Archive for category: Uncategorized

Title: San Francisco’s Eastside Resilience through Fluid Adaptation across Time, Space, and Scale

Time: Noon on October 5, 2017

Location: 5^th Floor Conference Room, 30 Van Ness

Speaker: Hope Hui Rising, PhD, PLA

Dr. Hope Hui Rising will be presenting to the San Francisco Sea Level Rise Adaptation Committee. The presentation will focus on fluid adaptation as a main approach for providing flexible resilience to San Francisco’s Eastside communities across time, space, and scale. Hope and the Adaptive Water Urbanism Initiative used this approach to propose several resilience master plans for the entire Eastside, the Embarcadero, and the communities between the Islais Creek and Mission Creek based on the results of the interviews and design game workshops conducted with residents, city staff, experts, and high school students. These master plans have been reviewed for comments and supported by the public and experts through a series of presentations at the Bay Area Council, the Bay Observatory at the Exploratorium, Potrero Hill Public Library, the Public Utilities Commission, and the San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Associations.  Submit a contact form if you are interested in attending the presentation online. 

Graphics by Nathan McCammant

On August 7, Dr. Hope Hui Rising made a presentation to the Landscape Architecture Foundation with four other professors from around the country. Her presentation focused on the use of landscape performance to motivate proactive funding mechanism for climate-adaptive interventions, which often rely on disaster-driven funding, by documenting their short-term co-benefits as ecosystem services that can contribute to long-term resilience incrementally.

Dr. Hope Hui Rising presented “Adaptive Water Urbanism for Three Coastal Cities” to the Climate and Water Policy Board at the San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Association.

On June 1, Dr. Hope Hui Rising presented her paper entitled “Mitigating stress-inducing effects of viewing urban hardscapes with water sounds,” which won the second place for the 2017 Best Paper Award from the Environmental Design Research Association.

ABSTRACT

With a repeated measures design, we investigated the potential of waterscapes in mitigating the stress-inducing effects of viewing hardscapes. A total of 18 participants were recruited in the vicinity of a park dominated by concrete surfaces and waterscapes. We randomly assigned participants to view either water or concrete first at each of the nine waterscape locations with varying water sound types and volume levels. Participants viewed each visual stimulus without controlling their gaze for 15 seconds. Then, they repeated the viewing protocol while fixating their gaze at one point. The investigator used a mobile eye-tracker to verify that the assigned stimulus was viewed with the correct gaze. Participants also wore a mobile sensor that measured their body temperature, galvanic skin response (GSR), and skin conductance level (SCL). Previous studies suggest that mitigation of stress responses is associated with a lowered skin conductance level (GSL) (Hietanen & Korpela, 2004), galvanic skin response (GSR) (Bakker, Pechenizkiy, & Sidorova, 2011), and body temperature (Briese & Cabanac, 1991).

We found a significantly greater body temperature drop in waterscape locations in front of a waterfall compared to the locations above and behind the waterfall. The findings suggest that waterfall sound may have greater stress-reducing effects than the sound of smaller waterscapes behind the waterfall due to the waterfall’s meditative sound quality or higher sound volume. Water sounds may help offset the stress responses associated with viewing concrete because there were no significant changes for GSR or SCL. The inconsistent results across measures suggest that future studies should examine the effects of both water sound types and volumes and lengthen participants’ exposure to a higher baseline stress level. This study provides preliminary support for the use of waterfalls as effective public health interventions to help alleviate the stress-inducing effects of viewing a predominately hardscaped urban environment.

Dr. Hope Hui Rising presented “Mainstreaming water retention within right-of-ways with ecosystem services: Meandering blue parkways as building blocks of amphibious transportation system.” for the urban design track at the 2017 Council for Educators in Landscape Architecture Conference.

ABSTRACT
Many cities have sought to retain water through place-making in order to better adapt
to the impacts of climate change. However, such water-coherent urbanism has largely been
proposed for parcels containing developments or public spaces rather than right-of-ways. Water
retention within right-of-ways lends itself to an interconnected system and widespread
applications because it typically does not directly involve private properties. However, introducing
water into right-of-ways often encounters public resistance due to people’s dependence on traffic
lanes and parking.

Ecosystem services have been found to contribute to human wellbeing, a correlate of place
attachment. This study intended to identify significant relationships between ecosystem services
and the two interdependent facets of water-based place attachment, water-based place identity
and water-based place dependence. When engendered from water-based place identity,
water-based place attachment had a significant positive influence on people’s openness towards a
more water-coherent approach to urban design.

The author sampled 60 participants from eight water cities. Waterscape mappability and
identifiability were obtained from cognitive mapping and photovoice as indicators for water-based
place identity. Water-based place dependence was derived from interview results on waterscapes’
capacities to help reduce stress and to facilitate self-orientation. Water-based place attachment
was measured by the extent to which participants would miss waterscapes if they were to leave
the city tomorrow. Structured interview questions were created based on the results of expert
interviews for identifying 22 design parameters as ecosystem services that could potentially be
provided by waterways.

Stepwise regressions were conducted to identify design parameters that significantly improved
the model fit. For water-based place identity, the extent to which a waterway meanders was the
only significant independent variable. The abilities of a waterway to support floating traffic lanes
and to infiltrate stormwater were the only significant independent variables for water-based place
dependence. The findings suggest that the aesthetics of meandering waterways is instrumental
for introducing water-coherent urbanism for public acceptance. However, to contribute to
water-based place dependence, such meandering waterways also need to accommodate floating
traffic lanes and continuous waterfront parkland to facilitate stormwater infiltration. The advent of
mass-produced amphibious vehicles may eliminate the need for straight floating traffic lanes.
When meandering amphibious blue parkways are interconnected into a network, such
systems-based approach to water retention can provide a more diverse range of ecosystem
services than parcel-based water retention.

KEYWORDS
Controlled Flooding; Ecosystem Services; Meandering; Blue Parkway; Amphibious
Transportation; Place Attachment.