Cities are sinking — and experts say we're not doing enough to save them
By Mira Adler-Gillies
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Cities around the world are sinking for a range of reasons; what they have in common is a stark lack of preparedness and a pattern of unsustainable urbanisation, says Ashley Dawson, author of Extreme Cities: The Peril and Promise of Urban Life in the Age of Climate Change.
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In Sao Paolo, as in Miami and in urbanised coastal cities throughout the world, a radical new approach is required. Dr Rob Roggema, landscape architect and Director of Cittaideale, argues that we need to rethink the kinds of cities we are building.
"I think planning and design of our cities needs to be structurally and fundamentally done differently in order to increase the flexibility of the city to deal with [these] events.
"[This] requires flexible protection of the coast so that the impact of a storm or a storm surge or a sea level rise is not that [great] on the coastline. But we also need to look at the whole urban system that we tend to fix and there is not much space in the city at the moment to ... accommodate the impact of a storm."
Crucially, this kind of urban planning and transformation, he argues, has to happen in a decentralised way and requires planning now to avoid a potentially catastrophic future.
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