History as it’s happening

While that last image I retweeted (ominous clouds behind the Statue of Liberty) was fake (but of great symbolic value!), this one is  real: the remains of the Atlantic City boardwalk.

And this is before Sandy has even landed.

I believe it’s fair to say already that we’re in an historic moment, like Katrina, where what follows will be altered forever by what happens in the next few days.

This is not unprecedented: history is often shaped by natural occurrences of this magnitude: 1900 Galveston, 1926 Florida, 1938 New England, just to use some American examples of momentous hurricanes.

In our history, the Lower Mainland was profoundly affected by the Fraser River flood of 1948.

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As Mike Harcourt and Ken Cameron tell the story in “City Making in Paradise,” it was this flood that led to creation of the Lower Mainland Regional Planning Board in 1949 – the body charged with the preparation of land-use plans, in particular to prevent development on flood plains.  Such a mechanism – interfering with the rights of private property and local jurisdictions – would not likely have occurred save for the impact, psychological and physical, of the preceding disaster.  And without this precedent, it’s possible we would not have seen the strategic regional plans that followed, including the ALR, that have shaped this urban environment.

So while the impacts of Sandy, still to play out on an epic scale, will be devastating, changing the economy, politics and culture of America and Canada, they may also be the justification for realizations and interventions that could not occur otherwise with respect to our climate, environment, infrastructure and urban form.