The San Francisco Chronicle: The Bay Area will soon be a laboratory that tests how urban regions can prepare for the likelihood of sea level rise.

That’s the aim of a $5.8 million design competition being announced this week that will select 10 multidisciplinary teams and assign each a different bayside setting. Each team will have $250,000 to work with and is expected to come up with a proposal that not only looks good but can become reality and has the support of the community where it is located.

Dubbed Bay Area: Resilient by Design, the competition has been slow to get off the ground because of fundraising difficulties. Now the Rockefeller Foundation in New York has agreed to provide $4.6 million to pull off the ambitious 15-month effort.

“This is a great opportunity for our region to start thinking about what the future holds and how to manage that future in a way that’s exciting,” said Allison Brooks, executive director of the Bay Area Regional Collaborative and one of 12 members of the competition’s executive committee.

The competition is modeled on Rebuild by Design, which was started in 2013 in New York and New Jersey. That effort was part of larger recovery efforts in response to the cataclysmic damage from Hurricane Sandy a few months earlier in 2012. Continue reading>>