Building Resilience in Boston

The Resilient Design Institute coauthored the document Building Resilience in Boston: Best Practices for Climate Change Adaptation and Resilience for Existing Buildings. This 117-page report was produced for the Boston Society of Architects, the Boston Green Ribbon Commission, and the City of Boston to identify strategies and specific measures that property owners can use to reduce their vulnerability to climate change, while providing policy makers with guidance on policies and programs that can spur such outcomes.

Completed in July 2013, the effort was led by Linnean Solutions and included the Built Environment Coalition, both of Cambridge. As a relatively early publication focused on resilience, Building Resilience in Boston has informed many municipal resilience initiatives throughout the country.

If your city or community is interested in developing a set of resilient design strategies, please reach out to alex@resilientdesign.org .

Back to Projects

David W. Orr, Ph.D

David W. Orr is Paul Sears Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies & Politics, Emeritus. He also served as “Counselor to the President” of Oberlin College for ten years. He is the author of eight books, including Dangerous Years: Climate Change and the Long Emergency (Yale, 2016) and Down to the Wire: Confronting Climate Collapse (Oxford, 2009) and co-editor of three others. He has authored over 220 articles, reviews, book chapters, and professional publications. In the past twenty-five years he has served as a board member or adviser to ten foundations and on the Boards of many organizations including the Rocky Mountain Institute, Bioneers, and the Aldo Leopold Foundation.

He is currently a Trustee of the Alliance for Sustainable Colorado, Children and Nature Network, and the WorldWatch Institute. He has been awarded nine honorary degrees and a dozen other awards including a Lyndhurst Prize, a National Achievement Award from the National Wildlife Federation, leadership awards from the U.S. Green Building Council (2014) and from Second Nature (2012), and a lifetime achievement award from Green Energy Ohio and the North American Association for Environmental Education. He has lectured at hundreds of colleges and universities throughout the U.S., Europe, Latin America, and Asia. He headed the effort to design, fund, and build the Adam Joseph Lewis Center, which was named by an AIA panel in 2010 as “the most important green building of the past thirty years,” as “one of thirty milestone buildings of the twentieth century” by the U.S. Department of Energy, and as one of “52 game-changing buildings of the past 170 years” by the editors of Building Design +Construction in January, 2016. He was instrumental in the design and funding of the Peter B. Lewis Gateway Center. He is the founder of the Oberlin Project and a founder of the journal Solutions. His current work is on the state of American democracy.