With a mission to inform, empower, celebrate and advocate for British Columbia's current and aspiring business leaders, BCBusiness go behind the headlines and bring readers face to face with the key issues and people driving business in B.C.
Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/1514012
16 BC BU S I N E S S .C A F E B R U A R Y 2 0 24 by Frances Bula Frances Bula is a longtime Vancouver journalist and the 2023 recipient of the Bruce Hutchison Lifetime Achievement Award from the Jack Webster Foundation. come a hugely popular term in all kinds of fields: studies of natural disasters or terrorism; business and organizational theories; materials science and environmental research. And, of course, it has become an al- most unavoidable word when it comes to how we build build- ings and cities. In the world of earthquake readiness, resilient buildings are the ones that not only don't collapse completely during a big shock but, ideally, are also ready for use again very quickly afterward. In the climate-change world, resilient buildings are the ones that re- sult in the lowest production of greenhouse gases, both in the way they are built and in how much energy they use when they're in operation. But for Vancouver architect James Cheng, who designed Canada's first building to get zero-carbon certification, resil- ience is more than that. For sure, The Stack—which looks like, well, a stack of art- fully arranged glass boxes on Melville Street in Vancouver's central business district—has the engineering, climate- change, fossil-fuel reduction side of resilience built in. Kevin Welsh at Introba, the consulting company on sustainability for the project, goes through the list. The Stack collects rainwater in tanks that is then used for toilet flushing and irrigation and also holds used water to release it slowly into the city system to avoid flooding it. That's expected to save 2 million litres of water that would have been taken from the filtered drinking- water system. It's designed to be as fossil fuel-free as pos- sible. It's permanently electric I first started hearing about the emerging study of re- silience 30 years ago. But back then it didn't have anything to do with cities or buildings or climate change. It emerged from the field of psychology, as researchers observed that a significant proportion of children who came from very troubled families managed to grow up to be well-adjusted, competent adults. At first, the researchers thought that the capacity for overcoming trauma and dysfunction was the result of special characteristics of those children, something they were born with. But more investiga- tion showed that this wasn't the answer. Instead, children develop resilience—the capac- ity to rebound from acute or chronic adversity—because of sometimes hidden supports around them. A single adult, not necessarily a family mem- ber, who provides stability and encouragement. Places to go in the community that offer alter- natives to a bad home scene. Access to resources that help that child understand what's wrong with the way people around them are behaving. Resilience has since be- RESILIENT MATERIALS In Vancouver's real estate industry, resilience means a lot of things, including how to build for future uses that don't exist yet L A N D V A L U E S