Climate-resilient infrastructure that brings people together
6 questions with Shalini Vajjhala
Shalini Vajjhala, PhD is the Executive Director of PRE Collective and a nationally recognized infrastructure and climate resilience expert with 15 years experience designing, funding, and financing community-centered resilient infrastructure solutions. As part of this work, Vajjhala works with local communities in the “messy, early space of an infrastructure project, trying to find out what a community needs — as opposed to just rebuilding a shinier version of what they already have.” We spoke with Vajjhala about the need to create and build beautiful and resilient civic infrastructure in a time of accelerating climate change.
Q: Parks and natural areas are mostly thought of by community leaders as places for events and recreation, but have many other benefits. What arguments are useful to convince community and government leaders of their importance as climate adaptation and resilience?
Shalini Vajjhala [SV]: This is an area of so much opportunity! Traditional planning and infrastructure design processes have been very unimaginative about the climate resilience value that nature provides. The ways in which we think about nature and climate resilience are oftentimes about what impacts we can delay or prevent, or the risks we can reduce, when in fact we should be thinking about how we can meet multiple goals — creating beautiful spaces that people can use and that are protective against that ‘once in a thousand years’ storm.
There are whole fields of people working on this, wonderful folks from fields like landscape architecture and economics, who are making the case for where and how nature can provide day-to-day benefits. Of course, those benefits include things like recreation, but they also include things like protection against storms and mitigating the impacts of sea level rise and wildfire.
One of the lovely things about civic infrastructure is that it provides these multiple benefits. These are places that people can use now, as well as places that protect against future harms. They reduce financial risks and disruption of people’s lives from extreme weather. For example, if you have wetlands that are allowed to function naturally, they can keep your roads from being flooded, which helps your community in a time of growing climate risks.
A lot of times when we are examining successful resilience projects, we’re looking at success meaning something didn’t happen. A storm hits, and the community isn’t flooded. The financial arguments for investment in the civic commons and what it can prevent in the future need to be talked about in the beginning. Because without talking about it, people may assume nothing beneficial happened — so why should we fund it?
One of my favorite examples of building this kind of infrastructure is in the City of Hoboken, which was underwater after Hurricane Sandy in 2012. In response, Hoboken has built an absolutely beautiful piece of civic infrastructure called the ResilienCity Park (formerly the Northwest Resiliency Park), a six acre formerly contaminated site that was completely reworked to become a living “urban sponge.” Recently, when a big storm hit the Tri-State Area, the park protected the city against flooding in ways that New York City across the river was not as well protected. Best of all, this infrastructure is beautiful and multipurpose, with community gathering spaces and outdoor recreation assets for all ages.
Q: Another benefit of civic infrastructure — the parks, trails, town squares, main streets, play spaces, libraries, and other gathering spaces located in communities across the country — is their potential for supporting needed social connections between people. How can we better convince our leaders to understand and support this important function?
SV: These kinds of connections are so important, and as an example I go back to a terrible heat wave in Chicago during the 1990s, which killed over 700 people. There were differences when you analyze what happened, in who died and where the most people were impacted. It turns out that stronger social connections in Chicago were correlated to fewer deaths — that is, people in places where there were stronger social connections fared better. This means civic spaces are a big part of our emergency response infrastructure and the value of social infrastructure is already being demonstrated for traditional sectors like emergency management.
Another example of this kind of protective social infrastructure is the Cajun Navy, a group of people from along the U.S. Gulf Coast. They are an incredible group of folks that are and have been extraordinary disaster recovery actors, even though they are a bottom-up, stitched-together part of the social fabric and not part of a government agency. These examples show us that it’s indispensable to have both the physical infrastructure and the social connections if we want to respond well in emergencies.
While these examples underline the necessity of social infrastructure as a part of resilience planning, our systems have not yet caught up. We need to rework funding structures to properly value the work of these informal social infrastructure scaffolds, and to set up systems to deploy them when government capacity is limited. That’s where PRE Collective works, trying to bring those seams closer together.
Q: How do you help people understand that they are part of a local solution that scales up to a global solution in a time of skepticism and disconnection?
SV: I don’t think trust is possible without spaces for listening. At PRE Collective we ask a ton of questions and we really try to listen. We work with everyone, from environmental justice communities that face harm after harm to fishermen in coastal regions that are trying to figure out how to preserve working waterfronts in the face of shifting economic forces and environmental challenges.
A lot of times our approach to healing and building more durable connections is to just start with a set of questions. Most of the time, people come into infrastructure with an idea of building something that they want to build and then they embark immediately on a persuasion campaign to build that specific thing. That is rarely where we start conversations. Oftentimes we’ll ask, who’s losing money if you don’t do something here in your community?
It’s rarely the city that is losing money, even though a city is responsible for protecting its residents. Instead, it’s the hospital system, or it’s a major employer, or it’s the transit authority. Asking these questions upfront generally reveals who is disconnected, but needs to be part of the conversation.
The other questions we often ask are: who suffers if we don’t do anything? Who is suffering now? For example, a lot of public transit systems become slower or even inoperable in extreme heat. During heat waves, train tracks across the country have been melting. And when you’re operating a transit system and you are faced with damage from a heat wave, you run fewer trains and you run them more slowly, in order to reduce pressure on the superheated tracks. But think about the flip side of that action: it means the transit system is leaving vulnerable users — elders and people whose jobs depend on catching a train — out in extreme weather for longer periods.
Asking both who is losing money and who is suffering can bridge some of the very real disconnection that people feel right now.
When we talk about climate change, most of the time we talk to people about global action that creates societal-wide benefits far into the future. And while that global imperative is important, we need to bring our climate change arguments into conversations about what really matters to people now and in their backyards — rather than trying to persuade people to care about a big global problem.
If you are talking with a community about a retrofitting of a transit system that’s going to take a decade and billions of dollars to complete, it’s hard to get people to engage. But if you tell them that during the planning and construction period you’ll put in more shade and shelters, and that you will increase their access to micro mobility programs, they will start to care and understand. Unless you have an understanding of the day-to-day needs of a community, and are able to address those needs in a timely manner, you cannot build trust.
Q. You have spoken about the need to “work at the seams” of infrastructure systems in order to solve win-win problems. What are some of your tips for fostering this cross-sector, cross-silo work for climate resilience?
SV: This is the bread and butter of what we do at PRE Collective, because I believe the best infrastructure is multi-benefit infrastructure. Single purpose pieces of infrastructure, like a road that just gets you from point A to point B but that doesn’t protect against flooding or provide other types of connectivity, are just missed opportunities.
There are two tricks we use to try to enable bigger thinking and a more thoughtful approach to infrastructure. Both of them are designed to make complicated things less scary. The first trick is “English to English” translation, which means helping people of different professions and orientations see things from other perspectives. For example, a water infrastructure person might look at a street tree and see a water project, because that tree helps capture and absorb stormwater and reduce flood risks. A transportation person sees that same street tree as a pedestrian safety project. A public health person sees shade and heat protection. All of them are just using a different vocabulary.
A lot of times we’re trying to make the pieces and parts responsive to all of these different peoples’ core day-to-day jobs. And that is often an exercise in just learning each other’s vocabulary, so that you can communicate more effectively. That means the person interested in water isn’t going to the transportation person and saying “I need you to maintain this tree,” which to the transportation person is just a hassle. Frankly, that seems like extra work, as opposed to, “Hey, can I talk to your pedestrian safety program? I’d love to figure out how we can save money by maintaining these trees.”
The second trick works on people who are in various departments or agencies that are at odds with each other. To help in this situation, we listen for the phrase “if they would just…” said in an exasperated tone. In a meeting someone might say “we could complete this great project if they would just get out of the way.” This comment typically reveals where people need to work together but are not currently doing so. An example of this is when planners in local government or in engineering and architecture firms are creating work for maintenance departments through their project design, without really thinking about what that means for the maintenance department’s staffing and workload.
Of course we need to maintain our civic infrastructure, and that costs money and time. But these places can also save on maintenance costs if you think about how a green space might keep water off the roads, or how trees planted in the public right of way can shade transit workers out in extreme heat. I’m coming right back to the importance of asking those questions again: who loses money? Who suffers? A lot of the time it’s our maintenance workers who are in the greatest danger if we are not climate resilient. They’re on the front lines, fixing, repairing and recovering things in extreme weather. Civic infrastructure can protect them and make their work safer in a lot of ways, but most of the time we do not think about that.
Q: What have you learned about helping communities finance climate-resilient infrastructure, in ways that help local communities better respond to the impacts of climate change?
SV: It’s important to draw a line between funding and financing. Funding is money that you use for public projects that you don’t necessarily have to pay back. Financing requires that you pay the money back. Financing means agencies and communities have to think about what value is being created, and how that value is captured, so that you can have the ability to pay the money back.
The simplest example of this is a toll road. You have drivers, they drive on the road, they pay a toll, and that’s used to cover the cost of construction. In civic infrastructure you create value, but there are very few ways that value is captured. That same problem exists for climate resilient infrastructure, because a lot of the time, the benefits of investing in this infrastructure is prevention, that something bad didn’t happen.
It’s similar to how we fund preventative health care and emergency room services. We’re better at funding the emergency room than we are at preventing bad health outcomes. Going back to that Hoboken project, one of the early questions we asked the city was, what do you need that’s not flood infrastructure? They told us they didn’t have enough green space or parks. They also told us that their streets were clogged with cars. So we asked, what if we could use parking fees to help pay for this project, for both flood protection and recreation?
That is our method, to figure out how we create what you want and help the infrastructure pay for itself. We create savings and efficiencies to pay for things, in much the same way that your insurance company might give you a discount for safe driving.
Q: How can we move community and elected leaders away from thinking about “hardscape” and “big systems” as climate resilience towards a more people-oriented vision of climate resilience? Where does the public realm fit into that people-oriented resilience strategy?
SV: I am optimistic about this question, because I think this is already starting to happen. While a lot of communities are building sea walls, other communities are thinking about more creative ways to make sure our infrastructure meets current needs and also protects us from harm. There’s a wonderful landscape architecture firm out of the New York City area called SCAPE, and some of their projects are brilliant examples of this integration. They are creating flood protections for climate resilience that are also a river walk or a working oyster farm. This shows me we are at a turning point for how we think about and create our infrastructure.
I am seeing a culture change within traditional big engineering firms, within architecture firms, within conservation groups, all of which are talking to each other about how to build and maintain nature-based solutions. Folks in the investment world and in the finance world are starting to consider how to pay and invest in nature. People are thinking about big systems as being made up of lots of small pieces, instead of just constructing single-purpose levees and dams and dikes like we used to. If you want to break the infrastructure construction deadlock that we are seeing in America, meeting a community’s needs with multi-benefit infrastructure is what makes projects easier to get done.
Reimagining the Civic Commons is a collaboration of The JPB Foundation, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, The Kresge Foundation, William Penn Foundation, and local partners.
