Whether we are vacationing at its shores, working in its harbors, or building along its many edges, we are drawn to water.
Unsurprisingly, many of our greatest cities sit on the banks of rivers, marshes, harbors, and oceans. Because of the many trade routes that rely on water, these cities and their surrounding regions are home to some of the world’s most active economies. A recent study by the World Bank reports that the costs of flood damage to large coastal areas could rise to $1 trillion a year if cities don’t take steps to adapt. And that figure doesn’t begin to address the potential cost of human life as well.
We have a lot to lose, yet despite the increasing risks posed by flooding, people continue to develop waterfront sites. Even a storm as devastating as Hurricane Sandy could not permanently move most coastal communities or property owners. Given this fact, what role can designers play as development comes up against the growing threat of climate change and rising sea levels?
Most designers (and policy makers) focus on one of two diametrically-opposed options: fight the water with heavy infrastructures and fortifications or retreat to higher ground.
Granted, in densely populated locations such as Manhattan, there are few options: some form of levee system, heavy infrastructural solution, or other fortification—like those proposed in the Big U project—will be necessary. In sparsely-populated coastal communities up and down the eastern seaboard, the retreat and re-building of communities farther from the water’s edge is potentially actionable. But, what about all the other locations, moderately populated and conveniently located within commuting distance to major urban centers, where communities are going to re-build and expand whether it’s advisable or not? In these locations, are heavy fortifications the right approach? A recent article in the New York Times rightly highlights the many financial and engineering challenges confronting these approaches. Is this really the right path forward?
We believe there is a third alternative. What if we stopped fighting nature and started accepting its fluidity as the given context of our coastal community designs? Can we find opportunities to adapt existing communities and create new ones that not only survive, but even thrive as a result of their designed response to shifting coastal conditions?
Aerial View of F.R.E.D. shown on the FARROC Competition site.
These are the questions our team grappled with while designing F.R.E.D, an Ennead Lab project that began as a response to the FARROC Competition, a post-Hurricane Sandy call-for-ideas for an eighty-acre beachfront site in the Rockaways. F.R.E.D., an acronym for Fostering Resilient Ecological Development, was awarded the Jury Prize for Leading Innovation in Resilient Waterfront Development and just this Spring won an Architizer A+ award for its innovative approach.
F.R.E.D. isn’t a bespoke design for a single site, but rather a whole-systems approach for coastal communities, a potential model for resilient, sustainable, mixed-income neighborhoods that can serve its inhabitants both today and for generations to come. F.R.E.D. embraces a conceptual shift that blurs the dichotomy of wet vs. dry; as opposed to an ideology grounded in the notion of terra firma, whose components include single-purpose expensive infrastructure and landfilling to create hard, elevated edges, F.R.E.D. embraces the natural flow and fluidity of water.
As an architectural design, F.R.E.D. is a kit of parts, composed of three primary components; dunes, piers and housing clusters. This kit proposes four principle design recommendations for coastal sites: Lift it up; get close; get connected; and finally, let the water in.
First and foremost, this design follows current federal regulations and lifts most construction above the flood elevation. In doing so, the design creates a practically-uninterrupted protective dune-scape, similar to the site’s original barrier island landscapes. A progression of micro-environments extends across the site, beginning at the beach, where primary and secondary dunes provide the site’s principal storm protection from direct waves. The landscape slowly evolves as it moves inland, progressing to hardier and more stable shrub land and maritime forest on the higher ground. Throughout the site, low-lying wet meadows serve as bio retention areas to collect and filter stormwater. Together, this dynamic landscape protects the neighborhood from wave energy, replenishes the beach, manages surface water, and sponsors habitat opportunities.
Diagrammatic Section through the dune-scape and one of the typical housing clusters.
In order to maximize the amount of surface area available for this working landscape, the design recommends dense clusters of housing interspersed across the site and connected by a series of elevated piers and walkways. These connective paths create a new typology of pedestrian street, while also providing elevated and protected routes for the community’s electric, data, and other infrastructures, keeping these vital utilities out of the reach of future flood waters.
These elevated pathways converge on three pedestrian piers. Aligned with the site’s existing street grid, they organize pedestrian and vehicular access, utility distribution, and retail activity, creating three main pedestrian connections between the elevated A train at the north edge of the site, and the beach and boardwalk to the south. If sea-level rise eventually brings regular tidal flooding from Jamaica Bay, these piers and their network of elevated pathways will allow the neighborhood to adapt as a predominantly pedestrian community, connected to the rest of NYC by elevated subway and future ferry service.
Together, these systems of dunes, piers, and housing clusters create a new way to live at the water’s edge. Rather than keeping the water at bay, F.R.E.D. accepts water onto the site and creates new character-defining spaces that support community uses and provide amenities for both F.R.E.D. residents and the surrounding existing communities, while also functioning as protective landscapes in times of tidal and storm-related flooding.
As architects and urban designers, we believe the “fight” against rising sea levels is a misnomer. It is not so much a fight as it is a dance, asking us as designers to develop a choreography of architectural and urban design strategies that respond to nature’s ebb and flow. If done right, flood protection does not need to mean a constant battle against rising tides and shifting sands. Frankly, that’s a battle we won’t likely win in the long run. Architecture’s survival in the wetter landscape of the future depends on our ability to embrace the idea of water as ground. Within that framework, we can use our tools as architects and engineers to imagine a future that goes beyond dry land engineering solutions toward a vision of flow and fluidity in our built environments.
Three main pedestrian piers traverse the site, connecting the elevated A Train to the beach and boardwalk to the south.
Dalia Hamati is a designer at Ennead Architects, and a member of Ennead Lab’s F.R.E.D. design team.
Andrew Burdick is associate partner at Ennead Architects and the director of Ennead Lab. This series—titled What If…?—focuses on design opportunities and their potential impact.
Summit is a planned community in the making. The Powder Mountain development will comprise 500 houses—each conforming to specific architectural guidelines—and a village core. The first neighborhood, featuring homes designed by MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple Architects, is currently under construction. Courtesy MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple Architects
A new public town is under construction on Powder Mountain in Eden, Utah, where 500 houses and a village core are gradually taking shape. This isn’t another ski resort or gated community, but, rather, a planned community of artists, entrepreneurs, and scholars working to help solve global problems. This vision has a name: Summit.
The project evolved out of the Summit Series, a multi-day event program geared towards entrepreneurs. With inspirational speakers, farm-to-table food, entertainment, and a focus on wellness, Summit marketed these events as a way to spur “disruptive change” and altruism. In 2013, Summit founders and a group of investors, including venture capitalist Greg Mauro, purchased Powder Mountain for a reported $40 million, crowdsourcing much of the initial funding and forming a company called SMHG LLC, which operates the Powder Mountain Ski Resort and serves as project developer. They have also gathered a who’s-who list of architects, such as Olson Kundig and Todd Saunders, to design a master plan for the 10,000-acre site where their investment in innovation, cultural enrichment, environmental stewardship, and creativity can truly flourish.
One of Summit Powder Mountain’s first neighborhoods is currently underway. The “Horizon” quarter encompasses 26 modern cabins and a communal lodge designed by MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple Architects. Sited to maximize southwestern views of Mt. Ogden, the Great Salt Lake, and the Wasatch Range, the dense cluster of houses—ranging in size from 1,290 to just over 3,000 square feet—are what Brian MacKay-Lyons likens to a “Nova Scotia fish shack on stilts.” The monolithic, cedar-clad rectangular volumes (which will patina to a silvery-red) are entered on the second floors via bridges and cantilever over the hill to account for annual snow accumulation of 500 inches. The architects devised an intricate site plan so that each house has framed views that are unobstructed by its neighbors. “For us the whole neighborhood is a case study in listening to our community, how they want to live, what they’re interested in,” says Sam Arthur, Summit’s vice president of design and marketing. Because Summit places such a high value on community and interaction, MacKay-Lyons and his team wanted to create an urban condition between the houses—a protected micro-climate of informal courtyards with space for barbecues or gatherings.
Each house is accessed via an elevated bridge. Courtesy the MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple Architects
Inside, the main living space of the houses rise to a peak. The same two-inch vertical matchbook cedar siding that clads the exterior lines the interior, enhancing the seamlessness between indoors and out. “Louis Kahn used to say that any more than two materials is too many,” jokes MacKay-Lyons, but the anecdote is aligned with Summit’s 120-page design guidelines, which place a priority on natural materials such as stone and wood. The overall goal is to maintain the mountain’s fragile eco-system. (Dictating everything from site lighting to roof forms and acceptable shrubs and grasses, the guidelines have recently been updated with Phoenix, Arizona–based Studio Ma’s help on form-based coding work and sustainability best practices.)
MacKay-Lyons says that he and Summit’s leaders found a compatibility in their values—”stewardship of the landscape, interest in community, the idea of an architecture of place, and working with the local climate and material culture,” says the architect. Those values are expressed in the firm’s own Shobac campus in Upper Kingsburg, Nova Scotia, a 25-year endeavor that began as a design/build experiment and has evolved into an agricultural village with a mix of reclaimed and new buildings, guided by the architect’s stewardship. There, the houses are geometrically simple and follow a limited material palette. “Outward modesty is an important ethic,” he says.
This ethos spoke to Boston-based husband and wife Jim and Alina Apteker who purchased a house in Horizon and are working with MacKay-Lyons. After visiting Powder Mountain on a ski trip and participating in one of Summit’s multi-day events, they knew they wanted to be a permanent part of the community. “We feel it is wonderful for our kids—11 and 6—to grow up surrounded by conversations that matter, and exposed to the great ideas and thinking of fellow Summiters. We see this as a generational decision,” Alina says. She also envisions Powder Mountain as her family’s “gateway to the West,” giving them a home-base from which to explore national parks and go on roadtrips. (She and Jim chose the Horizon neighborhood for its views and surrounding aspens.)
“This is not a house that could be built anywhere anytime and fit in,” says Alina. “This is a house that belongs only in a place that allows for full integration with nature, that doesn’t take anything from it and doesn’t replace it. It just gently stands there on a slope, blending in.”
The houses are designed with optimized views of the surrounding landscape. Courtesy MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple Architects
Urban-Think Tank’s Empower Shack for Cape Town, South Africa Courtesy Daniel Schwartz/Urban-Think Tank
Migration is a defining challenge for architects and designers today. But migration has always been at the heart of urban change. Cities are fundamentally places of opportunity—urban migrants continue to be drawn in their millions by the promise of security as well as upward mobility. As the journalist Doug Saunders has suggested, the unprecedented urbanization patterns to which we bear witness are, at their core, an epic story of human movement, set in motion by the common search for a better life.
The “migration crisis” that burned so brightly in the collective European consciousness for months in 2016 before being overtaken by fears of violence and “homegrown” terrorism represents just one chapter in this story. But far from a simple narrative of unanticipated arrivals exposing chinks in the armor of fortress Europe, as architects and designers we must understand our role in the refugee “crisis” in broader terms. It is a role that spans countries and continents.
A House is not a home
In the last year, European architectural discourse and activism has been dominated by a simple humanitarian impulse—the need for fast and effective emergency shelter in cities and towns struggling to cope with an influx of newcomers. However, exhibitions likeMaking Heimat, the German Pavilion at the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale, allude to more intangible questions that resist a design quick fix. What exactly makes a built environment feel like home? What material deprivation and sense of danger must be experienced to push someone to flee that home? How can a person continue to retain a sense of identity and connection to a wider community as they move in fits and starts through unfamiliar landscapes and territories? Does the process of settling in a new city—however long—necessarily lead to the establishment of a new home? And after years of conflict, destruction, and absence, is it possible to return “home” and rediscover what was lost in a place that has been rendered unrecognizable?
For those engaged with the full reality of the refugee issue these are challenging questions and impossible to ignore. Rather than a linear journey from A to B, ending with successful long-term integration into a welcoming “host” society, forced migration is often a circular phenomenon. Architects and designers have crucial roles to play in the places that migrants leave, the spaces through which they travel, the urban environments where they will attempt to build new homes, and the transformed cities, towns, and villages to which they may eventually return. Our recent edition of SLUM Lab magazine is dedicated to this theme, and explores the way in which conflict urbanism, internal displacement camps, border fortifications, liminal settlements, informal transit camps, planned camps, detention centers, reception centers, first step housing, social housing, and various phases of post conflict reconstruction each reveal the way built space shapes, and is reshaped by, the refugee experience.
Identity and architecture
At Urban-Think Tank, we have also engaged with some of these questions in our design projects. On a conceptual level, our involvement in Hello Wood’s annual design-build workshop “Project Village” has explored ideas of temporariness and collectivity. Most recently, the “Migrant Hous(ing)” project grew from the desire to devise a structure that was itself migrant in nature. Each individual arrived to the site with an individual unit—a series of rotating frames that could configure into a multitude of spaces based on personal need. These units had material limitations that prevented individuals from building complete solitary housing. As they began to form relationships, however, the units transformed. Only through a collective force could they fulfill their structural potential and exert their limitless combinatorial possibilities, testing the true nature of community building. The project questioned how displaced individuals begin to establish relationships with other traveling migrants, and whether architecture can preserve individual identity while contributing to integration.
For refugees and internal migrants alike, the ability to integrate goes hand in hand with the ability to imagine and build a brighter future.
More concretely, our Empower Shack housing project in Cape Town is, at its heart, a response to the long-term struggle of migrants to establish a foothold in a new city. In this case, however, the pattern in question is rural-to-urban, rather than the fraught cross-border route traced by refugees (though South Africa continues to attract those fleeing violence and persecution across the continent). In many ways, Khayelitsha is a classic “arrival city”. But the particularities of post-apartheid urbanism, combined with persistent barriers to effective informal settlement upgrading, mean even after 20 years most residents of our pilot site in BT-Section live in a perpetual state of tenure insecurity and spatially entrenched poverty. Pulled by family networks and pushed by the promise of a better life, the community—transplanted largely from the Eastern Cape—has found itself disconnected from public services and employment opportunities. The “home” they have forged is fragile, marginal, and rife with personal dangers and environmental risks.
The aim of Empower Shack is to develop a scalable settlement upgrading methodology that offers immediate access to dignified shelter and basic services while establishing a clear pathway to incremental formalization. The project integrates community participation, a new housing prototype, spatial planning, and urban systems that contribute to a sustainable economic model and new livelihood opportunities. Beyond meeting immediate needs, the project also has symbolic value. The post-apartheid South African constitution enshrined a “right of access to adequate housing.” But this bureaucratic language masks the deeper promise—an end to deliberate structural inequality and exclusion, where the idea of “home” was contingent on the whims of government planners and strictly circumscribed. For refugees and internal migrants alike, the ability to integrate goes hand in hand with the ability to imagine and build a brighter future. In its fullest sense, this means the ability to participate in a city’s political, economic and social life.
The frontlines of architecture have always been located along the shifting routes and in the liminal zones traversed by people seeking a new home.
Visiting Khayelitsha, it becomes immediately apparent that the lived experience of most South Africans is not reflected in existing planning approaches. Until now, the residents of BT-Section have had no dialogue with formal planning provisions. By accepting the need to work with what already exists—however shaped by a history of discrimination—we have been able to negotiate with the City of Cape Town to employ more permanent construction techniques and materials, allowing the upgraded homes to eventually join the formal housing stock. Greater certainty about tenure security and future adherence to housing codes will not only overcome the paralyzing effect of “permanent impermanence,” but also encourage incremental investment in an asset now recognized by financial institutions. The initial phase, consisting of four adjoining houses to the south of the main site, was completed in December 2015 and is currently undergoing user evaluation. The next phase will commence in May 2017, including the roll out of 72 additional units.
The spaces in between
As Europeans decamped en masse for beaches in Greece, Italy, France, and Spain in July last year to escape the summer heat, more migrants than ever before were dying attempting to cross the Mediterranean. In the meantime, the March 2016 resettlement deal hurriedly agreed between Turkey and the European Union had seen land borders across the continent slam shut. The conflicts in Syria, Afghanistan, and elsewhere responsible for fueling a persistent wave of refugees continued, but Europe was closed for business. At the opening of the Biennale that May, the world of architecture descended upon the labyrinthine canals and alleys of Venice under the guise of “reporting from the front.” Designers were called upon to fight “the battles that need[ed] to be fought.” But if urbanization is ultimately a story of migration, then the frontlines of architecture have always been located along the shifting routes and in the liminal zones traversed by people seeking a new home.
Skip forward a year, and the global community is older, but not wiser. From the shoot-from-the-hip executive orders of the Trump administration, to the rising populist tide in France, the Netherlands, and, indeed, South Africa, resurgent nationalism and xenophobia have seen the notion of an inclusive “Heimat” open to, and tolerant of, newcomers fade. It would be foolish to suggest that architecture alone holds the answers. But the built environment cannot be divorced from the context in which it was produced. Our towns and cities hold up a mirror to both our best and worst impulses. Whether in the sprawling refugee settlements of Kakuma or Zaatari, the squalid basement apartments of central Athens, the makeshift encampments connecting the fluid “Balkan route,” or the restive immigrant enclaves of Stockholm, Berlin, or Brussels, we all have a role to play in meeting the complex spatial challenge posed by unprecedented flows of humanity. The moral demands are rather more straightforward.
A version of this text will be published in the new volume CARTHA: On Making Heimat, out on Park Books in September. The book was produced by the editors of CARTHA magazine.
Alfredo Brillembourg and Hubert Klumpner are founding partners of Urban-Think Tank. Alexis Kalagas is a writer, researcher, and editor working at the firm.
Living in America: Frank Lloyd Wright, Harlem & Modern Housing installation view. Curated by The Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation (GSAPP), and co-presented by The Buell Center, The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery, and Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library. Courtesy Columbia GSAPP
Usonia Homes, Broadacre City, the Jacobs House—these are projects almost every Columbia architecture student can recognize, yet for those same students, the complex history of nearby Harlem’s modern housing probably remains a mystery. That’s something that The Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture‘s new exhibition, at Columbia’s new Lenfest Center for the Arts, aims to correct. In the process, the show tries to cast Wright’s projects in a new, more racially- and socially-conscious light.
At the physical center of the exhibition is Broadacre City, Wright’s enormous model for individualism, self-sufficiency, and low-density. X-shaped walls radiate outward and showcase 12 housing projects from Wright (none of which are in Harlem, nor New York City) and 12 from Harlem. Wright’s designs are represented with original drawings and historic photographs, while the Harlem projects tend to feature smaller copies of promotional materials and photographs. Various other media—such as newspaper articles and film clips—are interspersed as well.
The extensive collection does highlight tensions common to Wright’s work and designs for Harlem: private versus public ownership and funding, racial segregation versus integration, top-down versus bottom-up planning. Inevitably, there are some ideas that mismatch: Harlem’s urban character doesn’t illuminate Wright’s ideas on sprawling, low-density urbanism or agrarian self-sufficiency. Moreover, while Wright dealt with large government agencies (such as the federal government and local planning agencies) Harlem was shaped by entities with greater concentrations of power, such as the Morningside Heights, Inc., Robert Moses, and the New York City Housing Authority.
Living in America: Frank Lloyd Wright, Harlem & Modern Housing installation view. Courtesy Columbia GSAPP
Fans of Wright may discover a few lesser-known unbuilt projects, such as Crystal City, a 24-tower mixed-used development outside Washington, D.C., or the Cooperative Homesteads, which would have been half-buried homes for autoworkers in Detroit. Wright’s struggle with individualism, collectivity, sprawl, density, and the outside forces that inhibited his designs are also in plain view.
Yet, while the attempt to detail a neighborhood’s urban history is laudable, Harlem’s story is only presented piecemeal through the various projects on view. It can be frustrating to see large Wright drawings alongside smaller reproductions of Harlem housing floorplans. Moreover, in many instances, the parallels between Wright’s designs and Harlem’s developments remain just that—parallels, not intersections. Still, rarely does an exhibit attempt the ambitious task of depicting a neigbhorhood’s complex urban history.
Port Arthur, Texas on August 31, 2017 after Hurricane Harvey. Courtesy SC National Guard/Wikipedia
Yesterday, news broke that eight elderly individuals at a nursing home in Florida had died due to an air conditioning failure; the building’s cooling system had shut down after Hurricane Irma’s winds knocked a tree onto an electrical transformer.
The incident highlighted how the storms have caused enormous calamity across swathes of the U.S. While the damage and fatalities of Irma are still being calculated—the human toll is currently around 42—the destruction from Harvey to the built environment may reach up to $200 billion. Hurricane Harvey–related deaths now number at least 60.
Architects Advocate co-founder Tom Jacobs said in a statement: “Hurricanes Harvey and Irma have brought destruction, loss of life, and suffering. There is no debate that this is real and that it will happen again. There should also be no debate that, guided by our common humanity, we in the architecture and design community must do all we can to help ease the devastation that future storms will bring.”
Jacobs described how architects could push for the placement of emergency generators on higher floors to avoid floodwaters, the installation of more permeable, rainfall-draining paving surfaces, and finally the general raising of buildings.
Additionally, he asked that architects contact their representatives regarding the bipartisan Climate Solutions Caucus. “The most innovative aspect of the Caucus isn’t its content, but rather its procedural rules for membership: representatives must find a colleague across the aisle to join as a bipartisan pair…. This model—organizing in a non- or bipartisan way first, committing to constructive reason and prudence second, and getting into the specifics of policy last—represents true leadership in Washington, D.C. It is a powerful path for the urgently needed way forward in politics.” (You can find your local representative here).
Lastly, he wrote: “I also urge you to visit Architects Advocate for Climate Change and sign our open letter to Congress. Government policymakers have the greatest opportunity to make a targeted, positive impact, since rational and responsible building, energy, and environmental codes and standards benefit everyone.”
Below the Water Towers, from Pacific Aquarium, 2016. Courtesy Design Earth
Buckminster Fuller’s Manhattan dome has been repurposed to protect the ocean floor from contamination. Hans Hollein’s aircraft carrier now floats in a freshwater reservoir created by melting icebergs. Superstudio’s walls, Tatlin’s Tower, even Boullée’s Cenotaph for Newton—these all make cameo appearances in Design Earth’s new Geostories exhibition at The Cooper Union’s Foundation Building. But, ironically, these canonical projects have been enlisted to question the traditional disciplinary bounds of architecture.
Design Earth, which is based in Ann Arbor, Michigan and Cambridge, Massachusetts, is led by El Hadi Jazairy and Rania Ghosn. The pair teaches at the University of Michigan and MIT, respectively. (They were also recently tapped for the upcoming U.S. Pavilion at the Venice Biennale.) And while the firm’s name suggests an ecological focus, its Geostories proposals are hardly “green” in the usual sense. Instead, they’re what the architects call “geographic fictions”: the drawings aim to provoke architects to see the built environment at whole new scales. “We really want to say that it’s time to revise the existing canons of urban design and urban planning…to include some additional responsibilities vis-a-vis the Earth and all the silent partners,” Jazairy told Metropolis. As the Earth faces increased resource extraction, trash production, and water shortages (to name a few crises), “we are really hoping these stories encourage people to think in a more responsible way.”
Frozen Record, from Of Oil and Ice, 2017. Courtesy Design Earth
The fictions do truly operate on massive scales. Of Oil and Ice, a 2017 project from a recent biennial in the U.A.E., illustrates a seriously-considered solution to the Gulf Region’s water shortage: tow an iceberg to the Gulf and create new infrastructure to harvest its fresh water. Trash Peaks, from the Seoul Biennale, showcases numerous designs for waste management in the South Korean capital, such as a multilayered, volcano-shaped facility that uses fungi to mine rare earth metals from electronic waste. Pacific Aquarium, from the recent Olso Architecture Triennale, looks at resource extraction under the Pacific Ocean. Its Below the Water Towers project (the first image in this article) sees Fuller’s Manhattan dome transposed to the sea floor where, instead of protecting New York City’s air, it stops mining operations from spewing contaminants into the ocean. The pollution is instead piped to Manhattan skyscraper–shaped reservoirs that filter the contaminants. Drawings like these aren’t serious proposals but instead seek to build awareness of where resources originate and what happens once they become trash. “Maybe the sustainability discourse needs a dose of humor [to expand] beyond what seems to be a closed toolset of approaches,” says Ghosn.
While the projects’ fictions are sure to provoke a reaction, Design Earth’s drawing style may also generate surprise. Jazairy and Ghosn are fascinated by 18th-century geographic illustrations. That period’s illustrations, says Jazairy, are not about color, perspective, or hyperrealism: they are about straightforward “didactic visual information.” Adopting that approach, Design Earth’s drawings emphasize visual clarity, even featuring the monochrome and distinctive shading lines of old engraving techniques.
Geostories exhibition Courtesy Lea Bertucci
If you’re not a fan of the Design Earth’s boundary-pushing architecture, Ghosn says, “at the end of the day, they’re also stories, so if you’re not willing to embrace any of these projects’ own pragmatic, geographic sense, maybe you’ll still be able to enjoy some exquisite drawings.”
The reception for Geostories is Tuesday, October 17th, from 6:30 PM to 8:30 PM. (Event details here.) The discussion will include Felipe Correa, an associate professor at the Harvard GSD, as well as Franco Purini, an Italian architect whose drawings are also being exhibited at the Foundation Building. Geostories and Franco Purini: Selected Works are on view through Saturday, December 2, 2017.
Sidewalk Labs’ long-rumored smart city development in Toronto has been made official.
Sidewalk Labs, a New York–based subsidiary of Google’s parent company Alphabet, made the winning submission to Toronto’s 2017 Request for Proposals to develop the Port Lands, a publicly-owned area located just east of the city center.
This announcement kicks off a lengthy public engagement process. “Waterfront Toronto and Sidewalk Labs will devote the next year to extensive community and stakeholder consultation and long-range planning, focused on improving infrastructure and transportation systems, creating new models of affordable housing and flexible retail uses, and establishing clear governance policies related to data protection and privacy,” said Sidewalk Labs and Waterfront Toronto in a press release. The process will produce a “Master Innovation and Development Plan” that will be the foundation for the new neighborhood, dubbed “Quayside.”
Already, Sidewalk Labs has committed $50 million (USD) toward this “initial phase of joint planning and pilot project testing.” The Canadian government is committing $1.25 billion (CAD) to build critical infrastructure and flood protection.
The explicit mention of affordable housing is noteworthy, not only because Toronto is grappling with housing affordability, but because Sidewalk Labs CEO Dan Doctoroff has faced criticism that his policies as New York’s deputy mayor (from 2001 to 2008 under Mayor Michael Bloomberg) aggravated–or at least failed to staunch–the city’s ongoing affordability crisis. Additionally, the question of data privacy is no small point: the development will be a testbed for Sidewalk Labs technology, meaning that Quayside will collect enormous amounts of data from its users/residents.
Sidewalk Toronto is, if nothing else, highly ambitious, promising a “global hub of a new industry focused on urban innovation” that’s also affordable, eco-friendly, community-oriented, all with new public transportation and public spaces.
“This project offers unprecedented opportunities for Canadian innovators and will create thousands of good, middle-class jobs,” said Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in a press release. “The new technologies that emerge from Quayside have the potential to improve city living—making housing more affordable and public transit more convenient for Canadians and their families. I have no doubt Quayside will become a model for cities around the world and make all of our communities even better places to call home.”
“Waste is a design flaw,” announces ZeroWaste Design Guidelines, a recently-unveiled book produced by AIA New York (AIANY).
The book–much in the vein of the 2010 Active Design Guidelines, which AIANY also helped produce–aims to be an interdisciplinary toolkit. ZeroWaste Design Guidelines is the result of intense research and collaboration: multiple architects, the Department of Sanitation (DSNY), the Department of City Planning (DCP), and the Department of Transportation (DOT) participated in workshops and roundtables, while the book’s authors also conducted more than 40 building site visits and building manager interviews.
With New York City aiming to send zero trash to landfills by 2030, but still exporting some 24,000 tons of discarded material every day, the challenge is immense. As the book also notes, “designing for material flows in our buildings is not the same as designing for energy and water flows.” Trash takes many forms (recyclable, compostable, hazardous, etc.) and it all needs to be sorted and transported, with humans playing a direct role at some point in the process. “Design hasn’t really been applied to the waste field,” said Claire Miflin of Kiss + Cathcart, Architects, who helped write ZeroWaste Design Guidelines. “It’s really an amazing opportunity.”
The book details current standard practices and suggests new approaches. On the building scale, architects need to start planning early in a project to reduce construction waste while also designing proper collection paths, sorting points, and holding facilities. On an urban scale, trash pickup greatly affects the layout and use of streets (as any New Yorker who’s maneuvered around a trash bag mini-mountain will attest). Neighborhood-scale solutions include pneumatic tube systems, submerged trash containers, and networks of small neighborhood recycling centers, to name a few. As multiple AIANY members pointed out at the Guidelines‘ release event, creating trash bag–free streets could become a major amenity for residential and commercial developments alike.
You can download the full set of guidelines here. Project Projects designed the book, and will also design an exhibition on the same topic that will appear at the Center for Architecture in time for the AIA Conference on Architecture in June 2018.
An aerial view of the New Jersey coast following Hurricane Sandy’s landfall in 2012. Courtesy U.S. Air Force photo/Mark C. Olsen
This week marks five years since Hurricane Sandy, one of the most devastating storms in U.S. history, made landfall. As it rolled over the Caribbean and up the Atlantic Coast, the storm caused unprecedented destruction—unseen since Hurricanes Katrina and Andrew—and killed more than 100 people. The New York City area was hit particularly hard, especially in economically and geographically vulnerable areas on its unprotected coastline. When the waters receded, according to a city report, the storm left nearly $19 billion in damage. Although progress has been made in the half-decade since, there is still much work to be done.
In light of these challenges, Metropolis asked several New York stakeholders—ranging from resiliency leaders to grassroots organizers—to reflect on how Sandy continues to impact New York City, what we have learned about storm preparation, and what hurdles still lay ahead. Read their responses below.
BIG’s BIG U proposal for the Rebuild By Design competition. Courtesy BIG/Rebuild By Design
Amy Chester Managing Director, Rebuild by Design
Hurricane Sandy impacted New York City physically, socially, and culturally. We understand now that our shoreline is 520 miles of vulnerability that needs to be addressed.
Though our city has already done a lot, we are far away from being ready for another storm as severe as Sandy. Some of the long-term investments made in our city are not visible to us, like the upgrades to our subway infrastructure. Others are more visible, such as the raising of homes in Broad Channel or rebuilding our historic wooden boardwalks into concrete pathways. In the next two to three years, the Rebuild by Design projects will each break ground; these large-scale demonstration projects will increase social resilience by reimagining parks that will not only increase recreational opportunities but also protect our communities in times of severe weather.
However, all that we have already invested is not nearly enough. We need to rethink our city’s relationship to the water. How do we do that? We ensure that every piece of infrastructure we build is built for tomorrow’s environment, not today’s. If we build the berm to protect us from the storm surge, we need to build it to heights that will protect the next generation, 100 years from now. We also need to become smarter about our investments and ensure that every single dollar we spend on infrastructure brings us multiple benefits. We need buildings that produce energy, parks that store water, and green infrastructure that beautifies our city, absorbs water, cleans the air, and increases health outcomes.
If we do it now, our New York will be loved by the people who live here in 150 years, just as we do today.
New York City Mayor de Blasio makes an announcement about coastal resiliency in the Rockaways Sunday, October 29, 2017. Courtesy Benjamin Kanter/Mayoral Photo Office.
Bill de Blasio
Mayor of New York City [Spoken at an October 29 press briefing announcing new infrastructure investments in the Rockaways, an area of Queens hit particularly hard by Hurricane Sandy]
I want everyone to know, it’s going to be my administration and many administrations to come that are going to have to do this work. Global warming set the stage for everything we’re facing now. Global warming will take decades to reverse.
We will be in the resiliency business for a long, long time—not years, decades—and it’s going to take a huge amount of effort and a huge amount of money to increasingly make us safe, and it takes time, piece by piece, to make us safer and safe each year.
Still from New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) affiliated artist Anita Glesta’s WATERSHED installation at Red Hook Library, part of WATERSHED Red Hook, a large-scale public art project and forum presented by ArtW Global and The Fifth Avenue Committee’s “Turning the Tide Environmental Justice Initiative” in commemoration of the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Sandy. Courtesy Amy Aronoff for NYFA
Karen Blondel
Environmental Justice Community Organizer, Turning The Tide (part of the Fifth Avenue Committee)
Hurricane Sandy impacted New York City’s most vulnerable communities typically housed in public housing along its waterfront. Many residents were without electricity for weeks and most are still hooked up to temporary boilers for heat and hot water five years later. Many businesses and private residents along the coast were also devastated, and there is a need for an integrated flood protection system since our waterfront has many owners and businesses.
The challenges ahead are related to how we retrofit our buildings in order to reduce our energy and waste. But what we also need is legislation regarding value capture, carbon taxes, and a community climate protection act that holds corporations, developers, and everyday citizens responsible.
The key is public education and awareness through the arts. Artworks like Anita Glesta’s WATERSHED (2015) actually provoke and stimulate the conversation, and our local community-based organizations, including the public library, are exactly the types of spaces we need to carry out that work.
Courtesy Office of Brooklyn Borough President
Eric Adams
Brooklyn Borough President
Five years ago, a deadly force of nature hit our shores like nothing we had experienced before. Hurricane Sandy claimed the lives of dozens of our neighbors and destroyed thousands of homes, and as Brooklynites we take time today to pause and mourn what our borough and our city lost.
The winds and waves of Sandy certainly did all they could to shake us, but they could not break us. The spirit of “One Brooklyn” has shone as bright as ever in the still-ongoing process of rebuilding and recovery, and I want to personally thank everyone who gave whatever they could to help communities in despair from Red Hook to the Rockaways, Manhattan Beach to Midland Beach.
Sandy tested the resiliency of our people, and we passed with flying colors. However, we still face an incomplete grade when it comes to the resiliency of our infrastructure. The realities of climate change compel us to be prepared to handle storms like this again, and the recent devastation facing our fellow Americans in Florida, Puerto Rico, Texas, and the U.S. Virgin Islands are terrible reminders of what Brooklyn may face in the years ahead. Government has made some strides in flood mitigation efforts, but bureaucratic red tape has stalled or boondoggled far too much. Leaders on the local, state, and federal level have a duty to be as determined in funding and finishing these projects as our residents have been along our coast, from Greenpoint to Gerritsen Beach, Canarsie to Coney Island.
Let us channel the pain from this anniversary into a purpose of strengthening our waterfront, protecting our environment, and building a more resilient future.
Joseph Esposito Courtesy Ed Reed Mayoral Photography Office
Joseph Esposito
Commissioner of New York City’s Office of Emergency Management
Hurricane Sandy was a paradigm event for New York City. We have never experienced in modern times an emergency incident that so severely damaged many areas in this city in all five boroughs. Our decision making, our response as a city and our attempts at recovery (which are on-going) posed a major coordination challenge. After a thorough after action review, we’ve developed new procedures and protocols to more quickly and effectively coordinate storm response and recovery in the future.
One of the key changes following Hurricane Sandy was an update to the City’s hurricane evacuation zones, which are a critical part of the City’s Coastal Storm Plan. The City’s pre-Hurricane Sandy evacuation zones corresponded to the anticipated flooding caused by hurricanes categorized on the Saffir-Simpson hurricane wind scale. The new hurricane evacuation zones (1 through 6) reflect more sophisticated modeling and forecasting from the National Weather Service, including the direction and strength of a storm’s winds. These more refined evacuation zones allow the City to more effectively communicate with and evacuate those residents who are most at risk based on the characteristics of a particular storm. Over the past few years, we have expanded efforts to prepare New Yorkers for hurricanes. This remains one of our biggest challenges—we want all New Yorkers to know which hurricane evacuation zone they live in and have a plan for what to do when a storm approaches.
Control of nature is human folly. Recent storms have demonstrated once again that as a society we are not invincible to weather yet are unwilling to make difficult choices to reduce vulnerability. The $20 billion of physical damage and scores of lost lives have led to some important changes in attitude, which has, in turn, enabled innovation. But it’s not enough. In five years we should have seen more real change.
The concept of retreat needs to be recast as a heroic strategy—escape danger to live and fight another day. Our recent work with the Regional Plan Association for its fourth regional plan recasts retreat as a development strategy that we call Receive Protect and Adapt. Existing underdeveloped transportation corridors on high ground (which will incidentally be the waterfront in 50 years) will be up-zoned and developed with jobs and housing to draw people away from vulnerable properties in flood zones. The water’s edge will become a zone of action, relieving tension off hundreds of miles of coast, and protecting hundreds of thousands of residents, and hundreds of billions of dollars in property. Waterfront zones will be repurposed for recreation, agriculture, energy and ecosystem services including carbon sequestration, oxygen production, and flood control. Critical infrastructure will be buffered and protected. We also need to be smarter about leveraging our built and natural systems for long-term sustainability. The opportunity and challenge: to understanding, working with, and capitalize upon nature’s dynamism, value, and diversity.
SCAPE’s Gowanus Lowlands project proposes adaptive strategies for the area surrounding the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn. Courtesy SCAPE
Kate Orff
Landscape Architect and Founding Partner, SCAPE
Despite increasing uncertainty in climate- and weather-related stressors, we are planning for the next 100 years with the static tools and siloed regulatory context of the last 100 years. Innovation will spring from pilot projects that test, modify, and reframe these rules. We are working on this now in the San Francisco Bay Area through our Public Sediment project and will continue to test alternatives here in New York Harbor with waterfront edge design and in-water habitat design. The latter can pilot not only physical changes in the urban landscape but regulatory pathways that can unlock future system-wide transformation.
MNLA is engaged in multiple waterfront resiliency projects citywide, including the community-based planning initiative for Manhattan’s East River Esplanade. Courtesy Mathews Nielsen Landscape Architects
The good news since Sandy is that locally-based NYC initiatives are expanding the parameters of climate change and attempting to address a broader set of strategic responses. The bad news is that the continuing disconnects among federal, local, and community level regulatory agencies are stymying real change.
At the federal level, most resiliency implementation funding is based on stringent FEMA requirements including the reconstruction of a damaged or destroyed property in kind regarding location, elevation, and materials. Low-lying areas demonstrate that these approaches are no longer fiscally responsible—relocation must be considered.
Locally, slow decision-making on FEMA-certified projects by operationally-strapped city agencies is being exacerbated by federal and local flood protection data variances. Additionally, FEMA’s maps do not adequately account for sea level rise and rapid rain accumulation. It is politically challenging to change National Flood Insurance Program maps. Federal agencies should consider local conditions and offer broader solutions. New York realizes that resiliency requires a regional response, but action succumbs to inertia in the face of budget shortfalls and cost uncertainty due to varying natural and physical conditions.
At the community level, those touched by Rebuild by Design now feel they are not getting promised ecosystem services and broader community benefits. Better communication, engaging a spectrum of urban challenges, and proposing multi-valent solutions are critically needed moving forward.
Five years after Hurricane Sandy, New York City is stronger and better prepared than ever to respond to a future event, yet major infrastructure projects intended to deflect devastating surges—notably the Storm Surge Barrier and the Big U—remain stymied by lengthy approvals and staggering costs. While frustrating, especially for those in vulnerable areas, these delays have created an opening to analyze and accelerate less costly, more agile green infrastructure solutions, such as wetlands restorations at Jamaica Bay and Staten Island or the New York City Department of Environmental Protection projects throughout the five boroughs. And we’re designing and retrofitting buildings for resiliency so they remain inhabitable following flooding—whether from a hurricane or a nor’easter. Collectively these cheaper, faster solutions may allow us to reconsider the scale and purpose of mega projects, diminishing their economic and ecological impacts. In other words, the end result may be smarter long-term strategy.
Diagrams depicting SCAPE’s Jamaica Bay Eco-Infrastructure proposal, from Waterproofing New York Courtesy UR
Denise Hoffman Brandt
Director and Associate Professor of Graduate Landscape Architecture Program, The City College of New York, and co-editor of Waterproofing New York
It’s time to recover from the recovery. We launched Waterproofing to propose a systematic approach to climate change adaptation that would evolve with dynamic challenges as opposed to a piecemeal response that would leave the city in a perpetual state of defense against climate forces. Since then we have watched as ambitious initiatives like the Special Initiative for Rebuilding and Resiliency (or SIRR) and Rebuild By Design got caught in a mire of conflicting regulatory requirements and fragmented by underfunding as political winds shifted. What we need most right now is a clear-eyed assessment of what worked and where we floundered in the recovery process so that agency policies can be untangled and plans for systemic adaptation can be made that will outride the four-year election cycle.
Collage of Red Hook Island, a plan to protect the Red Hook community from the next Hurricane Sandy. Courtesy DRAW Brooklyn LLC
I was the chief urban designer in the Department of City Planning when my house was flooded by Hurricane Sandy. I stayed and saw the devastation first-hand, and I relied on my neighbors in Red Hook, Brooklyn, to survive. I tried to learn from the experience. I wrote a book about it, The Nature of Urban Design: a New York Perspective on Resilience. I went to teach about it, working with the best hydrodynamics professors in the world at the Stevens Institute of Technology. And I tried to convince government how important it was to fund resilience in order that we could improve not just the security of our neighborhoods but their quality of life as well.
Five years after Sandy, I have come to realize that we are out of time. We cannot wait on a rational combination of government funding, science, and philanthropy. We have to act on our own. We developed a community plan called Red Hook Island, and we are moving forward. One hundred years ago a new island was signed into law in New York Harbor, and then abandoned. We are reviving that island. If we succeed, it will prove what resilience can be: socially beneficial, simple to engineer, and profitable.
The Holding Project Courtesy Sean Cullen and Chris Millar
Cities don’t exist in a vacuum. Even though urban areas and their hinterlands are usually viewed separately, they’re deeply interconnected. Their challenges, which range from affordability to sustainability, are frequently on different sides of the same equation.
This competition from AECOM and the Van Alen Institute–dubbed hOUR City and just the latest installment in the Urban SOS® ideas competition series–challenged student teams to create more robust connections among those living within expansive urban regions. By expanding the “hour city” radius (how far one can travel from a city’s center, a historic metric of an urban area’s size) the competition aimed to provide fresh solutions and perspectives to regional planning. As the competition organizers wrote in a press release, “with the forces of globalization and dramatic geographic, social and economic shifts affecting cities everywhere, the time has come to imagine new ways to connect people in suburban, rural, and isolated urban communities.”
86 multidisciplinary teams–with nearly 300 students from 31 countries–entered the competition, which was organized with the help of the Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities (100RC) initiative. Housing, transportation, economic development, public health, and resiliency were prominent focuses in hOUR City. “It’s inspiring to see how these multidisciplinary student teams have responded to the challenge to connect urban, suburban and rural communities,” said Stephen Engblom, AECOM global cities director. “From multimodal pathways in Bangkok to bold new housing solutions in Melbourne and Belfast, and public health initiatives for vulnerable populations in Oakland, we believe the finalists’ ideas will bear imaginative solutions to real challenges in those cities that translate globally.”
The four finalist teams, which are listed below, will collaborate with the Van Alen Institute, AECOM, and 100RC to develop and finalize their proposals. Their work will be presented to a jury and live audience in Los Angeles on January 23, 2018.
Alternative Ways of Transportation Courtesy Wilaiwan Prathumwong, Perada Plitponkarnpim, and Patcharida Sricome
Alternative Ways of Transportation
Team: Wilaiwan Prathumwong, Perada Plitponkarnpim, and Patcharida Sricome
Location: Bangkok, Thailand
This proposal, formulated by students from King Mongkut’s University of Technology Thonburi, features a new type of multimodal pathway “along one of Bangkok’s many underutilized canals, connecting isolated residential communities to public transit,” reads the press release.
The Healthy City Vincent Clement Agoe, Derek Lazo, Serena Lousich, Mark Wessels, and Sarah Skenazy
The Healthy City Team: Vincent Clement Agoe, Derek Lazo, Serena Lousich, Mark Wessels, and Sarah Skenazy
Location: Oakland, California
This plan by University of California, Berkeley students is focused on public health. It seeks to better connect communities afflicted by chronic diseases (such as diabetes or asthma) to treatment centers “using traffic calming, recreational opportunities, and new transit options.”
The Holding Project Courtesy Sean Cullen and Chris Millar
The Holding Project Team: Sean Cullen and Chris Millar
Location: Belfast, Northern Ireland
Two students from Queen’s University Belfast propose building prefabricated micro-units on vacant, publicly-owned sites in Belfast. The plan, which would promote affordability and economic development, is aimed at renters aged 18 to 35 and would see “tenants…set aside 20 percent of their monthly rent as savings.”
New Suburban Living Courtesy Lisa Ann Garner and Lauren Garner
New Suburban Living Team: Lisa Ann Garner and Lauren Garner
Location:Melbourne, Australia
These two students, from the Universität Der Künste and RMIT University, respectively, developed new housing typologies that aim to address housing shortfalls in Melbourne’s suburbs.
The RPA’s Fourth Regional Plan includes a recommendation to turn the New Jersey Meadowlands into a national park that would also absorb storm surges. Courtesy RPA
Any New Yorker will tell you the city’s transportation system can be an ordeal. Taking the subway sometimes feels gambling your $2.75 fare, hoping that everything works and you don’t lose minutes or hours. Instead of a customer-oriented transit approach, “pain threshold is our management system,” joked Regional Plan Association (RPA) President Tom Wright. But expanding that transportation network and enacting deep reforms to it are just two small facets of the RPA’s Fourth Regional Plan, a massive scheme that seeks to reshape how the New York metropolitan region functions and grows.
The RPA is a planning non-profit that has long influenced the tristate area. The organization’s large schemes (released in 1923, 1968, 1996, and now in 2017) have been its primary instruments of change. These plans are (for the most part) not intended for immediate implementation. Rather, they seek to generate discussion and plant ideas for future use. “We don’t make these plans to convince anyone currently in office,” said Wright at a press event. In many ways, New York City has been the victim of its own success, attracting 1.8 million new jobs and 3 million new residents from 1990 to 2015. With up to 3.7 million more residents living in the region by 2040, ensuring affordability is one of the plan’s critical goals. (No small task when, according to the RPA, the median income for the bottom 50% of the population hasn’t changed since 2000.) Add in an underfunded transportation system, climate change, and lagging infrastructure, and the challenges mount. In response, the RPA’s recommendations range from monumental projects to subtle technological solutions.
The RPA wants to avoid Bay Area–levels of housing unaffordability. “We’re headed in that direction” unless change happens, said Wright. Seen here: opportunities for new, mixed-use growth abound near regional train stations. Courtesy RPA
In terms of housing, the Fourth Regional Plan recommends a bulwark of legal actions and policies to protect communities from displacement while also rezoning land around regional train stations for mixed-use development. These moves would, in theory, protect existing affordable housing stock while opening desirable transit-connected land for growth. In terms of the transportation system, in the short term the RPA is asking that the MTA and Port Authority be restructured to remove political motivations from key decision-making processes. A newly-created and specially-empowered Subway Reconstruction Benefit Corporation would spearhead the modernization of the subway system during the next 15 years. Newark and JFK airports would need a revamp, especially given Teterboro Airport’s perilous elevation one foot above sea level—a situation would likely lead to massive flooding in the near future.
When it comes to the subway, the RPA is recommending the city cease operating 24/7 to allow adequate time to maintain and clean stations. Without taking a few hours–probably around two or three a.m., when ridership is lowest–even new stations will fall into disarray. “The 24/7 should not be sacred,” said Wright. Seen here: the Second Avenue Subway under construction. Courtesy MTA Capital Construction / Rehema Trimiew, via RPA
In the longer term, some transportation changes would be hyper-visible projects: a new Penn Station South, new rail tunnels under the Hudson and East Rivers, 31 new subway stations, and a greatly-expanded regional rail system that could serve more than one million people by 2040. Other changes will be far subtler: with the gasoline tax and parking fees made obsolete by electric and autonomous vehicles, the city would have to transition to a digitally-tracked VMT (Vehicle-Miles Traveled) system to generate new revenue. (VMT, in essence, taxes the driver based on how far a vehicle travels, not unlike a taxi meter.) Additionally, the absence of permanent parking could lead to a re-greening and rethinking of streetscapes throughout the region.
The threat of climate change (rising sea levels and more extreme storm events) weaves throughout the Forth Regional Plan. The RPA recommends creating a new tri-state Regional Coastal Commission would provide “long-range, multi-jurisdictional, and science-based approach to managing coastal adaptation”; the Commission’s recommendations would be supported by new trust funds created by each state and funded by surcharges on different types on property and injury insurances. An expanded, California-style carbon dioxide cap-and-trade system spanning the tri-state area could generate $3 billion annually, money that could go toward many of the Fourth Regional Plan’s projects.
According to the RPA, the sea level is expected to rise six feet by 2100. The group is recommending that the low-lying Meadowlands in New Jersey be converted into a national park that will help absorb water from extreme weather events, such as hurricanes, thereby alleviating flooding in adjacent areas. Courtesy RPA
Lastly, the goal of improving public health threads throughout the Plan. The RPA is advocating for a new health awareness among planning agencies; these efforts would be spearheaded by new chief health officers who would ensure that all groups equitably reap the benefits of the cleaner air and walkable cities that accompany many of the plan’s schemes. “A rebuilt and expanded transportation system would connect more low-income communities, be usable by all, and limit negative environmental impacts,” the RPA writes in its Plan. “New rail service would open up the region’s downtowns to more jobs and other opportunities, and enable more walkable communities.”
In addition to its data crunching, the RPA conducted more than 200 meetings with 4,000 locals over several years. Wright cited a close collaboration with many grassroots organizations as being a key part of formulating the plan; such groups “collectively…represent more than 50,000 low-income people and people of color throughout the region,” according to the RPA. Seen here: distance to subway stations in New York City. Courtesy RPA
The Fourth Regional Plan is ambitious by design. It aims to “reset the vision for the region,” said Wright. While the RPA president admitted its schemes were optimistic, “we feel we have recommendations that will change the dial in each area”—specifically, public health, equity, prosperity, and sustainability. Though he added, “we have to be willing to confront [those challenges] directly.” And while the timeframe for the Plan’s implementation is long, the urgency is real. According to Wright, if the region doesn’t harness its current prosperity to lay the foundation for future prosperity, then its cycle of growth will be broken, leaving future generations to pick up the pieces.
SCAPE is working with the Gowanus Canal Conservancy to develop a plan for New York City’s Gowanus Canal that anticipates denser development and sea level rise. Courtesy Gowanus Canal Conservancy and SCAPE Landscape Architecture DPC
As the race against time (and sea level rise) to build climate resilience into the urban and social environment accelerates, some architectural practices stand out for designs that uniquely, and effectively, combine communal and environmental values and goals. SCAPE, a landscape architecture studio based in New York founded and led by Kate Orff, is one such example. A central feature of the office’s working culture is the emphasis on developing broad-based coalitions that can advocate for a given project. Additionally, nearly all of Orff’s projects focus on facilitating constructive encounters between people and different aspects of nature—especially waterways and waterscapes. Rather than shying away from activism and politics, Orff is upfront about her commitment to issues of social equity, feminism, environmentalism, and civic advocacy. Beyond SCAPE, Kate is also the director of the urban design program at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation (GSAPP), author of Toward an Urban Ecology(2016, The Monacelli Press), and co-editor of Gateway: Visions for an Urban National Park (2011, Princeton Architectural Press). This year, she was awarded the prestigious “Genius” Grant from the MacArthur Foundation in recognition of her work. On the occasion of this exciting win, Metropolis editor Akiva Blander recently spoke with Orff about some of her ideas and current work.
Metropolis: You wrote a thesis about feminism and environmentalism while you were in school. What was that in response to? Do those ideas continue to inform your work?
Kate Orff: I went to college at the University of Virginia and studied in this program that was called Political and Social Thought, and I put together a major called eco-feminism. There was this branch of feminism, which was tied to, for example, womanhood being closer to the earth. And I was like, “no,” it’s highly political in its conception. The reason that women also understand these deep connections between environmental phenomena and social injustice is that women are doing the groundwork around the world, like gathering firewood, carrying water, working the fields. So, I tried to use much more of a political lens to talk about women, environment, and making change. I was trying to tie together women who were making critical connections between people’s lived experiences and ways of making change that I felt weren’t happening in many of the environmental movements. Afterwards, I went to Harvard and got an MLA in landscape architecture.
So, there was all the political and social thought of the early years, combined with the tools of the landscape architect, and that is basically how I work. A major mode of working for me has also been very proactive and research-oriented; very motivated by questions, rather than just being a landscape architect in the service-based profession, which is how it’s more traditionally practiced. I’ve tried to foster this culture at SCAPE of advocacy and research. Not just responding to a client that says, “I want a roof garden here,” but trying to craft questions about the larger landscape.
It seems so obvious that landscape architecture should be rooted in a kind of environmentalism. But, it seems today like a lot of landscape firms don’t really foreground this environmental awareness or activism. Do you think this has been a blind spot? Why?
Well, it’s funny because landscape architecture is a very tiny profession. There are many, many strings of thought within landscape—there are people working in the National Park Service, in municipal governments. There are firms that are looking at just high-end residential landscapes for beautifully crafted meadows for very rich people that live in Connecticut, which is all fine. But it is a truly diverse small profession.
And what it has not been in the past is very politicized. In my reading of the situation, land policy and land use are at the root of almost every political issue in some way. I would say I do think the profession is moving more in that direction, and should move more in that direction.
A lot of what I’ve been trying to do and what I’ve been writing about has been this era of climate uncertainty, and that landscape architecture can’t just continue as before. We really need to be inspired by the actual physical changes in the environment. I’ve been very focused on the word “loss” lately because I feel like there’s this whole narrative around our climate is changing. But I’m also trying very hard to describe loss—species loss, loss of ecosystems, loss of salt marsh ecosystems.
Rendering of the Gowanus Lowlands project. Courtesy Gowanus Canal Conservancy and SCAPE Landscape Architecture DPC
It’s sometimes hard to address environmental issues because we don’t have the language to comprehend the scale of climate change. Saskia Sassen, among others, has said that the term “climate change,” can sound kind of nice—change can be good and the climate is simply changing. How do some of your projects seek to get people more aware of environmental issues?
I would say on a project-scale, right now, we’re working with the Gowanus Canal Conservancy to do this massive framework plan for anticipating changes in water level rising, land use, and densification around the canal. We’re looking at how we can make edges stepped, so that can get people closer to the water after the Superfund cleanup.
In anticipating this future condition, we are also trying to advocate in a very strong way for connectivity along the canal edge itself. There’s no contiguous access. So, the project is trying to anticipate a different social context, but one that is more just and that connects to people from surrounding lower income areas to make sure that they can get to the canal.
In other ways, we’re looking broadly at ecosystem loss. One thing that I’ve been focusing on is charting and referencing salt marsh loss in Jamaica Bay. The marshlands in Jamaica Bay are slated to disappear very rapidly, because of sea level rise, a lack of sediment, and excess nitrogen.
We’re also doing a Living Breakwaters project in Raritan Bay off Staten Island, which helps rebuild the landscape through a rocky breakwater structure. And we’re looking very systematically at San Francisco Bay right now, which is faced with extreme bay lands loss, because of lack of sediment and potentially very rapid sea level rise. We’re trying to look at these systems very broadly, but then propose very specific policy changes, regulatory changes, and physical landscapes and infrastructures.
Engaging the public was a major part of the Living Breakwaters project. Courtesy SCAPE Landscape Architecture DPC
You’re doing more than just designing something. You’re advocating to local climate-related authorities. Do you think that your toolbox is different than other landscape architects?
I definitely feel that we see every project as a chance for some kind of catalytic change of another process. Through some aggressive visualization projects, and through very intense science-driven perspectives that we have, we’re able to have the tough conversations with regulators, with decision-makers, and with agencies. If you do a one-off project that doesn’t have an impact on some broader decision-making context, or that doesn’t unlock a situation for the right project to happen down the line, then it’s not really a systematic change. It’s aesthetic. So, we’ve always tried to tie our work back to the decision-making context and the administrative matrix that is behind our built environment.
In Town Branch, our park in Lexington, Kentucky, we have this three-mile corridor that we’re working on. A main goal has been to engage the transportation cabinet about some of these issues, and see if we can use Town Branch as a pilot for ideas that aren’t really part of the playbook.
Everyone says they like to “engage the public,” but you’re also trying to unlock or remove some of the secrecy that surrounds processes that constitute the city and to have people think about the city a little bit more than just accepting what is given to them and saying, “Oh well! This is the city that we have!”
In a big way, I feel like we need to proactively build constituencies for the projects that we want to do. And those constituencies don’t exist in many cases. In the Breakwaters example, we brought the Fisherman’s Conservation Society and the pilot association and schoolteachers, and there was this broad-based coalition that formed around the idea. It formed through the lens of the project, which was about people who love the shoreline. In the Town Branch project, we did city lectures in an art space downtown that was open to the public. We wanted to solicit feedback, and explain the significance of their underground water system and what that could mean for the future of the city in terms of its livability, access through bike lanes and walking paths, improved water quality, and better habitat connectivity. We’re trying to build this coalition of engaged eco-citizens who are going to advocate for a project and help us envision a project together.
You have an interesting project in Be’er Sheva, in the middle of the desert in Israel, that has a big educational and training component, as I understand it. It also functions as a kind of open-air natural history museum of the region.
In Be’er Sheva, we’ve been designing a quarry park that is highly attuned to the sort of choppy sandstone and the limestone of the quarry itself, and we’re doing operations on that stone to make it an accessible park. It’s very based on the texture of the rock that is physically underlying the city.
What’s fascinating about the Be’er Sheva project is that, literally, this quarry helped build the historic downtown. You can go up to the quarry and look at a certain kind of rock, and then you can go to a station and see that same rock on the wall.
Another goal of the quarry is skills training, because there’s a lot of disempowerment in the city due to its immigrant history. The idea of the quarry was also to do skills training and job training for construction and for tooling, because there’s a huge job market for skilled artisans in terms of stonework. We’re trying to build a big shed on the quarry that can serve as a workspace for these kinds of training programs.
What are you really excited about and looking forward to right now?
I’m extremely focused on this issue of disappearing bay lands and salt marshes. I’m trying to highlight in our Venice Biennale installation these issues of disappearing salt marshes worldwide. In Venice alone, there has been about 75 percent salt marsh loss since 1900. Part of our project is actually going to be working in another space in the lagoon and bringing that basic concept into our room at the U.S. Pavilion. So, our Venice installation is this kind of activist ecosystem maker project. I’m very excited about that because I feel like it’s a way of bringing our approach and ideas to this broader global audience.
Frank Lloyd Wright (center, in beret) overseeing the construction of the exhibition model for Broadacre City (1929–35) at Taliesin West. With Broadacre, Wright anticipated the phenomenon of sprawl and countered it with his vision of an agrarian urbanism. In this decentralized “city,” low-rise homes, workplaces, retail, and community buildings would be interspersed (at great distances) with farmland. Courtesy The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundations Archives | The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library
The central issue facing the world of architecture today is sprawl. Surprisingly, the last architect whom both professionals and the general public took seriously to offer a comprehensive solution to the spreading of urban environments was Frank Lloyd Wright. Already in the 1920s he had realized that the megapolis had extended so far beyond its traditional core, which he respected but did not like, that its far reaches had become completely mixed with rural elements. Though we may disagree with the nature of the plans he presented in Broadacre City (conceived circa 1929, first shown in 1932, and developed throughout subsequent years), as well in his earlier proposals for suburban communities in Oak Park, Illinois, and his later Usonian houses, at least he accepted the reality of suburban developments such as the one he inhabited. He took seriously the way Americans live, at the time in radial communities connected to a downtown, but which he already saw reaching far beyond such hub-and-spoke urban constructions, and thought that architecture could make it better.
These days, architects tend to ignore sprawl. That is probably because those architects who see themselves as responding in a critical way to the built environment live in the urban cores whose essential goodness is now something we accept as a fact. Only very few theoreticians, most notably Robert Bruegmann (Sprawl: A Compact History, 2005) at the University of Illinois at Chicago, have tried to make sense of sprawl without dismissing it. In Houston, Lars Lerup and Albert Pope at Rice University developed ways to give names to sprawl that articulated its inherent forms (“ladders” for Pope, and “stim and dross” for Lerup). The Southern California historian Alan Hess has honored such historically important developments as the Irvine Ranch early subdivisions with insightful writing. Younger voices like Alan Berger, author of Drosscape (2006), have argued that we need to understand the history and logic of suburban and exurban development so that we can figure out how to act in a responsible, critical, and productive manner within its reaches.
We need to look beyond our urban cores because sprawl is not going away. The financial crisis of 2008 led to a dip in home building and net out-migration from downtowns, but the trend has now reversed itself back to the norm of continual expansion that has held true since before the Second World War. Although the Brooklynization of cities all around the country and world has received a great deal of press, let’s remember that, for all the streetcars and cappuccino bars serving the young and wealthy, these new downtown scenes present only a tiny fraction of urban sprawl. In Phoenix, where I live, they dream of 60,000 people living downtown—of a population of over four million in the metropolitan area.
Wright widely toured the model for decades and obsessively revised the project. His most fantastical version, the Living City, came a year before his death, in 1958, replete with personalized helicopters and futuristic cars. Courtesy The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundations Archives | The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library
I would propose that we indeed look at sprawl seriously, and that we use some of Frank Lloyd Wright’s insights to do so. We can turn to earlier examples of regional planning, such as Daniel Burnham’s 1909 Plan of Chicago, and find European examples of thinking about sprawl throughout the century, but Wright remains the source of the most original American model. What can we learn from Wright’s ideas and suggestion to make sprawl work from a social, environmental, and aesthetic standpoint? Is there anyone taking his work forward?
First, Broadacre City shows a respect not only for the Jeffersonian grid, but also for the democracy it sought to spread throughout the American continent. Wright imagined not so much a utopia as a refinement of the grid into nodes of trade and culture spread out through a landscape of farms that were also suburban-style homes. Following the ideals John Ruskin first articulated in The Two Paths, Wright believed that society should consist of communities that would collaborate to exchange craft and sustenance. The city, with which he had a love-hate relationship, would remain only in fragments, as a scattering of apartment buildings, small offices, train stations, schools, and cultural and sports facilities.
This is, in fact, what most of the United States looks like today—without the actual self-reliant communities Ruskin and Wright thought would emerge. The cities, although they have not withered away, have grown by dispersing into the landscape, leaving cores that are the command, control, and cultural centers for a region. Now we are seeing more proposals for urban agriculture and homesteading in cities such as Detroit, where homes are being renovated in the middle of productive fields recovered from the city’s rubble.
Moreover, Wright’s Broadacre City model avoids the hub-and-spoke conceit that was first popularized by Ebenezer Howard in the late 19th century and which became the model for American thinking about suburbia. Instead, Wright sees only urban cores and then a Jeffersonian countryside with small market towns like Richland Center, Wisconsin, where he was born, creating smaller moments of density in a continuous grid that is both rural and suburban.
Wright’s Broadacre City model at the Museum of Modern Art exhibit Frank Lloyd Wright in the City: Density vs. Dispersal, 2014. Courtesy Debra Pickrel
We have indeed moved closer to such a vision by the way sprawl in the United States has organically developed. Suburbs have stretched so far into the countryside that the exurban areas are difficult to tell apart from rural areas. Up and down Wisconsin’s Fox River, for instance, 40-odd miles away from downtown Chicago, former industrial and farm-market towns have turned into cores for far-flung exurbanites, with coffee bars and fancy restaurants taking over the main streets and small apartment blocks filling in gaps as places to live for those who serve this new economy. The pattern is repeating itself all over the Midwest and was already the norm in the newer, multinodal cities of the West and Southeast, whether it be Los Angeles, Dallas–Fort Worth, or Phoenix.
What Wright did not anticipate was that the accumulation of capital in cities would strengthen their cores as enclaves of power, even as they continued to sprawl. What he also did not foresee was that technology would not dissolve as quickly as he had hoped into the flying cars and other forms of automated transportation he added to his postwar versions of Broadacre City. Instead, we have seen the continual construction of more roads and warehouses, serving both the just-in-time inventories of producers and the equally time-pressed desires of far-flung consumers, which dominate so much of the exurban landscape. Now, the advent of driverless cars, drones, and other forms of more efficient transportation promises to fulfill that part of his vision.
What Wright also got wrong was the strength of the nuclear family at the core of his vision. That is to a certain extent surprising, as for most of his adult life he led an existence that was far beyond such conventions. His homes, first in Oak Park and then in Taliesin in Spring Green, Wisconsin, and Taliesin West in Scottsdale, Arizona, were offices as well as homes and became, after the establishment in 1932 of the Taliesin Fellowship apprentice program, veritable communes where a diverse group of people worked, lived, and engaged in cultural pursuits together.
In that manner, Taliesin remains a model today for how to create communities in sprawl that are smaller versions of American campuses, from Yale and Princeton to numerous land-grant colleges in rural communities, which have long served as the ways in which we tested and formed communities beyond kinship or place, as well as modern versions of the monasteries that were once the agricultural and cultural centers on the edges of civilization.
Beyond the large scale of Broadacre City, Wright also proposed ways in which the basic unit of suburbia, the single-family home, could be both intensified and extended. His early homes are pinwheels rotating around central cores consisting of the hearth, which serves as both symbolic heart and the locus for the technology that provides the services inhabitants need, bringing the logic of the skyscraper, with its core and window walls, to the domestic realm. He then, in a series of projects that started with a “quadruple block plan” version of his Home in a Prairie Town (first described in The Ladies Home Journal in 1901), proceeded with the so-called Roberts Block of 1903–04 and then a decade later scaled up to a quarter of a section (a section being the square mile that is the basic unit of the Jeffersonian grid). In these designs, he showed how the asymmetric units of his homes could coalesce to fill out the city blocks of suburban Chicago, creating shared open spaces and a sense of community built of individual units. Unfortunately, he never had a chance to construct this bottom-up community; though he imagined Usonian developments and a romantic housing development in Los Angeles (Doheny Ranch, 1923), his commissions remained for individual buildings.
Today, young architects are picking up on these ideas while eschewing the forms that made these proposals appear alien to potential home dwellers, developers, and builders. They are learning from both the Oak Park subdivision and the various versions of Broadacre City, but they are also doing something just as important that is inherent in Wright’s theoretical projects and writings: They are offering alternatives, holding up mirrors to sprawl, and in general making us look at the built environment that spreads around us rather than just obsessing about walkable streets and parklets. These architects are also the first generation of designers to do what Wright did, namely to look at and design for sprawl.
The most complete proposal I know is by Keith Krumwiede, an architect who now lives in New York City but who spent years in Texas and California. His Atlas of Another America (2016) proposes a Broadacre City–like division of suburban developments in the rural grid. In this case, however, Krumwiede has made an exhaustive research into the plans of existing suburban dwellings and has found ways to extend and combine their floor plans to create compounds surrounding shared open space. Though this densification and extension (there is much more open space in this suburban model than the cul-de-sac or plat development currently allows) might not be realistic—these are satirical compositions—the project’s vision is as compelling and as beautifully presented as that of Broadacre City. Like Wright, Krumwiede started with the grid and proposes an equal sprawl without an emphasis on central and subsidiary cores. Recalling Wright’s earlier Oak Park works, he starts from the basic suburban house and opens it up, connecting it to a larger community. He does so with current forms and conditions, and, in his proposal for his larger building blocks, even seems to be imagining the kind of collective community Wright built at Taliesin.
Similarly, the young architects Ashley Bigham and Erik Herrmann created Safety Not Guaranteed, in which they represent suburban homes in models that extend and warp into the fortresses that they have become. In this manner, they expose the fact that we cocoon ourselves in our homes, and show how we might confront our own paranoia and become more playful—in one case quite literally, as they let visitors play with the models in a sandbox. This is not a direct continuation of Wright’s work but a critical commentary on the myths he articulated with such power.
In their 2016 project, Safety Not Guaranteed, architects Ashley Bigham and Erik Herrmann explore similar territory as Krumwiede, looking at the suburban house typology. But where Krumwiede’s project is planimetric, Bigham and Herrmann explore the volumetric consequences of densifying sprawl. Courtesy Outpost Office
On an even more theoretical, but also visually more compelling, level, the artist Doug Aitken, whose videos are among the most haunting explorations of sprawl I know, constructed an installation, Mirage, for the Desert X art installation in California’s Coachella Valley that turns every surface of a suburban home into a mirror. The standard ranch house dematerializes and reflects and intensifies the gridded sprawl around its disappearing shape. The model is meant to travel throughout America mirroring and making us aware of sprawl the same way Broadacre City’s model did.
Desert X installation view of Doug Aitken, Mirage, 2017. Photography by Lance Gerber, courtesy the artist and Desert X
There are more concrete models for developing sprawl, but most still concentrate on creating transit-oriented developments or reducing the cost and wastage of suburban construction. A good example is a project by Matthew Salenger of coLAB Studio, the Vali Homes Prototype, which shows how we can make the basic home unit more sustainable and affordable. Starting with manufactured components that can be easily assembled, and assuming small footprints that emphasize the relationship between the houses’ interiors and both the landscape and the community, Salenger and others are picking up on the experiments Wright first made in Oak Park and imagining how they might work in today’s suburbs.
What all these projects lack, however, is a concrete analysis of the economic, physical, and historical definitions of sprawl, coupled with a proposal as to how we might be able to work within and beyond those definitions to create a suburban world that is more sustainable, connective, socially open, and just more beautiful. Frank Lloyd Wright set us all a challenge; it is up to us to design a better sprawl.
For architecture firm Brooks + Scarpa, adapting to sea level change is more important than resisting it. Its South Florida office developed an urban planning framework for dealing with the increasingly intense and frequent flooding of Fort Lauderdale’s coastline. Courtesy Brooks + Scarpa
Images of the havoc that natural disasters wreak upon the built environment are part of our cultural consciousness. They have been since the birth of photography. Yet the past decade or so has seen a worrisome convergence: the parallel increases in the ubiquity of media technology and the number and severity of devastating storms, which are arguably linked to climate change. Katrina: drowned New Orleans freeways and neighborhoods (the latter re-created in Beyoncé’s 2016 “Formation” music video). Sandy: a darkened Manhattan shot by Iwan Baan. Harvey: Houston’s graybrown floodwaters captured by drone photography. Irma: cell phone footage of a battered port town in the British Virgin Islands.
The degree to which the two are connected—and the importance of that link—was most acute when Hurricane Maria tore through Puerto Rico, cutting out power and destroying telecommunications infrastructure. The Washington Post even attributed the Trump administration’s delayed response in part to not seeing the wreckage.
It’s easy to picture the aftermath of a crisis. But how do we visualize the calm before the storm—resilience in the face of more frequent 100-year floods and storm surges, and rising sea levels? Policies, regulations, and infrastructures that govern a city’s ability to bounce back from disaster are largely invisible—until they fail.
Port Arthur, Texas on August 31, 2017, after Hurricane Harvey.Courtesy SC National Guard/Wikipedia
Getting people to adjust to climate realities is challenging. We assume that planning regulations and zoning are in place to protect us. Yet the market often pushes development precariously into potentially hazardous areas, betting on a 100- or 500-year probability.
“No matter how many data points or models you show, no one likes being told not to build somewhere,” says Otis Rolley, a director at 100 Resilient Cities. “It can be difficult and emotional to think about building differently—it is not based on politics or inequity, but about their well-being and the overall wellbeing of the city.”
Landscape architect and educator Chris Reed of Stoss thinks that designing infrastructural spectacles could help the public understand what’s at stake. His fall 2016 studio at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design (GSD) took on a pre-Harvey Houston as a site to investigate how to use landscape to address 21st-century realities of demographics, economics, and climate, among other things. For their studio project, graduate students Louise Roland and Jonah Susskind proposed retrofits of former water treatment pools to create a public pool and a multistory tower with a gushing fountain. If that whimsical fountain were built, it would serve as a daily reminder to the public that water is both a resource and a threat.
Architect Chris Reed led a 2016 studio from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design to a pre-Harvey Houston, charging students to devise designs for the blighted and scarred landscape along the Buffalo Bayou. Seen here: Louise Roland and Jonah Susskind’s project imagines a wetland park fashioned from the area’s decaying water infrastructure. Courtesy Louise Roland and Jonah Susskind
For Rolley, the recent storms did bring more public awareness, validating the importance of the work and a comprehensive idea of resilience that is social and economic as well as infrastructural. Yet it’s what he calls the “pre-covery” that remains unseen. “We do the pre-work in understanding the human and physical systems at play and how they can adapt to the shocks and stresses we will face,” he says. “Through data, analysis, and case studies, we advance stories and ideas within the cities we serve. Our goal is to change their approach to these risks before they occur.”
He points to an example in the San Juan, Puerto Rico, neighborhood of Playita, near the Los Corozos Lagoon, where Chief Resilience Officer Alejandra Castrodad-Rodriguez worked with the community, showing residents data models and maps of areas in jeopardy and having conversations about the danger. He estimates that 100 lives were saved, noting that because of those models people understood the risks and evacuated.
Also from Reed’s GSD studio: Endless Liquid Surfaces, a project by Xun Liu and Ziwei Zhang, envisions the rewilding of the bayou, spurred by rising water levels. Over time, the city’s concrete freeways would be reclaimed by forest and fauna. The student work is collected in Retooling Metropolis: Working Landscapes, Emergent Urbanism (Harvard University Graduate School of Design, 2017). Courtesy Xun Liu and Ziwei Zhang
As this year’s hurricane season has shown, the optimistic (and perhaps even Modernist) goal of full recovery no matter where we build and what happens is no longer viable. And so there’s a growing tendency among designers and planners to scrap the word resiliency for adaptation, a term that is a bit of a fatalist’s reality check. “Resiliency has gone the way of sustainability—it has lost its meaning,” says Reed. “I subscribe to an ecologist’s definition of resiliency: the ability to adapt to new conditions. A wetland, for instance, changes and evolves over time.”
In Blue Dunes: Climate Change by Design (Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 2017), which tracks the development of WXY Architecture and West 8’s post–Hurricane Sandy barrier island proposal for Rebuild by Design, editor Jesse M. Keenan stresses the performative urgency of adaptation, writing “People need to change the way that they produce and consume in response or in preparation to climate change.” Perhaps then, in lieu of arguing for more robust buildings, architects have a responsibility to use their design and representation skills to help a larger public understand what a coastline looks like without buildings, and how a restored ecosystem would better protect inland development.
Blue Dunes, a project to protect the Mid-Atlantic coast from powerful storms like Hurricane Sandy, was originally conceived by West 8 and WXY Architecture as a proposal for the Rebuild by Design national competition in 2013. The team called for large-scale littoral construction works, mainly artificial island barriers capable of both absorbing storm surges and supporting new ecologies (this dual aspect differentiates these “blue dunes” from seawalls). Courtesy WXY Architecture
Architect Jeffrey Huber was a Florida adolescent when he saw his house destroyed by Hurricane Andrew. Now a principal at Brooks + Scarpa, he manages the firm’s South Florida office, where he is a director of planning and urban design. Huber rode out Irma in Fort Lauderdale, which weathered the storm but lost power for a week. Heat-related deaths followed across the state. The situation illustrates the difference between resilience and adaptation: Buildings were resilient and survived, but were ill-suited to what came next. “We are only chasing a symptom,” Huber says angrily. “We aren’t dealing with the inability of our contemporary architecture to allow us to live within the climate.”
Dubbed Salty Urbanism, Brooks + Scarpa’s project calls for “strategic retreat from the most vulnerable shoreline,” which would in turn lead to the creation of marshes, sand dunes, oyster reefs, energy farms, and even “amphibious neighborhoods.” Courtesy Brooks + Scarpa
The firm developed a framework for adapting to sea level rise in Fort Lauderdale. Unlike in places like Houston or New Orleans, where low-lying areas affected by flooding are often improvised, underserved communities with few resources for recovery when disaster hits, Florida’s wealthy live precariously on its coast. For the privilege of a sea view, residents will risk the storms and file repeated insurance claims. So Brooks + Scarpa’s proposal for the city includes both urban and architectural adaptation, such as adding salt water–tolerant plants and allowing land to become watery mangrove ecosystems. Home adaptations include building stilts, berms, mounds, or floating structures, and moving structures to higher ground. One of the firm’s scenarios calls for retreating entirely from the coastal edge and letting lowlands rewild into a green infrastructure that can absorb sea level rise over the next century.
Rendering from Salty Urbanism. Courtesy Brooks + Scarpa
Recently in the opinion pages of the Houston Chronicle, Albert Pope, the Gus Sessions Wortham Professor of Architecture at Rice University, similarly called for a tactical retreat from the city’s 100-year floodplain. His op-ed proposed a phased buyout of some 140,000 residential properties that are in harm’s way and reimagining the city’s 150-milelong Bayou Greenways as an expanded floodplain. Just under the surface of his argument lurks the infuriating knowledge that property damage and deaths could have been avoided with better planning.
“Resiliency means you’ve given up on solving the problem,” says Pope, with a scholar’s perspective on the ebbs and flows of growth and shrinkage throughout urban history. “‘Retreat’ is polemical; in the context of economics, technology, or the military, we never retreat. But we have to get real about the forces that we are contending with, and this will require substantially changing our thinking about advancing.” He also warns that the recurring 500-year floods over the past three years will have a long-term impact on the energy sector in Galveston Bay—its ports and refineries, the economic drivers for the city, are just several feet above sea level. If that industry decides to relocate, the city will shrink by default.
Polemical or not, Pope’s proposal is radical in that it offers up one possible solution to visualizing potential climate threats: absence. Reclaimed landscapes across Houston’s sprawl could act as a public reminder that floods are always a danger. Sometimes it’s better not solely to fight for resiliency, but before the waters rise again, to adapt and retreat.
The Spaulding Rehabilitation Center, located in Boston and designed by Perkins+Will, was built 2.5 feet above the site’s 500 year floodplain to avoid flooding. Courtesy Anton Grassl/ ESTO
The article “‘Resiliency’ Has Lost Its Meaning: Why We Need a More Radical Approach” raised no new questions and shared no revelations about how architects, designers, and planners could or should be preparing for climate change-related natural disasters. The author’s thesis is little more than an argument over semantics. As global resilience director at architecture and design firm Perkins+Will, I have never participated in a national or international dialogue on resilience in which managed retreat, adaptation, and mitigation were not clearly defined factors.
Resilience—in the world of Otis Rolley and other similar thought leaders—encompasses all of these concepts, and all three are actively being discussed and/or carried out as part of resilience planning and design efforts worldwide.
Managed retreat, a somewhat controversial approach (and a political nightmare for those who work in election cycle timeframes), is happening right now via buyouts in multiple cities and other forms of “resettling.” Rewilding is a topic that’s increasingly coming up in conversation, too. Rewilding is an ecosystem-driven concept that basically means bringing nature—natural landscapes and native plants, for example—back to coastlines and other areas where it could protect adjacent developed lands more than human intervention ever could.
Adaptation includes managed retreat, barriers, hardening, and green infrastructure, among other tactics; every resilience plan I’ve seen discusses these concepts in some way. In fact, our own work most recently with Climate Ready DC integrates all of them, and the work we’re doing with multiple other resilience initiatives nationwide does the same. It’s just the right way to think about things.
Mitigation is still highly relevant and inextricably tied to the We Are Still In movement and the rest of the world’s agreement on Paris. Indeed, mitigation is the foundation; it can’t be skipped over to jump right into retreat.
To be frank, the Metropolis article is a polemic and counter to collective experience in practice. Those of us working actively in this area are trying to avoid this type of unnecessary boundary-taking. Moreover, it’s worrisome to think the design community is projecting this message in a publication targeting designers. We need to do the opposite: engage across concepts; empower multiple actors; embrace small wins, as well as major transformations, and help students coming into this profession to see the ways that we can offer expertise as part of a collaborative.
Resilience is truly the greatest design challenge that we have ever faced and addressing it will take lifetimes and thousands of designers. Let’s focus our messages on how we can do more together.
Rechristened the Wimbledon House after it was donated to the Harvard University Graduate School of Design (GSD) for use as a research center, 22 Parkside—as it was previously known—was the home of the architect Richard Rogers’s parents for many years. The house was renovated over a two-year period and hosted its first researchers this year. Courtesy Iwan Baan
Ecological concerns are top of mind for us as 2017 draws to a close. Destructive weather events have us questioning whether our current thinking about resiliency is adequate. Meanwhile, new sustainability ratings inspire some hope in their promotion of human wellness, as do the startups leveraging technology to tackle intractable problems in cities around the world. Against this backdrop, there are, happily, a few moments for enjoyment: Richard Rogers’ Wimbledon House gets a new lease on life while Iceland’s designers strive to create an authentic aesthetic for its burgeoning hospitality scene. For more, see all our 2017 year-in-review articles below.
To the editors of The Arsenal of Exclusion & Inclusion, the armrest is no innocent thing—it can be used to prevent the homeless from sleeping overnight on benches. The Archisuit is a project by artist Sarah Ross that attempts to overcome this obstruction while signaling its unstated intent. Courtesy Sarah Ross
“Armrest” appears early on in The Arsenal of Exclusion & Inclusion (Actar). The encyclopedic volume by Tobias Armborst, Daniel D’Oca, and Georgeen Theodore with Riley Gold (plus contributions from a host of architecture, urbanism, and planning notables) begins with “Accessory Dwelling Unit” and ends with “Youth Curfew,” but it is the armrest placed on a public bench to ward off unsanctioned sleeping that most efficiently summarizes what’s at stake throughout this 459-page book: access, control, and space.
As the three partners of Interboro—a Brooklyn-based architecture, planning, and research collective—Armborst, D’Oca, and Theodore are well versed in the contentious history of urban design and policy in U.S. cities. They manage to strike an editorial tone that is forthright but not strident. If anything, it is a bit self-effacing in regard to the legacy of urbanism’s discourses past and present. “For many nascent urbanists, this is where it all begins, with an excerpt from Mike Davis’s City of Quartz and an ensuing epiphany about space and power,” they write in a sidebar to the “Armrest” entry, all too aware that their example could be, in their term, “hackneyed.” Still, the trio stays with the lesson.
“The armrest is all the more insidious for how subtle it tries to be, masking its exclusionary intent as a utilitarian or decorative element of the bench’s design,” they write, adding specificity to the implications for public space.
True to the book’s title, the armrest is not simply a tool designed to deter the homeless—it is a weapon. Although it is tempting to take the “arsenal” of The Arsenal of Exclusion & Inclusion as rhetorical styling and read the term as a stand-in for “archive” or “atlas,” the editors are literal in their interpretation, thus placing the volume in a canon of countercultural texts that ask a reader to be complicit in radical wordplay. Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog made normative the techno-ecotopias of the back-to-the-land movement in the ’60s and early ’70s. The Anarchist Cookbook, published in 1971 as a protest against the Vietnam War, put recipes for revolution within reach. (When I was a high school student in Berkeley, California, I read the Cookbook while sitting in the reference room of the main branch of the Berkeley Public Library.) “Bomb,” however, is the only actual weapon listed in The Arsenal’s table of contents.
The book presents an inventory of design elements—156 in total—with the aim of illustrating how “access to urban space is governed by a diverse, contingent, and often contradictory set of policies, practices, and physical artifacts.” Pictured: An illustration of the contemporary city, chockfull of “weapons,” obstructions, and loopholes. Courtesy Interboro
Rather than mix up a batch of Molotov cocktails, Interboro’s publication arms citizen activists and urbanists with greater knowledge about the forces at work in the cities. The Arsenal comes at a critical time when interest in the urban realm has moved beyond the innocence of tactical urbanism, with its ubiquitous vocabulary of parklets and bike lanes, and now includes protest movements to fight the perceived agents of gentrification. In the introduction, entries including policies, artifacts, and practices are broken into munitions categories, such as weapons both housing-related (“Insurance Redlining”) and public space–related (‘“No Loitering” Signs”).
Other entries entice with ambiguous meanings. Under seemingly benign weapons: “Book.” At first, this entry promises a “pen is mightier than the sword” explanation—that the printed word is the last stand for equity. And while the editors clearly believe in the distribution of content as a democratic act (otherwise, why go through the arduous task of publishing such a book?), it is a relief to find a more pedestrian description: In a nod to the First Amendment, New York City street vendors can mostly circumvent business licenses and fees by selling books and magazines. Deployed in this way, books are used as a weapon of inclusion, a legal tool that allows more people to occupy the street.
Interboro began work on much of the content that would ultimately make up The Arsenal in 2008 when the practice was asked to curate an exhibition for the 2009 International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam addressing the theme “Open City: Designing Coexistence.” Looking back after nearly a decade, the reflection on an open and inclusive society seems idyllic, even idealistic—as if the Summer of Love had followed the Manson Family murders. Economic and political events in the U.S. in the past few years have had an indelible impact on our culture and cities. Assumptions, especially within design and architecture circles, that we are moving toward a societally just (or even simply a politically neutral) urbanism no longer hold water. Armborst, D’Oca, and Theodore do their best to address this temporal shift, ticking off several critical moments during the decade. On the changes between then and now, they write: “The St. Louis suburb of Ferguson was unknown to most Americans outside Missouri. ‘Black Lives Matter’ was not yet exploding across social media platforms. Zuccotti Park was just another Privately Owned Public Space in Lower Manhattan.”
The armrest placed on a public bench to ward off unsanctioned sleeping most efficiently summarizes what’s at stake throughout this 459-page book: access, control, and space.
And still, it is with a sour sensation that a reader knows that so many more moments—from the Women’s March to Muslim bans to white supremacist rallies in Charlottesville, Virginia—have rocked U.S. cities over the past year. The most contemporary entry is “Sanctuary City,” with that movement’s stated resistance to the administration’s deployment of ICE squads to round up undocumented immigrants. The figure and agenda of President Trump haunts each page, of course—especially in a discussion of racist and classist practices, both historical and contemporary, that have limited access to housing and services. (It was just over a year ago that stories surfaced about the Trump Organization’s deliberate segregation of minority tenants, its total disregard for the Fair Housing Act of 1968, and the subsequent lawsuit leveled against Trump and his father, Fred, by the Department of Justice.) Three successive entries—“Racial Deed Restriction,” “Racial Steering,” and “Racial Zoning”—tell a narrative, beginning in the 19th century, of methodical discrimination against nonwhite populations on the part of private developers, real estate brokers, and city government.
That segregation, both physical and sociological, is still with us today. The Arsenal covers it as it sprawls across the United States, stretching from Manhattan to Malibu and from Detroit to the U.S.-Mexico border. In bonus material accompanying “Racial Steering,” the editors cite a 2006 case study in which the Corcoran Group, a large New York City real estate firm, was allegedly caught privileging white clients in an investigation by the National Fair Housing Alliance for the Department of Housing and Urban Development. And under the very innocent-sounding “Farmers Market” you’ll find a lengthy and ongoing narrative regarding Kercheval Avenue, a long-standing boundary between Detroit (with an 82 percent black population) and Grosse Pointe Park (85 percent white). Because it closes the street between the two cities, the farmers market, a revitalization amenity much touted by progressive mayors and neighborhoods, unwittingly re-creates the barricades erected during the 1967 riots to keep black Detroit residents from crossing into Grosse Pointe Park. For some, no amount of fresh produce will undo a history of spatial discrimination.
There is a fine grain to Interboro’s understanding of what is inclusionary and what is exclusionary—who is allowed in and who is kept out: It notes that the very techniques that make a space welcoming to some might ward off others. Writing on “Cultural Preservation,” architect and urban planner Toni Griffin surveys a practice so contingent on heritage, identity, and belonging that it is balanced on the precipice between inclusion and exclusion.
In the “Busking Ban” entry, the editors write how banning buskers or performers (pictured) “makes cities more predictable and boring and deprives residents of their ability to express themselves in public space.” Courtesy Tim Davis
Some “see neighborhood symbols of cultural preservation as a segment of the community separating itself from the larger dominant American cultural norms, and as a result excluding those who are thought to not belong to that community,” she writes, but later offers a converse argument. Others “understand cultural preservation as an acknowledgment of our society’s acceptance of difference—the inclusion of all cultural narratives and their various representations as a reflection of the American story.”
When reading Griffin, it’s tough not to consider the debates going on across the country on the future of Confederate monuments and how such markers, many installed during the rise of Jim Crow not long after the Civil War, are weapons in a continuing fight over whose version of the American story will prevail. That Griffin doesn’t explicitly call out Confederate monuments in her text is not a criticism per se but instead illustrates just how quickly conditions on the ground are changing (and the near impossibility for publishing to keep up).
Indeed, throughout The Arsenal of Exclusion & Inclusion, the editors stress the complex reality of urban life and the dual functions of many of the weapons included in the pages. They offer several “tours” through the alphabetical volume, synthesizing entries into overarching narratives. Each comes with an enticing polemic. Tour 3 (“So you want to know the weak tactics of the strong…”) and Tour 6 (“So you want to fight fire with fire…”) suggest that the book could function as instructions for those wanting to build better policy, better housing, and better public spaces.
But it would be a mistake to understand The Arsenal only as a DIY handbook to the agonistic public realm. The subject at its center is not necessarily the citizen, the urban designer, or the politician, but the city itself—a constructed phenomenon shaped by the weapons of our own design. “We hope that this book will help us understand that things like segregation and spatial injustice aren’t the product of invisible, uncontrollable market forces but of human-made tools that could have been used differently (or not at all),” writes Interboro. The text ultimately embraces history over how-to. The Arsenal, then, could be thought of as an urbanist’s I Ching, but rather than divining the future, each entry tells us about where we have been and where we are right now.
Launched last November, this driverless shuttle operates along a 3/5-mile loop in Las Vegas’s Fremont East entertainment district. It’s one of the city’s many transportation-related smart city initiatives. Courtesy the City of Las Vegas
Metropolis is reporting from CES in Las Vegas from January 8 to 10—catch our latest coverage of smart cities, 3D printing, VR, and more, here.
“Data is the new oil,” says Steve Crumb, the executive director of GENIVI Alliance, a nonprofit that’s dedicated to introducing open-source software for cars. “Commercial organizations are foaming at the mouth at how to monetize [the data] and return for-pay services.” That was one of the major takeaways from several panels at CES today, though the value of data is just one puzzle piece in a larger challenge facing cities and the private sector alike.
Data is also like oil in that it needs to be refined before it can be used: artificial intelligence (AI)–driven analytical software is required to convert raw data (such as traffic patterns) into useful information. However, unlike oil, data is easy to find: municipal agencies and private companies already collect huge amounts through sensors, whether they’re in smartphones or embedded in streets. The greatest challenge facing cities today may be how to share that data appropriately.
One project in Las Vegas demonstrates how cities and the private sector can strike a balance. The City of Las Vegas, which is striving to improve pedestrian safety, embarked on a novel collaboration with the GENIVI Alliance: connected cars (i.e. ones with internet access) running GENIVI open-source software would upload information on their movement to city-hosted servers. These servers would then analyze the data, combine it with the city’s data on street design (such as the location of bus stops and crosswalks), and message the driver when potential pedestrian traffic was imminent. The pilot was generally successful, according to Crumb, and the City and GENIVI are revealing more about the pilot program tomorrow. (Metropolis will also be interviewing the City of Las Vegas’s IT director tomorrow on Facebook Live tomorrow at 4:30 PM EST.)
Transportation is a generally fertile ground for these kinds of collaborations, as car companies and apps (like Waze) have extensive data on their drivers, while, “as a traffic engineer, our decisions are based…on the best data sources we have,” says Joanna Wadsworth, a City of Las Vegas civil engineer. “What’s exciting now with the sensors, and even the cars themselves, is we’re gonna have access to a broad range of data. Not just a snapshot, it could be 24/7/365 data so we can see patterns and variations.”
Though the collaboration with GENIVI makes the prospect of capitalizing on data sound easy, there are many potential roadblocks. In many cases, one city agency doesn’t have access to data from other agencies (Some states, like Illinois, have implemented such sharing agreements). A similar challenge exists when it comes to the private sector: cities and companies need to hash out complex sharing agreements that deal with privacy, ownership, analysis, and use. “A lot of people have to be at the table,” says Cory Hohs, CEO and founder of HAAS Alert, a company that helps city agencies communicate with drivers.
Lastly, companies need to be convinced that sharing the data is in their best interest. However, the panels seemed optimistic that the private sector will eventually become less reticent. Helping citizens by sharing valuable data in the short term may seem like a charitable giveaway. Crumb predicts that “it’s gonna snowball” as municipalities get more and more data. “Cities will raise the flag and say, ‘We need help from the commercial sector.'”
Such a surfeit of data will be lucrative. As Noam Maital, CEO of AI transit analysis company Waycare, puts it, if “data is the new oil, analysts are the new bankers.”
You can find our latest coverage of CES 2018 here.
The site where Sidewalk, whose parent company is the tech giant Alphabet, plans to build its smart city development in Toronto. Courtesy Sidewalk Toronto
Metropolis magazine is reporting from CES in Las Vegas from January 8 to 10—catch our latest coverage of smart cities, 3D printing, VR, and more, here.
“In [the Internet of Things] and smart cities in general, security and privacy take [on] a different meaning than [does] traditional cyber security,” says Sokwoo Rhee, the associate director of cyber-physical systems innovation at the U.S. Department of Commerce‘s National Institute of Standards and Technology. “If you get hacked in a physical system, people die.”
Rhee was speaking at a CES panel on cyber security and his comment seemed to loom over the palpable techno-optimism prevalent among this crowd. Global giants like Bosch and Panasonic are clamoring to develop services for cities capable of improving efficiency and offering a higher quality of life, frequently by collecting data via sensors. Cities are also increasingly offering up their data (either freely or with conditions, depending on circumstances) to companies in the hopes of spurring the private development of new smart-city products. But what safety measures must be considered when data collection becomes more prevalent and sensors begin to track all our movements and behaviors? What happens when devices and infrastructure, both in individual buildings and the urban fabric, become controlled by algorithms tracking those movement and behaviors?
Rhee, in speaking to local officials across the country, has found that cyber security and privacy are at the top of their concerns. But when he asks them what they’re doing about it, he doesn’t get hear much about any comprehensive strategies. “The problem is that each local government has their own perspectives about security and privacy. That creates a lot of fragmentation,” says Rhee. “Industry players already know how to address these issues, it’s just a question of how much the officials from the cities and communities can embrace those technologies.”
So what’s to be done? Rhee believes local governments, stakeholders, and companies need to share successful cyber security and privacy examples that can serve as templates. That way, communities can “figure out what works for them, because I cannot tell, probably no individual company can tell” which solutions will work for whom. “We all have to work together to address this issue, but the real point is—it’s time.”
You can find our latest coverage of CES 2018 here.
Launched last November, this driverless shuttle operates along a 3/5-mile loop in Las Vegas’s Fremont East entertainment district. It’s one of the city’s many transportation-related smart city initiatives. Courtesy the City of Las Vegas
Metropolis magazine visited CES this year—catch our latest coverage of smart cities, 3D printing, VR, and more, here.
While the idea of a “smart city” (with driverless cars, sustainable energy sources, and new opportunities for innovation and economic growth) seems far away, glimpses of it can already be seen today. Semi-driverless cars are already collecting data on streets that could be used for urban planning. Drone delivery prototypes are a reality. The City of Las Vegas, for instance, has a number of smart city initiatives that include an Open Data Portal and autonomous vehicle testing.
Throughout our time at this year’s CES, Metropolis talked to a number of experts at the cutting edge of these developments: Michael Sherwood, the IT director for the City of Las Vegas; Jim Keller, the senior manager and chief engineer of Honda R&D Americas, and Rana Sen, the leader of Deloitte’s public sector smart city initiatives. We pressed them on what the state of smart cities is today and what challenges lay down the road.
You can find our latest coverage of CES 2018 here.
