Remaking for Resilience:

Urban Design for a Warming Planet

New York City will face tremendous challenges as we move into the next century.  Climate change threatens to flood this coastal city.  Dependence on finite, increasingly expensive fossil fuels could limit the city’s purchasing power and economic health. Population growth promises to add a million people over the next decade pushing aging city infrastructure past capacity.

This studio tasked students with challenge of envisioning integrated urban design strategies that would allow communities to anticipate these future shocks and stresses while maintaining a consistent structure, function, and sense of identity.  A large, underutilized industrial tract in the Inwood neighborhood at the northern tip of Manhattan offers an ideal laboratory for exploring resilient development strategies as we build cities for the next century. 

The proposed intervention seeks to overcome prominent physical barriers to link the new development with the existing community while synthetically integrating strategies for protecting the low-lying site from rising sea levels and hurricane storm surge, creating pedestrian and transit oriented streets and transportation infrastructure, and incorporating onsite renewable and carbon neutral energy production, year-round local food production, as well as stormwater management practices that restore predevelopment hydrological cycles.