Garden-to-gaia, urban sustainability, disasters 319Athird approach for urban sustainability highlights a city’s ‘‘prime foot-
prints” or imprint areas, and may be the only case where sustainability has
areasonable chance of attainment. First, identify the primary landscapes or
sites that provide most of the inputs to a city. These might include water supply
from a forested drainage basin in the urban region, key mining and industrial-
production sites, a grain-production landscape, a pastureland area, a region
exporting tropical fruits, and a market-gardening area near the city. Similarly,
identify the areas receiving most of the outputs, i.e., the major solid-waste site,
air-pollutant deposit areas, nearby recreation/tourism sites, and so forth.
Theprime-footprints modelor concept, in other words, refers to the primary
source-and-sink areas connected to a city or urban region by routes of inputs and
outputs. Establishing and maintaining a balance, where nature and people thrive
in the prime-footprints system as a whole, would achieve urban sustainability
forthe city, even though in isolation the city supports only shreds of nature.
In addition, decreasing the number of input-and-output routes, shortening the
routes, and reducing the input-and-output amounts would all be steps toward
sustainability.
Ecological footprint analysis (Chapter 3)(Wackernagel and Rees 1996,
Costanza2000,Rees2003)isanimportant preliminary step in this direction.
It identifies the total equivalent area used to support the people in a city. The
prime footprints approach takes the next big steps by highlighting the specific
footprint locations, the amounts and routes of inputs and outputs linking key
locations to the urban region, and the importance of planning each footprint
and the urban region together as an integrated system. In short, plan each of
theprime-footprint areas linked to the city, plus the city, so the set as a whole
sustains a suitable nature-and-people balance.
Disasters
The ‘‘ten bad ones” -- wildfire, volcanic eruption, earthquake, tsunami,
flood, hurricane (cyclone/typhoon), industrial-pollutant release, nuclear-power-
plant radiation release, bombing, and disease outbreak -- are particularly seri-
ous in urban regions where people and human structures are so concentrated.
Landslides/avalanches, economic depressions, radical strong-government trans-
formations, wars/conflicts, and massive immigrant arrivals (e.g., war or envi-
ronmental refugees) could be added to the list. Nevertheless, we begin with
characteristics common to disasters in urban regions, then sequentially glimpse
each of the ten disaster types, and end with some guidelines targeted to urban
regions.
Disasters are sudden events causing great loss or damage. Humans are
impacted, often for a prolonged period, through property damage, illness, and
death (Kreimeret al.2003). Disrupted infrastructure networks -- gas pipelines,