Following my profile of Henk Ovink and his work to bring Dutch water-management ideas to bear in the Northeastern United States, I asked Henk to briefly describe each of the 10 proposals that the Hurricane Sandy Rebuilding Task Force has highlighted for possible implementation. Each was spearheaded by a multidisciplinary team in conjunction with local community groups. The next step in the process will see Shaun Donovan, the H.U.D. secretary and chairman of the task force, make a final selection from these visionary approaches.
1. Big U. (BIG TEAM) “It’s in the name: The proposal is for a protective U that would wrap around Lower Manhattan. The idea is like a lovechild of Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs: marrying a big infrastructure ask with community-based intervention. The challenge the team set was to protect communities that are on the edge of the island and at risk of sea-level rise, but do it without huge sea walls and with schemes that are actually community attributes.”
2. The Commercial Corridor Resiliency Project. (HR&A Advisors, Inc. with Cooper, Robertson & Partners ) “The team led by the consulting firm of HR&A Advisors looked at how much small business means to the region and how hard small businesses were hit by Sandy. They are businesses run by individuals, who are renters, community members. How can they withstand a storm and get back to work? The team came up with a financial program in which federal dollars are leveraged with private money to build more resiliency for these businesses. It’s a financial strategy married with local design.”
3. Living With the Bay: A Comprehensive Regional Resiliency Plan for Nassau County’s South Shore. (Interboro Team Long Island) “This is a big-picture approach for protecting Long Island’s South Shore. It involves building with nature, creating a smart system of dams, dikes and levees. There are north-south waterways on Long Island that flood in storms. The project would turn these into ‘green-blue corridors’ that would store and filter water. The project would also create new development opportunities, in which transportation, housing and water management would be integrated.”
4. New Meadowlands: Productive City + Regional Park. (MIT CAU + ZUS + URBANISTEN ) “M.I.T.’s Center for Advanced Urbanism, together with its other partners, found that the Meadowlands of New Jersey is the pits of the Sandy-affected region. Flooding and surge came together there with contamination to create an ecological nightmare. But this is also an economic opportunity. If there’s one place we should invest in, it’s here. The project involves creating a water system that becomes a natural reserve as well as a recreational amenity. It does this in part by enlarging the marshland, so that when there’s a surge, it can hold it, but at other times the water is getting filtered and cleaned.”
5. Resist, Delay, Store, Discharge: A Comprehensive Strategy for Hoboken. (OMA) “This team grasped that Hoboken can be an example for a lot of cities, because it is so vulnerable to flooding. It’s very urban, and its permeable character is just about zero. So the plan encompasses how to keep water out, how to drain it off when it gets in and how to store it. It uses parks as water basins and installs a new pumping system.”
6. Hunts Point Lifelines. (PennDesign/OLIN) “This plan focuses on the Hunts Point food market, which supplies much of the food for 22 million people. Strangely enough, it was not so much affected by Sandy, but it is in the flood plain, and if it had been hit, the City of New York would have been out of food within two or three days. The plan recognizes that there are not only food businesses on the peninsula but also communities. It says: Let’s safeguard not only the market but also the whole area. The plan would build a structure around the area, but in such a way that it fosters connection between the community and the market. There would be a dam, levee or berm, depending where you are. But the plan also says: This is a food market on the water, so why not make it so you don’t need a truck to get there but could do it by boat as well?”
7. Resilience and the Beach. (Sasaki/Rutgers/Arup ) “This project considers the Jersey Shore. In fact, there is no single Jersey Shore. There are three zones: barrier islands, beaches and inland bay. Each has different demands. The project envisions the possibility of developing on the inland side of barrier islands, so they could serve the community and as barriers. It looks at the boardwalk in Asbury Park as a source of protection for the beach. And in inland regions, it would enhance the capacity of lakes to hold water in a storm.”
8. Living Breakwaters. (SCAPE/Landscape Architecture) “The goal here is to reduce risk for communities on the South Shore of Staten Island, which is highly vulnerable to surge and erosion. The scheme reconnects communities with the water, develops breakwaters and natural barriers offshore and creates new oyster reefs, which reduce storm surge, improve the water quality and allow for beaches to grow again.”
9. Resilient Bridgeport. (WB unabridged with Yale ARCADIS) “From its very name you know that Bridgeport is all about water. But over time it became disconnected from the water. The project uncovers streams that were covered over by urbanization. The town does not use the river as an amenity. The sound side is largely unsafe. This is an overall strategy, encompassing 10 projects to build in more safety and resilience and reconnect the city with the water.”
10. Blue Dunes: The Future of Coastal Protection. (WXY/West 8 ) “This team said: If the ultimate need is to reduce risk for the entire region, let’s do that. They propose to build a set of barrier islands offshore that would cut the height of a surge. These would stretch from the southern tip of New Jersey all the way to Rhode Island. The thinking is: Reducing threat would save dollars, which would be a great business model. This is a very ambitious project that would create a new ecological system offshore: a place for birds and other species and possibly for people to enjoy. The plan requires long-term research, modeling and testing. They call it Blue Dunes because they function like dunes but are really islands in the blue sea.”
Because of a transcription error, an earlier version of this post referred incorrectly to one aspect of SCAPE/Landscape Architecture's plan for rebuilding the South Shore of Staten Island. The plan creates new oyster reefs, not "oysteries."