School of Urban Planning, McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada.
School of Planning, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, Canada.
PLoS One. 2023 Jun 23;18(6):e0287364. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0287364. eCollection 2023.
The uncertainty of climate change's impacts hinders adaptation actions, particularly micro-scale urban design interventions. This paper proposes a sixfold urban design framework to assess and enhance the resilience of urban form to climate change, where urban form refers to the patterns of streets, buildings, and land uses. The framework is then applied to Long Bay in Negril, Jamaica-a coastal area that incorporates the complex interactions between urbanization and a highly vulnerable socio-ecological system to climate change-related hazards, primarily sea-level rise. Empirical evidence from 19 in-depth interviews with planning and design professionals and development actors, in situ observations, and morphological analyses reveal that Long Bay's current adaptation strategies heavily rely on bounce-back resilience measures that predominantly consider the impacts of extreme climatic events rather than slow-onset ones. Such strategies abet current tourism-driven development patterns while overlooking Long Bay's inherent abilities for generative transformation and incremental changes to meet climatic uncertainty. Instead, this study's findings highlight how generative urban form transformation would better equip Long Bay to cope with future uncertainty-climatic or other.
气候变化影响的不确定性阻碍了适应行动，特别是微观尺度的城市设计干预。本文提出了一个六重城市设计框架，以评估和增强城市形态对气候变化的适应能力，其中城市形态是指街道、建筑物和土地利用的模式。然后，该框架被应用于牙买加内格里尔的长湾——一个沿海地区，它包含了城市化和高度脆弱的社会-生态系统与气候变化相关灾害（主要是海平面上升）之间的复杂相互作用。来自 19 名规划和设计专业人员和发展参与者的深入访谈、实地观察和形态分析的实证证据表明，长湾目前的适应策略严重依赖于反弹弹性措施，这些措施主要考虑极端气候事件的影响，而不是缓慢发生的事件。这些策略助长了当前以旅游为导向的发展模式，而忽视了长湾自身的生成性转型和渐进式变化的能力，以应对气候不确定性。相反，本研究的结果强调了生成性城市形态转型将如何更好地使长湾能够应对未来的不确定性——无论是气候方面的还是其他方面的。
