Neighborhood-Scale Solutions for Community Resilience in Hawaiʻi: Supporting Networks of Resilience with the Built Environment

Abstract

Climate change stressors and natural disasters are distinctly impactful for islanded communities (de Roode and Martinac 2020). In Hawaiʻi, each island within the chain presents unique combinations of shocks and stressors, which affect the vulnerability of communities. On Oʻahu, the most populous island, the top five shocks (hurricane; tsunami; infrastructure failure; rainfall flooding; external economic crisis) and stresses (cost of living; aging infrastructure; climate change impacts; lack of affordable housing; over-reliance on imports) (City and County of Honolulu 2019) require preemptive resilient responses in the built environment (buildings, infrastructure, landscape) to uplift the economic, environmental, and social wellbeing of the communities. Local resilience planning initiatives are underway to alleviate stresses and prepare for shocks, leading to more self-reliant, prepared communities. One planning response to these shocks and stresses is found in Action 15 of the Ola Oahu Resilience Strategy, which is to “Develop a Network of Resilience Hubs” (City and County of Honolulu 2019). The initiative relies on community-led efforts to build resilience and it is the primary focus of this study. Social resilience networks are increasingly in development across the state of Hawaiʻi (Center for Resilient Neighborhoods 2023; “Resilience Hubs,” n.d.; Office of Climate Change, Resiliency, & Sustainability 2023), and the ways in which the built environment should be adapted and developed to support these programs is a necessary exploration, one in need of extensive research at all scales, particularly the neighborhood scale. To build greater resilience, communities must address chronic stresses through built-environment solutions and distributed, or networked, approaches. Through understanding hazards and vulnerabilities, analyzing community assets, and engaging the community, stakeholders, and design teams, communities can collectively determine improvements, retrofits, and develop solutions to greater community resilience. The solutions include a combination of resilience hubs, nature-based solutions, cooling centers, sustainable and regenerative architecture, and distributed and circular systems for energy, water, and waste, to mitigate compounding impacts during a shock and provide redundancy. This study provides a design example and methodology to incorporate nature-based solutions, resilience design strategies and regenerative design foundations into a network of resilience in the built environment, using McCully-Mōʻiliʻili as a study neighborhood.