The Architects Newspaper: How do you make waterfront locations resilient to the problems caused by climate change? How can you support communities to manage—and come to terms with—flood risk? As governments and developers reverse their thinking around the land value adjacent to our global rivers and harbors, these challenges are shifting urban design in new and exciting ways.

The Rockefeller Foundation sponsored recent resilience-focused work in the San Francisco Bay Area, an area that typifies the challenges faced by many cities and communities around the world, with low-lying shoreline around the Bay isolated by misplaced freeway infrastructure, and communities economically depressed due to decommissioned industries and the loss of jobs.

These communities face the dual threats of sea-level rise at the shore-edge and increased stormwater flooding from the uplands, with the additional environmental risk of earthquakes and the liquefaction of historical landfill.

The Resilient by Design project asked a team of local, national, and international design experts to search for replicable solutions to make communities more resilient to these dynamic threats, all of which are expected to intensify dramatically, in both the immediate and long-term future.

The project involved extensive data analysis of climate change vulnerability, as well as multidisciplinary prototyping of solutions for adapting vulnerable sites and communities, significantly pushing creative thinking in this burgeoning area of landscape architecture and urban design. Read more>>