Student: Curtis Hall
Graduation date: May 2020
Type: Concentration (single major)
Date approved: November 2017
Go to concentration landing page
Summary
Walking through downtown Christchurch this past summer was somewhat of a revelation for me. Having been absolutely devastated by the 2011 Canterbury earthquake, the downtown was in various states of disrepair. This was nowhere more apparent than along the banks of the Avon river, where the quake had caused the river to flood huge swathes of the surrounding city. While I watched the construction workers as they worked on parts of the bank, I was hit with how both how this damage could have been minimized, as well as what is the best way for the city to move forward with the relative blank canvas of their rebuilding river. The earthquake may have destroyed how the city made the river originally, but it allowed for the city to re-evaluate what they wanted to do with the river than ran through it.
First, it is important to provide a brief explanation of some of the terminology that I use. Resilience is defined as “the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and reorganize while undergoing change so as to still retain essentially the same function, structure, identity, and feedbacks” (Walker et al. 2006). To be resilient would mean that an area of urban hydrology could be impacted by a disaster and still retain its function to the city and balance the feedback of the surrounding water to reduce the added damage caused by the compromised hydrology. In a similar vein, Shields defines rehabilitation as “the return of a degraded stream ecosystem to a close approximation of its remaining natural potential” (Shields et al. 2003). This definition of rehabilitation allows for things like engineering alterations, such as river channel reconstruction, to help return an area to a close approximation of its natural state (Simsek et al. 2012). Rehabilitation can be used after a disaster to implement engineering works in order to fix the damaged hydrology.
There’s no question that urbanization is increasing, and because of the increase more and more areas of freshwater will be used by cities of varying size, as freshwater is a core resource for cities (Zhu 2015). With this increasing use of freshwater, it is incredibly important to develop ways to both prevent damage when disasters strike, and properly fix damage that disasters cause. For example, floods are one of the most deadly and impactful disasters in the world and tie in directly with an urban area’s hydrology (Tingsanchali 2011). This means that finding ways to prevent flooding disasters through a cities hydrology is important to stop these floodings, and rehabilitating any damage to the cities freshwater is crucial to stopping more flooding. It’s not just flooding either. As mentioned briefly above, earthquakes can have a dramatic impact on urban hydrology. Not only do earthquakes damage the surrounding city where they hit, they also greatly damage the surrounding hydrology and any surface freshwater in the city. Take for example the previously mentioned Canterbury earthquake. The earthquake did massive damage to the banks of the Avon and caused huge flooding, exacerbating the damage of the earthquake (Cubrinovski et al. 2012). In addition, the damage is rarely confined to a single area like the banks of the Avon. The Canterbury earthquake also did massive damage to the surrounding hydrology of the floodplains in and around Christchurch, causing shifts in ground level and massive liquefaction (Zeldis et al. 2011). There is obviously no way to fully prevent this damage to urban hydrology caused by disasters, but properly building resilience would go a long way to greatly reduce the amount of devastation that is often amplified by urban hydrology in these situations.
Sources
Cubrinovski, M, K Robinson, M Taylor, M Hughes, and R Orense. 2012. “Lateral Spreading and Its Impacts in Urban Areas in the 2010–2011 Christchurch Earthquakes.” New Zealand Journal of Geology & Geophysics 55 (3): 255–69. doi:10.1080/00288306.2012.699895.
Shields, F. Douglas, Ronald R. Copeland, Peter C. Klingeman, Martin W. Doyle, and Andrew Simon. 2003. “Design for Stream Restoration.” Journal of Hydraulic Engineering 129 (8): 575.
Simsek, Gul. 2012. “Urban River Rehabilitation as an Integrative Part of Sustainable Urban Water Systems.” 48th ISOCARP Congress.
Tingsanchali, T. 2011. “Urban Flood Disaster Management”. Procedia Engineering.
Walker B. H., Salt D. 2006. Resilience Thinking: Sustaining Ecosystems and People in a Changing World. Washington (DC): Island Press.
Zeldis, John, Jen Skilton, Paul South, and Dave Schiel. 2011. Effects of the Canterbury Earthquakes on Avon-Heathcote Estuary / Ihutai Ecology.
Zhu, Xueqin. 2015. “Economics of Water Management – Environmental Science – Oxford Bibliographies – Obo.”
Questions
- Descriptive:
How do different types of disasters impact urban water?
How do resilience efforts impact urban water differently than rehabilitation efforts?
- Explanatory:
Why don’t urban waterways have more built-in protection from disasters?
How do resilience efforts change based on locations?
- Evaluative:
How much priority should there be to fund resilience efforts?
If resilience is more important than rehabilitation, how and why is it more important?
- Instrumental
What are the best ways to build resilience in urban waterways?
What are the best ways to rehab urban waterways after a disaster?
Concentration courses
- ENVS 311 (Unnatural Disasters, 4), Spring 2018. Gaining a better understanding of "natural" disasters and how they interact with humans, related to concentration around disasters and urban water.
- ENVS 460 (Topics in Environmental Law and Policy, 4), Fall 2019. Information about how law helps shape environmental issues, specifically water law.
- ENVS 499 (Independent Study, 4), Fall 2018 2 credits, Fall 2019 2 credits. Concentration related research around anticipated Australia trip spring 2019.
- GEOL 280 (The Fundamentals of Hydrology, 5), Fall 2019. Gaining a better understanding of hydrological functions, important for concentration surrounding urban water.
- SOAN 282 (Pacific Rim Cities, 4), Fall 2019. Examines urban life and planning, good to know for the urban part of my concentration.
Arts and humanities courses
- PHIL 215 (Philosophy and the Environment, 4 credits). Pre-approved A&H course; no justification required.
- HIST 239 (Constructing the American Landscape, 4), How environments get changes by different factors, from economic growth to technology