Throughout the Rebuild By Design Hurricane Sandy Design Competition, teams encountered policy, regulatory, and planning barriers that shaped their design proposals and ideas, which demonstrated that many existing frameworks do not fully support resilience. As communities  move towards implementing innovative, resilient projects, these challenges could become even more problematic.

To ensure the policy lessons learned from the design competition were not lost, Rebuild hosted a policy roundtable in June 2014 with the Regional Plan Association, government officials, community leaders, and ecology experts, where Hurricane Sandy design teams shared about the obstacles they faced as they developed their design proposals. Discussions were framed around three topic areas– engaging communities, governance models, and nature-based solutions in climate change – and centered on whether existing policies, regulations, and planning processes fully reflect current and future risks.

Read the briefing book for the policy roundtable here and the roundtable discussion summary here.