Building Resilient Communities Through Conservation

Trudi Sandmeier [00:08]: Hello, this is Save As, a podcast that glimpses the future of heritage conservation through the work of graduate students at the University of Southern California. I’m Trudi Sandmeier.

Cindy Olnick [00:19]: And I’m Cindy Olnick. Trudi, today’s episode could not be more relevant right now. 

Trudi Sandmeier [00:27]: I know. We’re going to hear from recent graduate Kelsey Kaline Neighbors, whose master’s thesis explored heritage conservation as a tool for urban resilience.

Cindy Olnick [00:35]: Which is…

Trudi Sandmeier [00:38]: Well, here’s one way to think about it. Urban resilience is the idea that in the case of a natural disaster, a crisis, a man-made disaster, we need to have a plan about how to recover, and what are the things that are important. And, so, the idea that we can have this really comprehensive plan in place to deal with any kind of crisis is really important. And it’s something that people are working with all over the world right now, to come up with these plans. Kelsey’s point is that historic sites and important places in communities are cultural touchstones.

Cindy Olnick [01:21]: In addition to saving these places, we can use them as tools for helping the community heal, because in times of stress, people want comfort, and they want familiarity, and they want identity, and these places really serve that need in communities.

Trudi Sandmeier [01:37]: Absolutely. They’re cultural touchstones and we can all think of a place that in the case of a hurricane or an earthquake, that our heart would be broken if these places were gone or we couldn’t in some way get to them. And, so what are those kinds of places and how do we protect them in advance. And think about them as a part of this whole conversation about what are the important places in our communities that we want to have on the other side of some sort of crisis.

Cindy Olnick [02:10]: Well, I tell you, not only do we have plenty of crises at the moment, but the field, as many of our listeners know, is grappling with this issue of relevance and I think this topic of Kelsey’s really ties to that really well. So, let’s get to it. Here’s producer Willa Seidenberg with Kelsey Kaline Neighbors. Take it away, Willa!

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Willa Seidenberg [02:35]: So, before we do anything, can you define what you mean by urban resilience?

Kelsey Kaline [02:43]: Urban resilience is the ability of people and communities and really any whole system to survive, adapt and grow no matter what is thrown at it.  So, what kinds of chronic stresses and acute shocks that cities or communities may experience.

Willa Seidenberg [03:01]: Okay, so you talk about shocks and stressors in your thesis. What are the characteristics of both of them?

Kelsey Kaline [03:09]: Sure, so a shock is an event that happens to a community. And I typically kind of list these as, it’s the earthquake, it’s the wildfire. It’s the thing that kind of comes out of the blue and you might be aware that there’s a risk for it, but it completely disrupts what’s going on. So, the explosion in Beirut was an example of a shock. The Northridge earthquake in ’94 was a shock. So these kinds of big events that you can kind of list a before and an after, that is something that would be considered a shock. A stress on the other hand is kind of more of a long-term disruption that kind of weakens a system within a city. So, oftentimes this can be homelessness or raising temperatures or income inequality. These are all things that kind of wear down the systems of a city and make it more vulnerable to disruptions.

So, both shocks and stresses can have rippling effects across various interconnected systems of a city, which risks failure of functionality at different levels. So, a good example would be, if we build up a bunch of undeveloped land in a flood plain or on a hillside, all of a sudden you’re risking erosion, mudslides, large flooding events, demolition of existing historic resources, et cetera, that increases population, that puts pressure on your water system, that puts pressure on your education system and your roadways. So all of a sudden you just have one small change, as in I’m going to develop this floodplain and then all of a sudden it has these kind of wide-ranging impacts that one shock or a stress can kind of have an impact on. So, I often say that the main threat to urban resiliency or resiliency in general comes from climate change, urbanization, general population growth, and then increasing natural disasters.

Willa Seidenberg [05:24]: Have you found that it’s not as common to have heritage planning as part of the resilience planning in cities?

Kelsey Kaline [05:36]: When heritage is discussed in existing resilience plans or planning documents, it’s typically in a way of like, how do we prevent this place from getting knocked down in an earthquake or this historic port potentially may flood during climate change. We don’t really ever bring people into the conversation who are heritage professionals or whose work revolves around more of the community side of heritage. So I saw an opportunity to talk about how heritage can actually be a proactive, beneficial tool to cities and not just something that needs to be protected. So, a more proactive instead of reactive use of heritage within resilience.

Willa Seidenberg [06:25]: Do you sense that among people who are doing this kind of work, the resilience planning in cities all over the world, I guess, that there is an openness to including heritage as part of the plan?

Kelsey Kaline [06:40]: I think so. So my thesis advisor, Marissa [Aho] is now the chief resilience officer in Houston and throughout our correspondence, talking about my thesis, it kind of spurred conversation of who else can we bring to the table? So with resilience, a lot of what you talk about in a lot of the pre-planning that goes into creating resilience, at least from a policy level, is how do we ensure there’s redundancies? How do we ensure that these systems, which are interconnected, are planned for with every, kind of, different facet that goes into it?

So, you know, it’s not just our electricity grid, it’s, I don’t even know like there’s many different interconnected systems. So, how do we make sure that everyone is at the table? And what we often miss in resilience planning is actually bringing kind of the heart of communities, which maybe it’s the small business owners or it’s the legacy businesses or the people who own the 150-year-old house museum, some of these kind of places that people relate to and feel like is part of their community, we don’t really include them in the conversations around how do we react to a disaster. How do we bounce back from it? Or how do we ensure that our community comes back stronger? 

Willa Seidenberg [08:03]: What are some of the advantages of including those kinds of people in, in a resilience plan for a city that is looking at how to respond to disasters?

Kelsey Kaline [08:15]: The biggest thing I found is that encouraging heritage conservation increases cultural values and identity, and actually increases social cohesion. So, rebuilding a sense of community after a shock or a stress is imperative because there’s this big event that happened, or maybe it’s this long-term event that happened, economic instability or a pandemic. So what can we do to continue to foster a sense of community, and networks established through the use of heritage or its conservation can actually provide support and access to further community resources. Not only that, but heritage actually brings people together through shared values, memories, so, our cultural values and identity underlie the decisions that are made in the face of risk and aftermath of disasters or kind of long-term stresses.

So, cultural values, through instilling pride and identity in place, also inspire community members to take action. It’s the reason that Notre Dame raised enough money to rebuild only a few days after its fire. You often see struggling legacy businesses who’ve been in business for a hundred years kind of rally a community behind them and stay afloat for another year or two until they can kind of figure out their finances. So where we can tap into conserving heritage and preserving these types of values can aid not only how we feel as a community and foster that strength, but it can actually encourage communication and recovery strategies that are based in other elements of disaster recovery.

Willa Seidenberg [10:04]: You mentioned in your thesis that the community often has what you call traditional knowledge that can help with disaster mitigation. Can you talk about what you mean by that?

Kelsey Kaline [10:16]: Yeah. So traditional knowledge doesn’t need some fancy academic definition. It really can just mean the learned history from a community. So with COVID-19 that’s happening. We can often relate things back to the 1918 Spanish flu. So how did our communities handle that? Here in San Diego my work has gone through some newspaper archives and found newspaper advertisements about businesses requiring mask wearing, all of the schools nearby moved their kind of education components outside for a year. I know in San Francisco, the city hall operations all took place outside. So kind of having this longer community memory can actually show us and guide us how to respond to disasters.

So oftentimes in academia, this kind of goes back to kind of like prehistory or some old indigenous knowledge rooted in place. A lot of work is coming out of New Zealand regarding some of their traditional knowledge. So, how do we react to the environment of our place? Oftentimes people, you know, they knew how to sustain their environments and, you know, not pollute or not be stressed out by drought or flooding or whatever the community is facing. So how do we remember that and move forward and kind of codify those types of traditional knowledge elements in our resilience planning?

Willa Seidenberg [11:53]: So I would imagine that cities and states and countries have forever done some kind of planning in the event that there is something unexpected that happens, but clearly in recent decades, we’ve had a lot more disasters and problems. So, you know, climate change has caused a lot because of increased fires, wildfires, hurricanes, but this movement about calling it resilience and having a structure, is that a more recent thing to the planning of trying to do disaster mitigation?

Kelsey Kaline [12:30]: Yeah. So as kind of like a field or an actual position, resilience planning, I would say, has kind of come up in the last decade or so. There was a big initiative by the Rockefeller Foundation called 100 Resilient Cities that was this worldwide initiative focused on, how do we create strong policies that can be translated to different locations and cities facing a variety of problems. I mean, San Diego is different than L.A., that’s different than, you know, San Francisco, it’s different than the East Coast. So how do we come up with and share best strategies for dealing with these problems that we know we all faced forever? There’s always been earthquakes, there’s always been wildfires, but I would say how we start to deal with our infrastructure in our information systems, in our buildings, we’ve started in the last decade or so to think about how we’re going to think about that from a policy perspective. So codifying it into codes and into kind of working groups, et cetera, is kind of a more recent development.

Willa Seidenberg [13:44]: How would you rate Los Angeles in doing planning for resiliency?

Kelsey Kaline [13:50]: It’s solid. Los Angeles, I am actually quite proud that I got to study under the chief resilience officer in Los Angeles. There’s always more that can be done, but the fact that there is an actual resilience plan is a huge step in the right direction. I mentioned 100 Resilient Cities. L.A. was one of those 100 resilient cities that did focus on having a chief resilience officer, in setting up working groups in an actual document that intended to look at resilience of Los Angeles.

But as I was doing my research and as I was writing my thesis, I just kept coming up with the missing link of heritage, and even in Los Angeles or kind of across the country or the world, really these strategies don’t often engage heritage. They might discuss it. It’s often discussed at like a UNESCO level, but more from an indirect perspective. So we need transformative action within resilience planning. So it’s not just individual behavioral change, but it’s innovation and infrastructure. And I just argue in my thesis that we need cultural considerations as well. So how do we include and prioritize historic and current cultural assets within our kind of change-oriented frameworks?

Willa Seidenberg [15:11]: Do you think the fact that we have in Los Angeles a city office of historic resources is an advantage to having people who are concerned with preservation and conservation part of the resilience planning?

Kelsey Kaline [15:30]: Yeah, I would say the biggest benefit of the city Office of Historic Preservation [Resources] within Los Angeles is that they have a solid understanding of what Los Angeles’s built heritage is. So with SurveyLA and the database that that created has made such a solid understanding and baseline of what exists within Los Angeles. And we go down a whole other rabbit hole of what cultural heritage Los Angeles has that we might not completely have a solid grasp on, but from a built typology understanding, SurveyLA and the City of Los Angeles is aware of what heritage resources exist. And from that, we can kind of start to gather what direct risks these heritage resources face. So, having a department and having staff that’s dedicated to the protection and use of historic resources, kind of gives a, I don’t know, already a seat at the table in resilience planning. So, how we start getting these people to kind of all come together is another question and something that, you know, we still need to talk about.

Willa Seidenberg [16:45]: And beyond that, are there other examples of partnerships that either exist or should exist in Los Angeles to further this kind of planning and protection of heritage?

Kelsey Kaline [17:00]: Yeah, I think there needs to be stronger communication just amongst, kind of people at the grassroots level. So people who are actually doing the work of maintaining cultural heritage, whether that’s a spokesperson for street vendors in Los Angeles or someone who does outreach for certain dance programs, or that’s kind of more that cultural heritage, but even, you know, museum managers or people who are architectural historians or are consultants, I think can bring a lot to the table with the research they have and the knowledge they have of their individual communities and the resources they advocate on behalf of.

Willa Seidenberg [17:46]: Was there anything in all of the research that you did for this thesis that really surprised you or was kind of, wow, that’s crazy. Was there anything that really stood out to you that was that kind of wow moment?

Kelsey Kaline [17:59]: For me, kind of the biggest lesson I learned, I’m not sure it was a wow moment, kind of crept up on me, but on an individual level, we are the primary actors shaping our community and the environment that we live in. So we are central to what is lost or saved or created within our community. So, if we think that heritage in these places and things that mean so much to us is vitally important to us, then we need to advocate for its longevity and we must work to make sure that it evolves with the community that we live in. So, through climate change, pandemics, et cetera, it’s up to us to make sure that these places exist and continue to exist. So I think honestly writing this thesis was a call to action for myself: how do we make sure that these places, how can I advocate on behalf of places and things that sometimes aren’t even tangible, how do we make sure that our neighbors and our kids and our, you know, the future of our community retains these things that make our places feel like ours.

Willa Seidenberg [19:12]: Given that we’re living through a pandemic and we’ve had big demonstrations around racial justice and we have a big political election coming up, so there’s a lot going on, how do you think the City will, and the country will be able to use some of the planning that they’ve done, or do you think that there’s a danger that some of this will go on the back burner because there’s so many other priorities?

Kelsey Kaline [19:40]: I don’t know why we can’t use heritage as a way to further a lot of these things that are priorities. So with the Black Lives Matter and racial justice movements, there has been a huge push for telling the full story and making sure that every member of the community, especially marginalized and minority members, have their histories told and from an unbiased perspective. So, you know, as we think towards the end of, I guess not even the end of the pandemic, but just moving forward, how do we make sure that all these voices are heard? Like, I’m not the right person to be telling you what parts of certain communities should be preserved or what shouldn’t. We need to make sure that we have those people who are actually boots on the ground living this, that their voices are heard.

So when we think about planning for the resilience and the future of a city, you know, making sure that all these voices are heard, and it’s not just an echo chamber of planning officials or government officials, but making sure that it’s what the community actually wants to see. So, within preservation that could mean, you know, toppling Confederate statues, or it could mean writing historic context statements for the African American community. How do we make sure that we plan for a lot of these systemic injustices and how we kind of start to fix that equity problem. And I think heritage can, should play a role in that.

Willa Seidenberg [21:19]: Do you have any advice for just ordinary people who are concerned about their city, about how they can be involved in these conversations, both about the resiliency planning and also making sure that heritage is a part of that planning?

Kelsey Kaline [21:38]: Yeah, there’s kind of different things you can do. So, a lot of my thesis focused on policy recommendations and to kind of be more involved in that, kind of get involved, whether it’s a neighborhood level or a city level, you know, write emails, show up to planning meetings, show up to community group meetings, kind of make sure that, you know, you are there saying, Hi, I’m a member of the public, I deserve to have my voice heard, and I don’t think we’re doing enough. You know, things like that can actually make a difference.

But other than that, it’s trying to focus on vulnerabilities within your community. Is there a local business that’s struggling? Is there a specific cultural landscape or a park or something that’s very special to our community, making sure that that is kind of upkept and kind of ensuring that those vulnerabilities are addressed. It’s also kind of finding and filling your own knowledge gaps of your community can also be really helpful. We don’t know what we want to preserve until we know it’s there. And on a general level, I think we need to support education and access to heritage resources, making sure that we all have equal access to museums and education and spaces that drive kind of that social cohesion and feeling of identity within our communities.

Willa Seidenberg [23:04]: And I would imagine that if you live in an area, say that’s prone to wildfires, if you know what kinds of historic resources might be in the path of a potential fire that you could focus your efforts on making sure that when or if the fires come that fire departments and city governments understand that that resource is something that needs to be prioritized.

Kelsey Kaline [23:31]: Sure. And, you know, we kind of start hitting some of these kind of fuzzy edges of existing preservation because I would also advocate that a lot of these places might topple in an earthquake or a wildfire or have some sort of issue. And we need to start focusing less on material integrity and more on what those places are symbolic of and what they kind of give to our community. So, ensuring that these places continue on, even if they are damaged or have to be rebuilt or restored kind of ensuring that the community rallies behind them and what they stand for.

I think we need to start listening to the people and to the history that is begging to be told. So how do we tell the full story and how do we learn from that in the future. So within the existing planning fields, you know, it’s kind of removing this idea that we know better, because we obviously don’t. There [are] always going to be community groups that we’re not fully incorporating, or histories we’re not telling, or a shock that we didn’t see coming. Like COVID-19. So making sure that we bring everyone to the table to ensure that our communities move forward and are better and stronger and just healthier.

Willa Seidenberg [25:11]: Did doing the research on the thesis make you hopeful or depressed about the state of our ability to do all of that?

Kelsey Kaline [25:21]: It made me determined. I know that we have the pieces and they’re on the table. We just need to make sure that they can be fit together. So how do we manipulate existing policies, existing community groups, existing working groups, existing planning documents to kind of reflect some of these things we’re learning, whether it’s the actual importance of community cohesion or how important feeling identity to a place and to others is. I think we all have learned that in this pandemic, that we want to feel like we belong, not only to a place, but to a community of people. So how do we make sure that we’re capturing that in planning for the future and in our recovery efforts from pandemic or whatever future shock it will be.

Willa Seidenberg  [26:22]: Thank you. This is really interesting.