Vancouver’s Stanley park stands out as a green oasis in a heavily urban cityscape. In 1888, Vancouver had the foresight to preserve the 400-hectare park, which now serves as an invaluable natural resource. Vancouver is one of the top livable cities in the world, and it continues to forge a sustainable path. The city’s comprehensive Greenest City Initiative aims to make it the most sustainable city by 2020. But Vancouver is an outlier: most coastal cities struggle to become resilient as they confront climate change.
Voula P. Mega’s book, Conscious Coastal Cities: Sustainability, Blue Green Growth, and The Politics of Imagination, seeks to answer what sustainability and resilience mean for coastal cities in the 21st century. Coastal cities face an uphill battle towards resilience, but solutions lie in cities’ very existence as centers of human creativity, environmental assets, and economic growth. When faced with environmental, economic, and social threats, resilient coastal cities encounter less damage and bounce back, avoiding long-lasting negative impacts.
Human activities like overfishing, polluting, and building on wetlands inhibit the proper functioning of the ocean’s ecosystems, creating conflict between cities and the sea. While the ocean can benefit coastal cities through a number of ecosystem services, like providing food and even protecting coasts, conflict puts humans at risk.
Coastal cities have a strained and often destructive relationship with the sea. New Orleans models the conflicts that exist at the interface of sea and city. By draining coastal wetlands and creating an artificial flood management system with levees, New Orleans compromised coastal ecosystems, destroying the coast’s natural ability to stave off flooding. Streets flood with every downpour, and more extreme weather events pose immense risk. In 2004, Hurricane Katrina left 80% of the city underwater and devastated communities. New Orleans isn’t alone. In coastal cities around the world, rising seas and stronger storms increasingly overwhelm the protective capacities of damaged ecosystems and ill-implemented engineering.
Conscious Coastal Cities confronts this destructive reality, and helps readers imagine an alternative future in which coastal cities and the sea exist in tandem and relative harmony.
Mega formulates a layered and illustrative vision of what coastal cities are, which she uses to show how they can become resilient. Coastal cities represent the most complex human ecosystems on Earth, which gives them the potential to provide citizens fulfilled, healthy, and balanced lives. As Mega puts it “each coastal city is a public good.” At the edge of sea and land, coastal cities are gateways for the movement of people, goods, and ideas.
Coastal cities exist at the interface of marine and terrestrial environments. In order to become resilient, cities must strive for symbiosis between land and sea. Symbiosis, as Mega uses the term, means eliminating conflicts between human activities and the sea’s complex ecosystems. If properly managed, the relationship between sea and city can be mutually beneficial, becoming truly symbiotic.
Mega acknowledges that “symbiosis with the sea can be challenging,” especially as climate change creates uncertainty and instability. She is realistic about the current state of coastal city environments, acknowledging the many conflicts between human activity and the sea.
A view from Vancouver’s Stanley Park. Blue-green spaces like this can contribute to human wellbeing, as well as the health of local marine ecosystems.
The strategy of “blue green” growth provides a route towards symbiosis and resilience. Blue green growth means ensuring sustainable economic growth and development while recognizing the ocean’s central role in coastal cities. In Denmark, the “Building with Nature” plan involved the restoration of natural estuaries and tides to prevent flooding. This soft engineering solution works with nature to improve resilience. It recognizes the need for nature-based strategies, not just hard-engineered implements like floodwalls. Blue green growth requires the sustainable management of fisheries and other ocean resources. In 2013, 39% of Mediterranean fish stocks were overfished, versus 94% in 2005, indicating a more sustainable, blue-green fishing economy.
Conscious Coastal Cities takes a comprehensive look at sustainability and resilience in coastal cities. Mega covers topics from migration to renewable energy to preparing for sea level rise. While the book’s breadth illustrates the many aspects of coastal resilience, sometimes her writing style and lack of a geographic focus (other than an overall Euro-centric take) don’t create for the most readable book. At times, the many examples she provides begin to lose meaning after continually proving the same point.
But even if the reader doesn’t savor every last word and detail, the book is ripe with information and ideas, and its conceptualization of coastal cities and comprehensive approach to creating resilience have much to offer. A vision of a dynamic, mutually beneficial interface between city and sea transpires.
Mega makes clear that access to the ocean can actually promise coastal cities a resilient future, not a death sentence. Cities must find creative ways to eliminate conflicts between human activities and the sea, bolstering the ocean’s ecosystem services and creating resilience. If cities foster a symbiotic relationship with the sea, with all its ecological complexities, a resilient future is not too difficult to imagine.