The MDC Goes to the Big Apple

MDC Director, Tom Fisher, was invited to give a talk as part of the Design, Climate Change, and Equity lecture series at New York University’s Wager School of Public Service. Summarizing the contents of his 2013 book Designing to Avoid Disaster and his 2016 book Designing our Way to a Better World, Fisher looked at a set of strategies that cities like New York City, lying in vulnerable locations along coastlines and over fault lines, might explore to avoid the fate of other coastal communities hard hit by extreme weather events, like Houston and New Orleans. Fisher looked at strategies of protection around cities, such as the wetlands proposed around Manhattan; strategies of accommodation, such as plans to create water channels to accept future flood waters in New Orleans; strategies of mobilization, such as making cities more mobile as Fisher advocated in his recent piece in the Huffington Post on “Cities as Sitting Ducks;” and strategies of appropriation, such as those used by the homeless in seeking shelter wherever they can find it.  Tom Fisher