Episode 49: Rearview Wisdom | The "Fire and Water" Renaissance: Engineering a Resilient Southern California

About this episode

The episode discusses lessons learned from past catastrophic fires and the necessity of sustainable practices in urban design.

Happy New Year, and welcome to our first episode of 2026. I’m Josh Cooperman with Convo By Design and have bee hosting Doctoring Up Design, the official podcast of Design Hardware. If you haven’t been into the showroom before, or its been a while, please come back and see all of the new updates and additions to this remarkable space, where we host industry education events, like the one you are going to hear today. This is a throwback to the first Environment Check event held in the showroom back in 2022. It has been a year since the catastrophic fires in Pacific Palisades and Altadena. What have we learned? I would say we have learned a lot, but much of it isn’t new. So, periodically, in addition to all the new content we create here at Design Hardware, we are going to add some throwbacks that make sense. Like the program you are going to hear on this episode of Doctoring Up Design. Design Hardware hosted a vital forum on how the intersection of gray water reclamation, native landscaping, and green building policy is no longer a luxury, but a necessity for human survival. We, gathered a "Brain Trust" of sustainability experts at the Design Hardware showroom in Los Angeles. The…

People in this episode

Host: Josh Cooperman

Topics covered

• sustainability
• urban resilience
• water reclamation
• landscaping
• green building policy

Keywords

• sustainability
• gray water reclamation
• native landscaping
• green building
• urban resilience

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Design Hardware

Places: Southern California, Pacific Palisades, Altadena