The stories they tell Artifacts from the National September 11 Memorial Museum : a journey of remembrance

#+ |9781610913805 ~ Like politics, all disasters are " local. For Washburn, the chief urban designer at New York's ^ Department of City Planning, * the ruination inflicted by Hurricane Sandy was intensely personal. He watched helplessly as the deluge overwhelmed his house in Red Hook, a low-lying neighborhood on the Brooklyn waterfront. Out of that calamity rose this cri de coeur for action by cities, New York surely included, to steel themselves for the storm next time. Mitigation and adaptation are the key, Washburn says. The first means keeping climate change from worsening, the second easing the pain from dislocations already incurred. Washburn lays out strategies tried by a few cities - places as disparate as Seoul, Hamburg, Singapore and Nairobi - illustrating them with photographs that, in many instances, he himself took. For neighborhoods at risk in his hometown, he doesn't charter a specific plan for resilience so much as make clear that measures must be taken, and soon. This book may appeal more to students of urban policy than to general readers. There is a fair amount of theory (along with an unfortunate tendency toward repetitiveness). But Washburn, no stranger to municipal warfare, is a realist: Urban design goes nowhere without political and financial support, and bringing all those elements into alignment can be "like stuffing three cats into a bag." Yet the stuffing must begin. Speaking for his Red Hook neighbors, but also for all those living in coastal cities, he says they have to be liberated from the fear that they are no more able to withstand the next Sandy than is "an afternoon's sand castle."