Today as the eight Arctic nations turn their attention northwards, the onset of climate change, growing industrial activity, and increased accessibility indicates the number of people in this region will continue to rise and likely to be centered in urban environments like towns and cities. The process whereby human population shift from life and rural areas to denser permanent communities is called urbanization, a foundational concept in community planning. The urbanization of communities occurs for many reasons. Including when areas serve as marketplaces, administrative centers, ceremonial centers, or are important to military defense. In the Circumpolar North urbanization is mostly a response to an abundance of natural resources, such as fish, minerals or fossil fuels. Many of the earliest urban areas grew organically. However, recent changes in the size and density of populations presents new challenges, opportunities and threats. Careful planning is necessary to ensure development is sustainable and negative impacts to community and environmental health are minimized. What do we mean when we talk about community planning? Different organizations and communities may use this term in different ways. But in this course we treat it as closely related to the disciplines of urban planning. The McGill School of urban planning defines it as a technical and political process concerned with the welfare of people, control of the use of land, design of the urban environment, including transportation and communication networks and protection and enhancement of the natural environment. Ultimately, community planning is about the actions taken to influence a space and make it better for humans to live in, whether by enhancing or protecting the health, safety, general happiness of residents and visitors. It's not just about planning how to construct buildings for residents and business, but also how the community as a whole should affect and be affected by the nearby geography and ecosystems. It involves land-use planning and environmental planning, as well as urban design. The field arose in response to the many new challenges that communities experienced during the Industrial Revolution. People migrated in great numbers from rural areas to towns. This influx of people led to situations where sanitation, safety, and environmental issues became significant. For example, the London of the 1800s became choked with black smog and overcrowded with people. The city's infrastructure couldn't keep up with the tremendous amount of human waste, ultimately leading to a series of cholera outbreaks, which are estimated to have killed over 14,000 people. In response to these conditions, people argued for the regulation of land use and construction projects to build or improve water and sewer systems and access to open parks. Pollution and overcrowding also gave rise to the City Beautiful in Garden City movements, which push for aesthetically pleasing communities and advocated for careful planning of streets, buildings, and open spaces. While the City Beautiful movement was largely focused on architecture and monumental grandeur. The Garden City movement was intended to be a blend of city and country and inspired widespread integration of green space in urban areas. These early movements have since given rise to many other movements that have shaped how cities are planned today, including Cities of towers, New Urbanism, and Modernism movements. More recently, the notion of sustainable development has become a driving force in community planning, particularly as the trend of urbanization has continued, resource extraction becomes more challenging to sustain and climate change presents new threats to safety and well-being. The term resilience refers to elasticity and the ability to rebound our bounds back. Resilience found its way into ecological studies in the 1960s. Used to refer to the ability of humans or environments to absorb or recover from a change or disturbance. Today, the term is used in three distinct forms when discussing development and community planning. Engineering resilience, Ecological resilience, and Evolutionary resilience.Engineering resilience is the ability of a stable system to resist disturbance and how quickly it can return to normal afterwards. In practice, a human system like a school, would be characterized as resilient if it can withstand a flood and get back to regular service in a timely manner. Ecological resilience is defined as the extent to which a system can absorb disturbance before it's structure changes. Or in other words, to its ability to embrace changes and still persist. For example, the ecological resilience of Atlantic cod populations could absorb the impact for human fishing for millennia until the new technologies and practices exceeded the ability of COD to replenish their numbers. Evolutionary resilience is the most recent of these concepts and refers to the ability of Socio-ecological systems to adapt in response to stress. An example would be a coastal community that change to better respond to climate-related stressors like storm surges by relocating key buildings and services farther back from the coast. This definition acknowledges the transformative nature of human and natural systems by recognizing their ability to evolve over time, grow, and reorganize. Resilience is a key concept in today's rapidly changing world. A resilient community is one that can anticipate, respond to, and recover from disturbances. When developing and the Circumpolar North, we must strive for resilience and sustainability if we are to respond to and prepare for challenges such as climate change, economic ups and downs and beyond. Community Planning is complicated. There are a lot of moving parts. A planner who wants to improve their community resilience has to take a hard look at the people in systems that impact how well a community is able to handle disruptions. This includes physical components of the community, human-built infrastructure like bridges and sewers, as well as natural ecosystems that provide benefits to the community, such as water supply, food, or even shelter from harsh weather. A planner might investigate if these systems still function in the case of a change or disruption. If there are alternatives in the case of a failure, and if there are systems in place to resolve failures quickly and safely. People in organizations are another important element of resilience. As they have the ability to take information and make decisions that affect the community. For example, individuals choose how they vote, what they consume, and who they do business with. On a larger scale, organizations such as governments can make decisions, such as how the community's water supply is managed and regulated. In this case, a community planner might look at how easily people and organizations are able to access information. If they have the ability to anticipate challenges and share ideas on how to respond to them. Resilience is also heavily impacted by institutions, patterns of human behaviors, or conventions that are not necessarily the result of individual choices. Some are informal, such as turning off the lights when leaving the room, or formal such as government established fishing quotas. A community planner might evaluate whether an institution helps or hinders access to infrastructure. If they helped to promote good governance principles or allow people to easily access, create, and share meaningful information. Understanding a community's vulnerabilities is the first step in building resilience. From there, planners can set priorities, design, and implement solutions, and monitor their success. Ideally, incorporating both scientific and local knowledge along the way.
