Urban Flooding and Urban Design
The images of flooding in Houston are dramatic, horrifying. More than once I've recognized half-drowned buildings as ones we passed when we went there for Anime Matsuri either this year or last year.
A lot of questions are being asked about the disaster, particularly variations on why didn't they evacuate?. But are they necessarily the right questions? Might the horrific flooding we're witnessing be the result of a fundamental design flaw in the city?
Our culture has a tendency to want to treat problems as isolated, rather than taking a systems-based approach. In the short term the focus on the immediate produces results that can be reported to superiors, but in the long term, it means that the same issues recur on a regular basis because the flaws in the systems that produce the problem are never addressed.
A lot of questions are being asked about the disaster, particularly variations on why didn't they evacuate?. But are they necessarily the right questions? Might the horrific flooding we're witnessing be the result of a fundamental design flaw in the city?
Our culture has a tendency to want to treat problems as isolated, rather than taking a systems-based approach. In the short term the focus on the immediate produces results that can be reported to superiors, but in the long term, it means that the same issues recur on a regular basis because the flaws in the systems that produce the problem are never addressed.