Beyond Environmental Stewardship: Resilience Labor and Just Transitions

Keywords: resilience, labor, nature-based design
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Sunday
Session Start / End Time: 2/27/2022 09:40 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/27/2022 11:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 17

Abstract

Appeals to environmental stewardship are a seemingly required element in resilience plans and proposals that provide cities, regions, and the public roadmaps for mitigating the effects of extreme and unpredictable weather events. Essential to these proposals, authored by landscape architects, designers, and planners, are nature-based responses that envision resilient futures which reinstate hidden ecosystems that were once there, now newly envisioned. But what of the maintenance of these mitigating new ecosystems? Putting aside debates on the efficacy of nature-based resilience proposals, we ought to start paying attention to who is expected to maintain these new landscapes, what the training for such maintenance entails, and of how stewardship is served up as a potential answer to the question of resilience labor.

In this research I examine the Resilience by Design project that took place in 2018 in California’s Bay Area as one instance of a design process that implicitly foregrounded stewardship, and question the implicit demands on labor by the communities the proposals were meant to serve. As resilience plans and proposals increasingly reference or outright promote stewardship of local environmental features, they also fail to allow the question of labor to complicate what such stewardship entails. The labor to maintain resilient landscapes, what I refer to as resilience labor, is an implicit part of the expansive set of nature-based solutions, ecosystem restoration projects, and soft or green infrastructures that dominate resilience proposals, and should therefore also drive discussions on envisioning just transitions.