FireCity FireLand: Towards a Regenerative Urbanism

FIRECITY FIRELAND: TOWARDS REGENERATIVE URBANISM
The publication exhibits three years of research, architecture, and urban design examining the historical and future relationship between the built environment and California wildfires. While urban fabric expands the wildland-urban-interface further into wildfire territory, the intensity and frequency of wildfires continue to increase. FireCity FireLand collates observations, research studies, and projects from a panel of expert professionals and academicians examining wildfires and other natural hazards around the world, with ambitious student proposals envisioning a future condition in which natural and artificial environments symbiotically coexist.

WHAT IS REGENERATIVE URBANISM
Regenerative Urbanism* is an aspirational term that encourages the reframing of conventional urban design and planning techniques through contemporary models more dynamic, more elastic, and more faceted than conventional static plan-based ones. A catalyst for a holistic, evolutionary approach to metropolitan development – in this instance one focused on risk management and resilience in the face of natural disasters like fire – it underlines an approach that synchronizes and synthesizes information flows through simulation and forecasting of multiplex forces within an ever-developing intelligence network.

Always learning, the targets and outcomes of Regenerative Urbanism resonate with the research concerns of developmental neuroscience. Analogous to the nervous systems of complex organisms and their pathologies, regenerative urban morphologies and behaviors are conceived with anticipatory views toward adaptability, flexibility, and mutation. Physiologically, the organizational components and systemic, structural interrelationships of Regenerative Urbanism aspire to operate with a similar attitude to martial arts, particularly those that mobilize soft and malleable techniques of absorption and redistribution as a response, or even as a preemptive avoidance, of the hard impact of external forces.

Soon to be tested at the fiery interfaces between nature and artifice, between ungovernable wilderness and governable constructs, the combinatory design and planning techniques of a Regenerative Urbanism will flicker between software and hardware. As information in formations, our applied research on Regenerative Urbanism will reinvigorate visionary ideas of and influences on urban design from cybernetics to Metabolism.

‘FIRE’ AS LOCAL CONTEXT
The Los Angeles Metropolitan Region is naturally predisposed for wildfire activity with its abundance of dry fuels in chaparral and woodland ecosystems, hot and dry Mediterranean climate, and rugged topography in and around the region’s multiple mountain ranges. The Santa Ana Winds also contribute to the particularly explosive nature of fires in Los Angeles. These basic components of wildfire ecology are exacerbated by climate change, which has contributed to drought conditions and above-average temperatures in the entire state. The history of wildfires in Los Angeles has been dangerous since the beginning, starting with the Griffith Park Brush Fire in 1933 that was the deadliest in the state until the 2018 Camp Fire in Paradise. Since then there have been an estimated 60 large wildfire events in the Los Angeles Metropolitan Region. Their frequency has increased since the turn of this century, where three or more major wildfires occur every year. Wildfires cause damage to residences (typically single-family homes), commercial buildings, and infrastructure such as highways and power systems. Human activity causes the majority of wildfires. Recent significant wildfires in the Los Angeles Metropolitan Region, including the Woolsey, Saddle Ridge, and Getty Fires, were started by power lines or other electrical infrastructure. Wildfires have societal consequences, including loss of life and the disruption of social processes. They also expose and exacerbate existing social and economic inequities, such as the vulnerabilities of poorer and rural neighborhoods lacking infrastructure, and the threats to domestic and essential labor working in evacuation zones.

In pursuit of Regenerative Urbanism as part of the ArcDR3 initiative, UCLA A.UD will lead simultaneous synergistic design research studios, focused on the twin topic of fire-risk-reduction and fire-resilience, at Perloff Hall and the IDEAS campus. These synergies will also form and be informed by interdisciplinary collaborations on campus with other UCLA departments including Engineering and Planning as well as with 11universities participating in the ArcDR3 initiative. With a focus on the fire-risk-reduction and fire-resilience, both at Wildlife Urban Interfaces (WUIs) and within interstitial multi-hazard zones within the Metropolitan Los Angeles region, design research studios will contribute a vital array of design visions and knowledge to the ArcDR3 initiative and help to establish the conceptual framework of Regenerative Urbanism.

In adopting and modifying the global ArcDR3 Grand Syllabus to the Los Angeles regional context, and engaging with relevant authorities and experts both within the UCLA community and beyond, the studios will operate as a combined think tank whose culminating projects will be shared and discussed at international conferences, displayed in international exhibitions, and disseminated through globally accessible publications.

Although the recent destructive fires burning millions of acres of CA forest have captured the headlines, the greater more sober reality is that fires will have a lasting effect on California urban life. This growing fire problem in what is called the wildland-urban-interface will plague state and municipal leaders for the foreseeable future (Agee, 2006, 12).

Fire is a complex physical phenomenon that affects a larger ecosystem. The nature of a fire is a function of the local topographical conditions, the air temperature and humidity, wind speed and direction, level of precipitation, soil and vegetation types. All of these play a role in its spread rate and area, compromising the greater ecosystem, including the
area’s water quality and quantity, soil stability and erosion, and plant and animal mortality (Sugihara and Barbour, 2006).

Firefighting is a technical issue, but also a social, economic and political one. The institutional realities of reducing the occurrence and spread of fire include the fact that: much of the affected land is owned by a combination of federal, state, and county governments who must coordinate their fire fighting and management resources. There are jurisdictional differences in zoning policies that determine what and where buildings are constructed. The insurability of property will have a great impact in the years to come as fires are more frequent and intense along WUIs. The number of agents involved in the controversy is so great that the big picture of the “ecosystem” needs to be updated. Just as architecture is a technical pursuit that shapes social, economic, and political life, we will look at fire in both its technical dimension and its impact on civic life. Witnessing before us the consequences of the climate crisis on the lands we inhabit, we will explore the effects of fire on the multi-agent ecosystem of Greater Los Angeles, including natural resources, geography, human social networks, laws and codes, and nonhuman inhabitants.

Read FireCity FireLand: Towards a Regenerative Urbanism here.