6.1.3 From Wickiups to the Wildland Urban Interface

“The expansion of human settlements is of primary concern as it shapes a series of irreversible spatial and temporal patterns on the landscape”. Mann et al, 2013.

Indigenous American architectures stand in stark contrast to that which replaced them. In the aftermath of California’s most structurally “destructive” fire on record (CALFIRE, 2018a), the Tubbs Fire of October 8th – 20th 2017, fire officials documented structural damage, “foundation by foundation” (Troy et al, 2017, online) [Fig. 59]. In total, analysis of ground and satellite surveys evidenced that nearly 5,700 buildings [approx. 5% of housing stock] in the vicinity of the city of Santa Rosa had been “destroyed”, of which 1,700 were in “heavily forested or largely undeveloped” districts, including the Larkfield-Wikiup area (Ibid). Historically home of the Pomo [indigenous peoples of California], the etymology thereof speaks to the regional biochemistry, for their name means “those who live at red earth hole”, which, as discussed earlier, in pedospheric terms evidences high levels of Hematite and/or Maghemite, which is usually a consequence of fire-prone landscapes.

Where the Pomo built architectures that, like the flora that abutted them, burnt seasonally, today’s regional Hominin residents build not with intent to start fires, but to fight them. Bringing perspective to the cost thereof, in the 2017 fiscal year alone, California’s Department of Forestry and Fire Protection [CALFIRE], which is responsible for protecting and stewarding over 31 million acres of the state’s privately-owned wildlands, spent $700 million on fire suppression, the sum thereof $274 million more than had been budgeted (Renda, 2018). But, though a sizeable swathe of the federal government’s national fire suppression expenditure for the year, which at $2.35 billion (Ibid.) was the costliest on record (USDA, 2017), it prevented not against loss of property on such scale as for insurers to question whether it viable to continue issuing new policies in the areas that were affected (Daniels, 2018; Adriano, 2017).

The Tubbs Fire was not merely the most structurally destructive wildfire on Californian record, but one of several that swept through the state that same month. Excluding public infrastructure and uninsured properties, California’s Department of Insurance calculated that, collectively, the October 2017 wildfires resulted in insurances losses in excess of $9.4 billion (Diep, 2017), against claims for the loss of 14,700 homes, 728 business, and more than 3,600 vehicles (Adriano, 2017). Yet, even the sum thereof accommodates not for the total losses of all affected by the fires. For example, having examined the insurance policies of over 200 parties as incurred loss or damage of property, law firm Friedemann Goldberg found that 97% were underinsured (Swindell, 2017). However, as acknowledged in a notice on their homepage, the size, scale, and probability of wildfires are not the only contributory factors:

“This [underinsurance] problem may be due in part to the scope of the devastation caused by the fires, the critical housing shortage which existed before the fires, and the higher than usual costs of rebuilding in Northern California” (Friedemann Goldberg, 2018, online).

A year that saw California declare its first state of emergency in September, thereon several more in October (Blankenbuehler and Warren, 2017), during which 4/20 of the most structurally destructive fires on record occurred (CALFIRE, 2018a), ended with the largest fire by acreage since the late 1800s, the event thereof the Thomas Fire [December 4th 2017 – January 12th 2018]. All in all, California experienced over 9,000 wildfires in 2017, of which the acreage burned totalled over 1.5 million (CALFIRE, 2018b), thus accounting for roughly 15% of the acreage that burned through the year (Hamilton, 2018). The full extent of the costs incurred by the federal government is yet to be established. But, atop $500> million as was allocated prior to the outbreak of the October fires, California’s representatives lobbied Congress for the state to receive a sizeable chunk of an $81 billion disaster aid package (Mascaro, 2017). Additionally, in November 2017 Republican Mimi Walters, in the capacity of representing several state representatives, proposed to Congress the California Wildfire Disaster Tax Relief Act of 2017 (Congress, 2017), the purpose thereof to aid individuals “displaced from such principle place of abode by reason of the wildfires” to which the declaration relates [i.e. they without insurance]. The proposal’s outcome yet to be decided, the 2018 fire season is already underway.

As evidenced above, no-matter their meeting the specifications of the current WUI fire building codes, the materiality, design, and overall schema of homes that have been built across states including, but not limited to California, is no match for wildfires that now spread with greater frequency, speed, and intensity than the codes are designed to accommodate. Which, given the bandwidth of regional climate, wider environment, and social trajectories, including rising demand for housing, suggests that the current WUI paradigm will endure comparatively fleetingly by comparison to its antecedent [Fig. 60]: the wickiup and its indigenous architectural kin, they being created with wildfire-synced cyclicality and temporality in mind, and within the resource and wider constraints native to the region.

>Continue to Chapter 6.1.4 here.

The thesis is also available in PDF format, downloadable in several parts on Academia and Researchgate.

Note that figures have been removed from the digital version hosted on this site, but are included in the PDFs available at the links above.

Citation: Sterry, M. L., (2018) Panarchistic Architecture: Building Wildland-Urban Interface Resilience to Wildfire through Design Thinking, Practice and Building Codes Modelled on Ecological Systems Theory. PhD Thesis, Advanced Virtual and Technological Architecture Research [AVATAR] group, University of Greenwich, London.