When It Rains, It Pours

 There's no denying that weather happens to every city. If it didn't, we'd live in an airless void, which I guess means we wouldn't live, which means no city because no people.

But I digress.

My point is that every city has weather. Cities have different climates, of course, and thus different weather occurs in them, but the common issue of needing to allow people to continue to operate the city regardless of the weather crops up worldwide.

And one of the most consistent issues that cities have to deal with is rain. Most places people choose to live, especially in urban numbers, get rainfall. Some more, some less, but some.

Heck, I've even been in Phoenix in a rainstorm. It happens.

But what cities do to deal with that rain can be highly variable, and can massively impact the experience of living there. Today, I want to talk about some rain options I've seen, and how they operate.

1. Just Suck It Up (Because You Can)

This is the attitude of cities like Seattle and London to rain: yeah, it rains here. So? 

Now, this kind of attitude actually relies very heavily on the urban infrastructure, which is designed to handle (most) rain because it's a common occurrence.

Take this sunny photo of Pike Place Market in Seattle. Notice anything about the market itself? That's right, it's covered. Seattle assumes that there will be a lot of days where it's at best overcast and likely drizzling or actively raining; as such, it defaults to design where public spaces are rainproofed. This empowers the city's moment-by-moment unconcern for rain: it's already built into the plans.

It's subtler in an open, uncovered space like the University of Washington's Red Square, but the bricks here are organized and patterned so that the ground channels water down to massive drains, leaving the space not dry, but not puddled or hazardous, in all but the worst moments of a squall.

The city is built to just accept the rain, because it's easier than fighting it.

2. Wait, It Rains? What Do We Do?

The flip side of this is cities that seem to sometimes forget that it rains at all.

Sometimes I worry that Davenport is one of these.

In these cities, there may be rain infrastructure (there's a drain in the above picture, somewhere, though it's losing the war to the water) but it's not well maintained, and seems mostly vestigial as a result of standardized city planning, rather than intentional for the space.

Even unclogged drains may not be up to the task of draining the water the comes when it does actually rain.

Sometimes, this is should be linked to climate change: perhaps the style or frequency or intensity of rain is changing. But often it feels more like a cost-benefit analysis: everyone will hate it when it rains anyway, so is it worth the money to improve this system for a time that won't be appreciated?

Doing similar things with snow and ice leads to a lot of freeze-thaw cycles, though that's technically beyond the scope of this post.

3. Prepare But Don't Stress

Then there are cities that fall between these extremes: the ones that actually do things about the rain, but don't keep those preparations visible 24/7 because they don't think it's always coming.

Like Paris, for example:

Notice the available but not used extendable cover in front of Shakespeare & Co. here. 

With apologies for the blurry picture, you can see several other equivalent preparations here, some extended and some not (it had rained that morning). And the cobblestones likewise are good in the rain but not built as intentionally or permanently to deal with rain as Red Square is.

This is a neutral ground, where the city can adapt to a rainstorm but is not constantly cowering in fear of one (not that Seattle fears the rain--but it is always assuming that the rain will return soon). 

What about your city? How do you see it dealing with rain? Does it deal with rain at all? Or are you, like the Quad Cities, constantly surprised when water comes from the sky?