa realmente sobre un emprendimiento inmobiliario o una iniciativa de planificación, y deja muchos comentarios y opiniones potencialmente útiles sin expresar.

En el pasado, algunos consideraban que este paso del proceso de planificación era “más bien un ejercicio técnico”, en el que los datos de los expertos tenían prioridad por sobre la opinión de la comunidad, continúa Cotter. “Pero el área de planificación ha estado pasando por una transición. En este momento, la mayoría de los planificadores piensa que sus planes son mejores y más valiosos si la gente participa”. Pero no es fácil conseguir esta participación.

Ken Snyder, fundador y Director Ejecutivo de la organización sin fines de lucro PlaceMatters, con sede en Denver, observa que en los últimos cinco o diez años se ha generado un movimiento creciente alrededor de la innovación que ha aumentado la participación comunitaria, utilizando nuevas tecnologías. Un ejemplo es la plataforma llamada Engaging Plans (Planes participativos) de Urban Interactive Studio. Otro es CrowdGauge.org, desarrollada por Sasaki Associates y PlaceMatters. Esta última es una “herramienta abierta basada en la web para crear juegos educativos en línea” que pueden ayudar a “resumir, comunicar y clasificar ideas que emergen de un proceso de visualización e incorporarlas en el proceso de toma de decisiones”. (Snyder ha compilado una lista informal pero muy útil de herramientas e iniciativas de planificación creativas en bit.ly/placematters-tools).

Brandt dice que sus propias investigaciones la han llevado a concluir que los tres actores principales en la mayoría de los proyectos —los planificadores, los emprendedores y la comunidad en general— querían esencialmente lo mismo: mayor transparencia de las otras dos partes. En otras palabras, al mismo tiempo que los planificadores querían más comentarios del público, los ciudadanos frecuentemente sentían que no recibían información suficiente y verdaderamente accesible.

CoUrbanize fue desarrollado con contribuciones directas de planificadores y emprendedores, y la plataforma ofrece una página principal en línea para difundir información pública sobre cualquier proyecto. Esto quiere decir que es al mismo tiempo un foro para recoger las opiniones de la comunidad y un lugar que permite acceder ampliamente a planes y propuestas. Lo más importante es que se propone ser un punto de contacto flexible que suplementa, sin reemplazar, los mecanismos tradicionales y de otro tipo para recabar los comentarios del público.

Uno de los ejemplos más interesantes hasta la fecha ha sido el Plan de Renovación Urbana de Kendall Square en Cambridge, Massachusetts. La Autoridad de Revitalización de Cambridge y la empresa inmobiliaria Boston Properties están colaborando en un esfuerzo público-privado que abarca 100.000 metros cuadrados de nuevos emprendimientos comerciales y residenciales. La empresa de desarrollo inmobiliario, en colaboración con coUrbanize, ha distribuido carteles que preguntaban a los usuarios reales su opinión sobre los usos potenciales del espacio correspondiente. Esto significaba que cualquiera podía enviar sus respuestas por mensaje de texto, y que estas se recopilaran en un foro comunitario en línea de coUrbanize.

“La gente tiene ideas mucho más interesantes cuando están en un espacio físico”, dice Brandt. “Y la mayoría de la gente no sabe lo que puede decir. Así que es muy útil que se les hagan preguntas específicas”. Este experimento recogió más de 200 comentarios, más datos adicionales de los usuarios del foro que apoyaban o criticaban estos comentarios. El equipo de planificación y desarrollo “realizó cambios en el plan gracias a los comentarios recibidos”, dice Brandt, como el agregado de una cantidad sustancial de viviendas sociales y la inclusión de un “espacio de innovación” que ofrecía precios más bajos que el mercado a empresas en formación (startups) calificadas. Y añade que dentro de poco se concretarán también algunas ideas derivadas de la plataforma para espacios abiertos.

Desde la perspectiva de planificación, la clave está en ampliar la base de opinión. Esto puede dar lugar a ideas que nunca hubieran surgido en una reunión comunitaria tradicional. Pero es más importante aún comprender claramente lo que “la comunidad” desea, respalda u objeta sobre un proyecto en particular, y no recoger sólo lo que piensan las personas que asisten a una reunión pública.

Cotter apunta, con el acuerdo enfático de Brandt, que las reuniones presenciales siguen siendo importantes. Pero una plataforma como coUrbanize brinda un foro para aquellos que no pueden (o simplemente no quieren) participar en este tipo de reuniones: un trabajador del turno de noche, padres que tienen que quedarse en casa o jóvenes de la generación del milenio, a quienes el contexto en línea les resulta más fácil y conveniente. Según Brandt: “Uno de nuestros clientes dice que nuestra plataforma es una reunión comunitaria de 24 horas”. (Es de hacer notar que coUrbanize publica “directrices comunitarias” que requieren que los usuarios/ciudadanos se inscriban con sus nombres reales, para reducir al mínimo los comentarios de planificación equivalentes al spam. “Nuestros socios municipales nos han dicho que los comentarios que reciben de coUrbanize frecuentemente son más apropiados”, dice Brandt).

Para aprovechar al máximo esta accesibilidad, las ciudades o emprendedores inmobiliarios que usan coUrbanize o una plataforma equivalente tienen que volver a pensar en cómo presentar sus ideas. Cotter señala que incluso los términos más básicos como “contratiempo” o “densidad” pueden no significar nada para una persona no experta en la materia. (Como orientación para recoger opiniones de la comunidad, PlaceMatters ha utilizado métodos creativos como la instalación de ventanas emergentes (popups) para demostrar los beneficios de una ciclovía protegida en Portland, Oregón, ubicada en un lugar físico real). CoUrbanize ofrece a los planificadores y emprendedores un marco de referencia intuitivo para presentar ideas, tanto con imágenes como con palabras; casi como la página principal de una campaña de Kickstarter.

Por supuesto, los usuarios son los que tienen la responsabilidad de aprovechar la plataforma al máximo. Y como el modelo de negocios de coUrbanize depende en parte de la participación de los emprendedores, Brandt remarca que este tipo de plataforma puede revelar más rápida y eficientemente problemas que en circunstancias normales podrían haber provocado demoras costosas en el proyecto. La mayoría de los clientes y proyectos iniciales de la firma está concentrada en Massachusetts, pero coUrbanize también ha trabajado en Atlanta y otros lugares donde se lo han solicitado. Este año la compañía ampliará su radio de acción a Nueva York y San Francisco.

El objetivo, según Brandt, es que “ganen todos los jugadores”. Sin duda, la ganancia potencial para los miembros de la comunidad (los usuarios de coUrbanize, pero también de otras plataformas que intentan ampliar el proceso de planificación con herramientas tecnológicas) es particularmente intrigante. Y eso, dice Cotter, es algo que los planificadores han estado buscando durante años y que será cada vez más práctico a medida que la tecnología mejore. La clave, dice, está en “brindar a la gente la confianza de saber que se la escuchó y que su opinión será tenida en cuenta”. E incluso si su opinión no se tuviera en cuenta, se debería explicar por qué, y cuáles son las ventajas y desventajas de su propuesta.

“Hay tanta gente que no sabe que puede influir sobre su barrio”, dice Brandt. “No sabe qué es la planificación, y no ha asistido nunca a una reunión”. Quizá la generación actual de plataformas tecnológicas pueda ayudar a cambiar esto: “Hay mucha más gente en línea”, argumenta Brandt, “que los que tienen libres los martes a las 7 de la tarde”.

Rob Walker (robwalker.net) es colaborador de Design Observer y The New York Times.

Fotografía: Karin Brandt