The remnants of Hurricane Ida caused major damage and death in the United States on September 1st, 2021, and 11 people drowned in flooded basement apartments within New York City (NYC). It was catastrophic because the maximum hourly precipitation intensity, recorded as 3.47 inches (88.1 mm) per hour at Central Park, was unprecedentedly high for the NYC region. The stormwater infrastructure in NYC is built for 1.75 inches (44.5 mm) per hour, and so understanding the dynamic risk associated with Ida can inform city planning efforts for climate change’s impact on short duration extreme precipitation events. We contextualize this storm’s record-breaking hourly intensity within the historical record as well as project its risk in the near- to medium-term future using nonstationary stochastic models.
Library
Since the Hurricane Sandy competition, Rebuild by Design, and the processes that were inspired by that work including, the National Disaster Resilience Competition, the Bay Area Resilient by Design Challenge, Water is Leverage, and others, have sparked interest in communities, governments academics, and researchers. To help researchers understand more about our work, and to continue to contribute to a growing portfolio of writings about the work, we have launched this library as a resource for all who are interested.
We would like to thank the University of Groningen for their partnership in locating and cataloging the articles and books that have examined our work. If you know of a resource that is not listed here, please let us know by sending an email to info@rebuildbydesign.org
If you are looking for the Hurricane Sandy Competition archives, please visit the New York Historical Society here.
A group of experts was assembled by the Society of Actuaries Research Institute (SOA) on June 4, 2024, to discuss how climate change is influencing insurance affordability, availability, and adequacy in North America. Specific topics that were addressed included concerns the insurance industry has including ones of which they may yet be unaware, factors that are influencing insurers’ decisions to offer insurance and how much and at what price, the gap(s) that currently exist between what insurance is offered and what is deemed necessary, possible solutions for closing the gap, and possible ways to fund the improvement in insurance coverage.
In complex area transformations, strategic planning tends to include a collaborative approach that invites a wide range of stakeholders. But because the perspectives and interests are diverse, partly conflicting, and dynamic, a unifying plan of action will not emerge without good process design and proper facilitation for dialogue. Designers are increasingly considered as helpful for pursuing a shared vision of a complex challenge, as they are expected to unify across organizational and cultural boundaries.
This report tells the story of how Rebuild by Design's partnerships with the private sector gave way to the creation of Atlas of Disaster – a report that clearly lays out, through maps and data, the physical and economic impact of major disasters between 2011-2021.
Discusses what games and play can reveal about contemporary processes of urbanization and examines how gaming, in models like the Resilient by Design Bay Area Challenge, can help us understand the dynamics underlying interurban competition in city development.
Theory and Society: Provides an explanation for how increased public participation can paradoxically translate into limited democratic decision-making in urban settings. Using an in-depth case study of one of the largest coastal protection projects in the world, the East Side Coastal Resilience (ESCR) Project, and drawing on global scholarship on participation, this article narrates the social production of resistance to climate change infrastructure by showing how the state sidestepped public input and exercised authority through appeals to the rationality of technical expertise.
Explores how communities around the U.S. have built local climate resilience, with a Foreword from Amy Chester, Managing Director of Rebuild.
Water: Focuses on the role of international resilience programs and investigates how these programs can enable institutional transformation.
Examines the politics around climate change response strategies in three cities—New York, Jakarta, and Rotterdam— and the mobilization of grassroots activists to fight the perceived injustices and oversights of these plans.
Sustainability: Addresses the contemporary debate on urban and environmental regeneration, investigating the need to establish new criteria to implement the defence of coastal ecosystems by climate problems. It looks at coastal vulnerabilities, starting with the environmental fragility of flooding, as an opportunity to regenerate waterfront ecosystems.
Provides insight into different climate change adaptation plans in the United States that use participatory long-term resilience planning and collaborative design processes.
SeaCities: Focuses on presenting Water as Leverage proactive integral design strategies in three Asian cities: Khulna, Chennai and Semarang. Through the three projects, the chapter shows how several water management measures on different scales can be combined in integral design proposals that, in addition to addressing climate change, also improve the urban quality and liveability of the cities.
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