Toward a more resilient Rockaway
With some assistance from RDI’s own Alex Wilson, the New York Department of Housing, Preservation & Development, the Bluestone Organization, and others are presenting a competition called “For a Resilient Rockaway,” or FARROC, for short, which is looking for “ideas for resilient development, strategies for high-performance sustainable infrastructure, and appropriate and responsive programming for the site” — the site being “Arverne East, an 80+ acre site located in a FEMA Special Flood Hazard Area Zone A section of the Rockaways that experienced...
Read MoreThe New Orleans Principles
My interest in resilience was first kindled by work I did with many others in 2005, following Hurricane Katrina. Seeing the devastation wrought on the Gulf Coast by this storm, several chapters of the U.S. Green Building Council, particularly St. Louis and Little Rock, wanted to do what they could to help out. I was invited into the process, and we organized a series of charrettes at the 2005 Greenbuild conference in Altlanta. Some 160 people participated in those charrettes, one-fifth of them from New Orleans and the greater Gulf Coast region. Out of those charrettes emerged several...
Read MoreThe old way: build a wall. The new way: work with nature.
A nice illustration of the difference between old and new approaches to resilient design: In flood-prone Holland, the old approach was just: build a wall. The new approach is: work with nature, not against it, where you can. For centuries dikes (and natural dunes where they exist) have provided the primary defense against the North Sea for low-lying areas in the Netherlands. And while the Dutch continue to maintain, extend and elevate their system of dikes, they are also “increasingly relying on techniques that mimic natural systems and harness nature’s power to hold back the...
Read MoreMaking Los Angeles Resilient
Lisa Novick has a very good blog on what Los Angeles should do to boost it’s resilience on the Huff Post Los Angeles. The blog includes a nice definition of resilience: “Resilience is defined as the capacity of a system to absorb shock and still maintain its identity and function. Resilient systems — business, social, ecological, you name it — all have redundancy so that, when a shock or increased stress occurs, there will be back up. There will be some elasticity: someone or something will be able to step in and perform when the usual relationships fail.” Novick also...
Read MoreRe-imagining Manhattan
You might have missed this in your holiday busy-ness, as we did: In December, Atlantic Cities reported on a project by a team of architect and planners from the University of Michigan to rethink Manhattan in the light of the clear danger of damage from future versions of Hurricane Sandy: From the edges to the center of the island, the Michigan team’s concept plan alternates marshes, tidal defense berms, floating neighborhoods, hydroponic farms and new parks to protect against flooding. It also retrofits flood plains with a new datum above the water line for service, emergency and power...
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