Review
The Equitably Resilient City:
Solidarities and Struggles in the Face of Climate Crisis
REVIEW BY: PABLO MENINATO
May 2, 2025
During the first decades of the twentieth century, architecture and urbanism’s response to the needs of the most unprivileged segments of the population was focused on a single and semi-autonomous project: social housing. During this period, the principal aspiration of many architects, urban planners, administrators, and politicians was to provide dwellings for millions of people around the globe. Thus much of the professional and academic debate on equity focused on the merits and deficits of various realized social housing projects.
However, from the late twentieth century to the present, these disciplines have witnessed a paradigm shift in socially driven initiatives. Rather than fixating on social housing, contemporary design strategies encompass a broader array of interests, including environmental concerns, community engagement, infrastructure, and self-governance strategies. This expanded scope, in turn, demands an interdisciplinary approach, integrating not only architects and urbanists but also ecologists, sociologists, landscape designers, activists, anthropologists, lawyers, public health experts, and community leaders.
This evolving situation is skillfully examined in Zachary Lamb and Lawrence Vale’s The Equitably Resilient City: Solidarities and Struggles in the Face of Climate Crisis. The volume, composed of twelve chapters featuring compelling illustrations and diagrams by Mora Orensanz, surveys initiatives in twelve locations across the Global North and Global South: New Orleans, São Paulo, Paris, Houston, Cochabamba (Bolivia), Bangkok, Portland, Pune (India), Shenzhen (China), Thunder Valley (South Dakota), Nairobi (Kenya), and San Juan de Puerto Rico. To provide discursive coherence to such a variety of regions, economies, and political regimes, the authors identify four parameters to achieve more resilient and equitable communities: (1) environmental security and vitality; (2) security against displacement; (3) stable and dignified livelihoods; and (4) enhanced self-governance. These principles are framed as the four pillars of equitable resilience: Livelihoods, Environment, Governance, and Security (LEGS), against which the various urban interventions are analyzed.
Paradoxically, one of the book’s strengths can also be interpreted as a weakness. Unlike edited volumes with multiple contributors, most single-authored (or coauthored) manuscripts on socially driven projects tend to focus on specific cities or regions, allowing for more straightforward conclusions and recommendations. In contrast, Lamb and Vale propose a study that seeks to identify affinities and parallels across vastly different locations, climates, political contexts, and economic conditions, based on the parameters and guidelines previously mentioned. A key virtue of the text, therefore, lies in its ability to identify trends and challenges across seemingly unrelated experiences, many of which face surprisingly similar obstacles, problems, and ambitions.
One of the initiatives that best demonstrates the multifaceted approach focused on the work of the Kounkuey Design Initiative (KDI) in Kibera, the largest informal settlement in Nairobi, Kenya. KDI’s initiatives address a multiplicity of challenges, including adaptation to climate change, the scarcity of public spaces, and the lack of civic buildings. Their approach incorporates what they term Productive Public Space (PPS) projects—featuring markets, small business kiosks, savings and loan programs, childcare facilities, schools, health clinics, and women’s cooperatives. Additionally, to combat flooding exacerbated by climate change, KDI implements rain gardens, erosion control measures, and sanitation blocks that divert waste from Lamb and Vale’s analysis of KDI’s work bridges urban theory, history, ecology, and cultural and political analysis. Their examination underscores the necessity of a multidisciplinary approach to address such an array of multiple, diverse, and complex challenges.
The problems facing cities in the Global North are far different from those in the Global South, yet no less urgent. The Gentilly neighborhood of New Orleans, devastated by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, is the focal point of another chapter. Here, the Gentilly Resilience District (GRD) proposes investments in green infrastructure, public arts, and job training. The proposal included stormwater management and reintegration of water into the community’s urban fabric, featuring a network of levees, floodwalls, canals, and pumps. In the final portion of the chapter, the authors establish an assessment of the works carried out to date and possible outcomes, acknowledging that their execution will depend on multiple and varied factors and actors. Lamb and Vale critically assess the progress and potential outcomes of these efforts, noting challenges such as securing federal funding and addressing community concerns over tenure security and displacement.
While the authors highlight the positive side of transformations in projects as diverse as Kibera and Gentilly, they also acknowledge their potential. This approach suggests similarities with Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman’s Spatializing Justice: Building Blocks (MIT Press, 2022). In both cases, the goal is not to provide a “playbook” of design guidelines but rather to showcase a spectrum of projects to identify their principles and strategies for addressing the injustices experienced by marginalized communities around the world.
The book’s sole chapter dedicated to newly built collective housing examines the favela Paraisópolis in São Paulo, where several residential blocks were built for residents displaced due to dwellings at risk of collapse or flooding. As in the book’s other chapters, the authors analyze both the positive aspects and conflicts arising from this project. Although the housing blocks, designed by renowned architect Edson Elito, represent a significant improvement of residents’ living conditions, the housing complex essentially functions as a gated community with a walled perimeter. The project, therefore, generates an autonomous urban island, resulting in tensions between residents of the “condomínios” and the rest of the favela. In contrast, the most successful informal settlement-upgrading initiatives tend to promote benefits for the entire community by creating new public spaces, civic buildings, and infrastructure while supporting self-construction efforts, as seen in the chapters discussing interventions in Nairobi, Bangkok, Pune, Cochabamba, and San Juan.
A persistent theme throughout the volume is the impact of climate change on disadvantaged populations. At a time when the far right is on the rise in the US and many other countries, promoting ideologies that often include the denial of climate change, this book provides both inspiration and hope through a multitude of interventions transforming communities across the globe. As the authors contend in their conclusions, “The ultimate question is not whether settlements will adapt but rather how they will adapt [to climate change]: who will benefit, who will be harmed, and who will shape the contours of those adaptation The book ultimately presents a range of strategies that should serve as a valuable resource for designers, academics, and students, as well as community leaders, activists, and residents grappling with enduring economic and social injustices. However, by showcasing the partial successes of the cases examined, a truer understanding of the complexity of the far-reaching consequences of climate change is achieved.
Pablo Meninato, Ph.D., is an associate professor at Temple University’s Tyler School of Art and Architecture. His work focuses on the intersections of architecture, urbanism, and social change, with a special focus on Latin America. He is a recipient of the 2024–2025 Fulbright US Scholar Award for a research and publication project on Lina Bo Bardi. Meninato’s essays have been published in various magazines and journals. He is the author of the books Unexpected Affinities—The History of Type in the Architectural Project from Laugier to Duchamp (Routledge, 2018), Informality and the City—Theories, Actions and Interventions (coedited, Springer, 2022), and the coauthored book Urban Labyrinths: Informal Settlements, Architecture, and Social Change in Latin America (Routledge, 2024).