or distopian visions of levees and polders, floating cities, alluvial sponge combs 3 and the like. These large-scale architectural and infrastructural solutions certainly make great images for competitions, and while they certainly may be necessary, they represent an institutional tendency toward long-term and capital-intensive solutions whose ultimate practicality and success are difficult or impossible to predict. Alternatively, one can propose a more democratic methodology for adapting to climate change by drawing upon the invisible field of tactical solutions currently used, and codifying them into an evolving and flexible system. If our cities and our citizens are already altering the urban forms and practices that deal with weather, incrementally adapting to long-term changes in climate, then perhaps the most successful long-term solutions will actually arise from this field of currently undifferentiated practices, rather than be imposed top-down by well-intentioned visionaries and technocrats. 4 Instead of casting ourselves as futurists and spending our energy designing capital solutions based on complex and imprecise climate models and abstract conjecture, we should also be studying these small-scale adaptations and everyday practices and cataloguing them in a taxonomy of potential futures. If we read them closely enough, the adaptations and behaviours being deployed now are very good indicators of how our urban forms and cultural attitudes will shift in the near term, and potentially in the long term. We can thereby ask ourselves very real and specific questions — Will we continue to see a proliferation of sidewalk seating, and what kinds of problems for circulation and other uses of the public right-of-way will this create? Will our current
system of parks and outdoor spaces be able to accommodate large increases in use, or will we need to change their forms or increase their number to avoid overcrowding, conflict and damage? Will our building and planning codes need to change to allow more permanent installations of wind screens, roof gardens and other architectural elements as these types of quasi-outdoor spaces become more popular? What if, according to some climate models, climate change actually causes San Francisco to get colder? It is by keeping a close watch on these incremental adjustments that we can more precisely track where we are headed, and potentially avoid building an ecological Maginot line. * 1 There is no record of this quote in any of Twain’s writing, including his journals kept during his two-year stay in San Francisco. The closest Twain ever came to the topic was in his book Roughing It where he said, ‘The climate of San Francisco is mild and singularly equable. The thermometer stands at about seventy degrees the year round. It hardly changes at all. You sleep under one or two light blankets summer and winter, and never use a mosquito bar. Nobody ever wears summer clothing. You wear black broadcloth – if you have it – in August and January, just the same.... You do not use overcoats and you do not use fans’. ‘Glorious Climate of California’, Roughing It. vol. II, chap. XV. 2 For the purposes of this article, I’m considering public space to include quasi-public spaces such as POPOS and the outdoor components of private property such as outdoor seating, café’s, etc. 3 A super-absorbent waterfront landscape element proposed in Anderson & Anderson Architecture’s entry to the High Density on High Ground competition, installed at the 2006 Venice Biennale. 4 See Michel de Certeau’s The Pracice of Everyday Life , especially his discussion of Foucault’s Discipline and Punish , and how the methodologies of surveillance and discipline that were institutionalised in the 18th century arose from a field of practices that dated from the ancien régime .
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