New Books: The Equitably Resilient City
Featuring Lawrence Vale and Zachary Lamb, co-authors of The Equitably Resilient City: Solidarities and Struggles in the Face of Climate Crisis, published in 2024 by MIT Press. Their book, which draws on research from twelve unique case studies around the world, asks how cities can respond to climate change and still commit to maintaining and improving the lives of their most disadvantaged residents.
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Lawrence Vale
How well does this actually work? Does this improve environmental conditions? Does it enable people to keep livelihoods in the adjacent favela; do they have a level of security of tenure? Do they have some sense that they share in the self-governance of the place and involved in the management of it?
Emily
Hi, this is Emily Holloway, and you’re listening to UAR Remixed, a podcast by the journal Urban Affairs Review. In this episode, you’ll hear from Drs. Zach Lamb and Larry Vale, co-authors of the recently-published book The Equitably Resilient City: Solidarities and Struggles in the Face of Climate Crisis from MIT Press. The Equitably Resilient City assembles 12 in-depth case studies that examine different planning and design approaches to equitable urban resilience in the face of climate change around the globe.
Zachary Lamb
I'm Zach Lamb. I'm an assistant professor at UC Berkeley and the Department of City and Regional Planning. And my research is, broadly speaking, on climate equity. So the kind of uneven impacts of climate change and adaptation to climate change meets urban planning and design, often with respect to affordable housing.
Lawrence Vale
And I'm Larry Vale. I am in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT, where I am a professor and also associate Dean of our School of Architecture and Planning. It's where I've spent my whole career looking at a variety of ways that the urban design world is connected to the socio-political world and that has involved everything from studies of low-income housing to design capital cities to disaster recovery to the challenges of the climate crisis.
Emily
Could you both talk a bit about the genesis for this book and your collaboration? What prompted you both to start thinking about planning and design for climate resilience through this framework of what you call LEGS, or Livelihoods, Environment, Governance, and Security?
Lawrence Vale
So for me, this book is the culmination of a 20 plus year journey that started by focusing on a book called the Resilient City that dealt more about disaster recovery, which led, I think to the founding of a group in 2012-13 called the resilient Cities Housing initiative at MIT that was trying to apply this notion of equity to questions of housing, and then fortunately, Zach arrived in 2013 into the doctoral program, and we've spent more than a decade working together. But it was really an effort to recognize a shortcoming of my earlier work which had really not dealt very centrally with the climate crisis, and to draw upon Zach's expertise in these kinds of environmental concerns and to figure out, you know, why it was a good idea for us both to drop everything that we were otherwise working on. You know, Zach, to do a book based on his dissertation, which will be a great book when it does come and me to leave some other projects in mid-course to say this is more urgent and this kind of coming together of the challenges of urbanization, inequality, and climate crisis in a search to find some places that have handled that more equitably was worth prioritizing our academic lives.
Zachary Lamb
when I came to MIT to start my doctoral studies, I was coming off of, let's see, I guess eight years on and off of working in post Katrina New Orleans. I had started architecture school actually the fall that Hurricane Katrina hit in New Orleans. And so I got involved in a bunch of reconstruction projects during the course of my architectural studies, then I moved to the city and was working full time there for four or five years mostly on reconstruction efforts, largely around affordable housing, and I came back to do my doctoral studies because I was sort of perplexed by these larger questions of what was the future of the city going to be? How was this city that I had really come to love, how is it going to persist and thrive in this era of climate change, given the fragility that we had seen when the levees broke during Hurricane Katrina and the enormously uneven impacts of those levee breaches and the other really enormously uneven trajectory of reconstruction right, that that kind of followed the fault lines of class and race in New Orleans, and so I came back to do a PhD because I wanted to think about those kinds of questions of uneven resilience and uneven vulnerability, and so the opportunity to work with Larry on the Resilient Cities Housing initiative and then eventually several a few years later to really focus on that work as a as a book project was really, really appealing to me.
Emily
So, who is the Equitably Resilient City for? What audience or audiences did you have in mind as you were writing this collection?
Lawrence Vale
There's enough engagement with literature and theory to attract those who care about that, but enough focused on stories and action to be targeted to practitioners. One of the things that was so striking to me is about four days after the book came out on Open Access from MIT Press, I was contacted over e-mail by someone working at an NGO in India who said she'd read the book and that it was something that really appealed to the NGO she was working at and they realized that our story about Bangkok encouraged them to be in touch with other NGOs and to focus more on some of the livelihoods dimension that we talk about and the governance dimension that we talk about, and so that was, you know, I think you know, a good sign that it was doing what it was supposed to do and certainly a good reason to try and have a book that you can buy, but you could also bypass the world of Amazon and go direct to a free download from MIT Press for the Open Access version.
Zachary Lamb
One of the things that we were aiming for was to make the chapters to make the book both work as a whole that one could start on Page 1 and read to the end, and it would have a sense of forward momentum and growth and kind of cumulative impact, but also to make it legible if one were to assign a chapter at a time to an undergraduate course, for instance, or a specific case study for a course, so that was part of the vision.
Emily
There have been enormous political shifts in the months since your book was published in the fall of 2024, as we record this in April 2025.
[sound collage of clips of “climate change hoax” related stuff, maybe 10 seconds]
I feel it’s necessary to put a time stamp on everything, since the news cycle is shifting so rapidly this year. But I think it’s pretty clear that, maybe especially in light of these dramatic changes since January, this work is more urgent than ever. How do you both feel about this research and its contributions under these political and cultural conditions?
Zachary Lamb
It’s a great question and one that I've been thinking about, obviously as our kind of politics have unfolded and you know we wrote much of this book really beginning the writing and the research process in earnest, I would say it was largely in 2018, and so the political moment was not entirely dissimilar to the current moment and I think we really wanted to dig deep to tell stories about communities that were facing up to inequality and facing up to climate injustice and climate change vulnerability together, where there were efforts to make places more resilient to climate change that were also recognizing deeply embedded inequalities and trying to redress those deeply embedded inequalities. And so you know, much of the work in the book spans scales and it spans sort of primary actors. And among those case studies, some are national programs that are you know in which national governments are really important actors, but many are small scale, community driven efforts that are really driven by the needs and desires and priorities of people on the ground. And so I think what we've seen over the last several months is, from my perspective, a real need to reinvest in local solidarities and then think about how those local solidarities connect us into wider networks that can bring bigger changes in the face of the kinds of hostilities and provincialism, and retrenchment that we're seeing all around the world.
Lawrence Vale
And we put in the subtitle solidarities and struggles. And I think what we were trying to suggest is that these were positive outcomes from pretty difficult sorts of struggles that took a lot of time, but they weren't perfect and that this was an effort to try and tell partial success stories while being open to the challenges and the flaws, so it's not a book of marketing and boosterism for stories that are told only from the perspectives of their chief protagonist. It's an effort to approach difficult problems critically, respectfully, and to admire the capacity of the various people, whether it's community members or NGOs, or design and development firms, or government agencies, to work in various combinations, despite how difficult it is and to persist in what in many cases are 20-year stories and challenges, and in many cases ongoing and in many cases face set setbacks, so in that sense, you know more metaphorically, it's a call for the importance of grounded work and an ultimate affirmation that that things that are worth doing are not easy to do and that we need that more than ever to do that, but we also don't want to just be naively saying here’s something that somebody else did and you can do it too, because it's really a difficult set of challenges.
Emily
So the book is organized into twelve different case studies that you sort by four broad themes: Environment, security, livelihoods, and governance. And the geographies you assemble are incredibly diverse: we move from New Orleans, which, Zach, I know was quite important to you, to Bolivia, from Portland to Shenzen, to Nairobi and San Juan, among others. How did you settle on this list? Early on in the book, you mention there were nearly two hundred case studies you had to pick from – how did you make those decisions?
Zachary Lamb
It was a long process. So you know we built out this list along -- with we had an incredible group of research assistants who kind of worked with us over the years that we were researching and writing the book, and so we would meet at least once a week with that group. And, you know, we would sort of be on the hunt for these, what we were referring to as at least partial successes. We were looking for places where there had been some progress, some meaningful progress addressing core climate change vulnerabilities in human settlements that were bridging across both physical interventions and kind of institutional and social innovation across these four dimensions that are that are the core of the book, the livelihoods, environment, governance and security. We were sort of trying to build out this find, find it as many of these kind of examples as we could around the world and again you know we're seeking kind of diversity across a lot of different dimensions so both across those four dimensions, but then also we were looking for cases that were you know, geographically distributed, we're looking for cases that were in different types of settlements and different types of cities, we were looking for cases that we're dealing with different types of climate threats, so not just flooding threats but also heat or drought or fire, right, because we recognize that what climate change means in different communities is very different. And what those impacts mean and what inequality means in different cities is very different. So we wanted to make sure that we were gathering and ultimately landing on a group of 12 case studies that would really represent something of that diversity and pluralism in terms of both the kind of contextual situation and also the actions that we were interested in highlighting.
Lawrence Vale
And I would just add that we didn't lose all of the other 188 examples, but, but I think they were, in many cases, infused briefly into the way we framed the cases that we did focus on. And the other thing I would add is that we were being pretty careful about the time dimension of this. We wanted places that were far enough along in their trajectory so that we could have some capacity to judge not just the great aspiration, but some sense of the fulfillment of high hopes and, at least in one case far enough along for those high hopes and extreme efforts to be thwarted by pushback, a story of a women-led collective in Bolivia on the outskirts of Cochabamba, for instance, is a story of tremendous leadership among a group of women to really build a collective governance and collective land ownership of a territory, only to have a group of male-led countermovement folks upend the governance that had been planned and had been executed. Still yielding a pretty well functioning community even now, but it gave us a time frame that enabled us to say OK, when can you really judge a partial success, and I think that was a rich component of what we've tried to do because so often the idea gets credited but not the execution and the implementation, and for anything that deals with planning and urban design and community development and economic development and international intrigue like all of these cases engage, it matters. Following them along matters a lot to really begin to see how sustainable the effort is and what the challenges may be.
Emily
The word resilience may be, for some at least, a neutral, or even positive term when thinking about climate change adaptation, mitigation, and planning. But in some circles, both inside and outside academia, it’s pretty contested. And you spend some time discussing this in the introduction, unpacking these debates and also working to reframe the term and practice of resilience.
Zachary Lamb
As you can imagine, we had many conversations about our relationship to the word resilience. Resilience is a is a deeply contested word and a lot of you know different kind of corners of particularly sort of academic debate but also spilling out beyond scholarship. It's a controversial term in part because the term has been embraced by an enormously wide set of actors, and in some cases, it's been used to justify certain kinds of governance practices that can be really regressive, right. So rightfully, some critical scholars have said resilience is really just an excuse for saying the state isn't responsible and we're going to put all the responsibility of adjusting to and adapting to and responding to climate change and other threats on to communities and individuals. People refer to this as a kind of neoliberalization of risk or privatization of risk.
And other people have said, you know, resilience is just, it's just so malleable. It's just such a wide term. It can mean anything to anyone. And so there have been very valid critiques of the way this term has been mobilized. In the end we chose to use the word to embrace it, but not at all in a kind of in an unthinking way. We really spent quite a lot of time grappling with those debates and those criticisms and we come to the place that some many other scholars have also recently come to, which is to say that there are valid critiques. Yes, this word has been used in ways that can be destructive or regressive, but there also is a tremendous power in the embrace of the term, in part because a lot of communities have embraced the word, and because it ties us to a sort of lineage of other thinking and scholarship. And so we wanted to kind of step into that conversation and say we see real transformative and even kind of liberatory potential in this concept. And we want to sketch out the terms on which we think this idea of resilience can be really powerful framing concept in normative aim, and so that was that was the aim and the goal of kind of staying with resilience and not jumping on the bandwagon of you know immediately upon hearing the word pitching a fit about this.
Lawrence Vale
Yeah, I mean I think that that's the key thing is that we were trying to selectively rehabilitate aspects of the term by asking, what if we looked more holistically at what resilience could mean and what if we focused it on equity, and I think one of the things that we were really trying to do here is to take the conversation about resilience beyond the environment focus and beyond the explicit effort to only focus on the vulnerability of residents to say something about how they were vulnerabilized in the first place in terms of why they were in the places they were in. And that meant trying to understand the dimensions of resilience that are experienced differently by socioeconomically disadvantaged people exposed to environmental risks and stresses, but then to really insist that it goes to the other dimensions of our framework, not everything like the 22 categories that the 100 resilient cities folks at Rockefeller and ARUP were doing that sort of flattened it and do lots of good things, but to say, OK, let's start with the environment and then to say that if you're reducing climate risk and improving hazard literacy and strengthening ecosystem health, that's all essential but it doesn't do enough to benefit disadvantaged groups unless they have the security to resist displacement so that gets us into questions of security and then to be able to say, well, OK they now have the capacity to stay where they are with less environmental risk. But are they in the right place or if it's going to be lasting and equitable resilience, do they have the capacity for reliable and dignified livelihoods? So that then gets us into that set of questions, you know, all too much housing is safe and distant from employment.
That doesn't sound resilient. Finally, we were saying that it's not just secure housing and livelihoods in environmentally safe places, but really trying to figure out who exercises control over the development processes that get there. How legitimate that process is and who has a voice in how those communities are managed. So this is an effort to get to questions of governance and so once you have meaningful roles and capacity to have meaningful work in places where you're able to stay that are not dangerous to live in, then you have an ambition that truly warrants what we think equitable resilience can mean.
Emily
Thank you for that. So, each chapter really provides a lot of rich detail, supported by a range of qualitative and quantitative methods and framed carefully through the conceptual and applied frameworks of equity and resilience you lay out in the introduction. Did any case studies stand out as particularly memorable or meaningful?
Zachary Lamb
Maybe I'll start at the beginning with the first case in the book, which is a case called the Gentilly Resilience District in New Orleans. And this you know as I mentioned earlier, you know I'd come back to my academic career in part because of my experience in post Katrina New Orleans and trying to understand what the future of that city looked like and how the city was or was not effectively grappling with its vulnerability and its inequalities. And so, this Gentilly Resilience District was and is an ongoing effort in the city to kind of rethink the relationship between urbanization and water in New Orleans, and a really ambitious effort and it was a fascinating one to dig into. I knew a little bit about the case, and I knew a lot about the contacts from my previous research and my previous professional experience in the city. But to really dig into this ongoing effort, you know, when we were doing the work in the book, we were about six years into that effort, but it was, you know, 5 or 6 years after the city had gotten a big federal grant and we were talking to lots of folks across different dimensions of this project, from city officials to design and planning professionals to community groups, and to see where they were getting traction, where they were able to make progress and where things had kind of run aground was really illuminating and to really and I think that's one of the important things about the cases in the book to recognize is that we're while we were on the hunt for and found what we think are 12 really interesting partial successes, part of what makes them useful and interesting and cases that we can learn from is both where they've gotten traction, where they've really struggled to build solidarities, where they have made real tangible progress and also where they haven't, you know, where things have gotten held up or fallen backwards and in the case of New Orleans it was a case where there was a mayoral transition in the middle of this process and that had sort of slowed down the implementation. And then there was fundamentally just one of the things that became clear over the course of studying this this case was that it is much easier to implement a kind of infrastructural change on the ground than it is to reform the institutions that underlie and are linked to those infrastructures, right? So just briefly to mention, so in New Orleans, you know, there's been about a century of investment and construction of both physical infrastructures like levees and pumps and mechanical drainage, and the institutions that wrap around those infrastructures that operate those drains that make sure those levees are, you know, functional and holding back the water, and the Gentilly Resilience District was an effort to reimagine those infrastructures, to use what is often referred to as green infrastructures, which are kind of landscape embedded ways to hold water in the city rather than ejecting it out of the city as quickly as possible.
And what we were seeing was that things were moving along, in some cases reasonably well on some of these efforts to design new infrastructures, but there really wasn't much of a sense of how this was going to work institutionally, how the sewage and water board, who was responsible for those giant pumps, and how the levee board was responsible for those concrete walls and earthen levees, how are they going to change their stripes to be able to become green infrastructure institutions?
And so we had some really great conversations and interviews with folks across the spectrum there that that kind of brought to light the disconnect between the kind of design competition, vision for restructuring a city and the hard long term work of remaking institutions to match those changes in physical form.
Lawrence Vale
For me the second case in the book, very different from the New Orleans one, is in Sao Paulo, Brazil, a favela known as Paraisópolis that I had visited in 2012 and seen both the operations of the favela itself with community members, but also visited this adjacent, nearly completed set of large modernist condominium projects intended to rehouse some of the favela dwellers who had been seen as living in the most vulnerabilized portions of it, particularly landslide prone areas and flood prone areas, and so the question kind of revisiting it was you know, how well does this actually work? Does this improve environmental conditions? Does it enable people to keep livelihoods in the adjacent favela; do they have a level of security of tenure? Do they have some sense that they share in the self-governance of the place and are involved in the management of? And the reason I picked this out, is not because they succeeded in all of these dimensions, but because the quest to figure out how do we study a place like that was very interesting. We had access to government officials who were planning the policy as well as architects and planners who were involved. But the thing that really made it work was through a Brazilian based professor, we were able to track down a woman who spoke no English, who grew up and still lived in the favela, but had taken time out to go to architecture school and then returned and she was able to do a lot of the on the ground interviews in Portuguese, and then we found two students at MIT that were Portuguese fluent and one of them about to leave for a Fulbright in Brazil, who were able to really turn the insights of a person who spoke no English into material that we could work with so that we could feel that we had the voices of people undergoing this experience, not just the voices of the experts and the people who were leading it, and so that kind of thing, I think mattered a lot for it.
Emily
12 case studies, not to mention the potential two hundred that you pulled from, is a major undertaking even for co-authors. How did you navigate this, practically speaking?
Larry Vale
We were trying to do a book in eight countries that had material collected in nine languages and without spending a lot of time and money on airplane flights to distant places in ways that were kind of exactly the opposite of what you would want to do for a project focused on climate crisis, we were able to leverage networks in situ where we could get the people who were more likely to really gain the trust of local communities and speak to the people in the local languages. And so when we say we had a team of research assistants that mattered, the current students and the alums from both MIT and Cal were really vital partners in this, and the thoughtfulness of their write-ups and contributions really come through on every page, as does the graphic talents that were deployed by some of them to help us visualize what we were writing about.
Emily
And what was it like, co-authoring a book together?
Lawrence Vale
I would underscore what a pleasure it has been to work with Zach on this project. Your question earlier about collaboration made me made me wonder, whether if we if we tried this experiment. I don't know whether Zach, whether you've done this or not, but I haven't asked anybody please read these 12 cases and guess which six of them started with a Larry draft versus a Zach draft. But I'm guessing that even our spouses would probably have trouble guessing. I've done a dozen books before. This is the first time I've ever co-authored a book, and for me it allowed a level of consciousness about how I write because I was working with someone who did have more of a focus on structure and outlining in advance of chapters than I probably had done, whereas I probably approached, you know more from, let's get the story out and let's quote a lot from the people that we talked to and learn from, and as we edited each other's drafts, it seems to me that we found common ground to try to be as engaging as possible. We wanted this to be readable for people who wanted to get into arcane internal debates about the politics of resilience as a term, but also people who were on the ground working on difficult problems, who wanted to see how others had handled that complexity, and to do that means writing clearly and being open to as many perspectives as possible in others, and I think in our writing process open to the way that each of us approached each of these cases.
Zachary Lamb
Yeah, I'll second that to say it was a real pleasure to get to, to trust a co-author as thoroughly as I trust Larry to with my words and to have that process of knowing that when I when I sent him a draft, it was going to come back better and that he would understand what I was trying to do, you know, so we really, we did build a real understanding of each other as writers, as thinkers through the process of writing the book. And that was an amazing experience and pleasure to do. I think in the end I sometimes have to kind of remember if I was the primary drafter on a chapter or reviewer. I can't always remember when I look back at the text now. So, I think that's probably a mark of some kind of success.
Lawrence Vale
And after 12 years, we're still friends.
Emily
My thanks to Zach Lamb and Larry Vale, authors of The Equitably Resilient City from MIT Press, which is available open-access. You can find a link to the book in our show notes.
You’ve been listening to UAR Remixed, a podcast by Urban Affairs Review. Special thanks to Drexel University and the editors at UAR. Music is by Blue Dot Sessions. This show was mixed and produced by Aidan McLaughlin and written and produced by me, Emily Holloway. You can find us on Bluesky at @urbanaffairsreview.bsky.social for updates on the journal and the show. Please rate, review, and subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.