The Reimagining of Lower Manhattan Post-Sandy

In 2012, Hurricane Sandy reclaimed Lower Manhattan for Mother Nature. Making landfall near Atlantic City, it swept north, ravaging the New Jersey coast, destroying thousands of homes and inundating New York City with waves as high as 14 feet. Sandy shuttered Wall Street, rattling global markets, and for a moment the storm restored Manhattan’s early 17th-century coastline: A brackish murk of waist-high water submerged all the landfill that humans had dredged, salvaged and shipped to widen the island, and that now supported the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive. It also swamped a large cluster of public housing developments and a beloved but bedraggled ribbon of greenery built by Robert Moses during the 1930s called East River Park. The storm caused tens of billions of dollars in damage all across the region and killed more than 100 people. It was a sign of things to come and begged for a federal response. After surveying the wreckage, President Barack Obama turned to Shaun Donovan, his secretary of housing and urban development, and to a Dutch architect named Henk Ovink who came up with a novel federal competition called Rebuild by Design. Teams of architects and engineers were invited to conceive creative flood-protection proposals in collaboration with members of the affected communities. Several dozen proposals surfaced, and in 2014, seven winners were selected. By far the largest grant went to a segment of a wider Lower Manhattan resiliency plan called the BIG U. It aimed to protect residents in the public housing developments. It also proposed changes along the entire south coast of the island, which would be done over decades in phases. Officials named the first segment, which included East River Park, the East Side Coastal Resiliency project. Other winners focused on different places Sandy ravaged, fortifying Hoboken, in New Jersey; Hunts Point, the city’s major food distribution center, in the South Bronx; and Staten Island where the storm had wiped out several communities.

What has transpired since is a complex and rich case study in the challenges, frustrations and potential of large-scale, long-term public projects that aim to address climate change and at the same time provide social and other benefits through a mix of architecture, engineering and community engagement. The first part of the East Side Coastal Resilience project was recently completed. Other parts of the project are in medias res. Some are stalled, others still remain to be conceived. It is now possible to look back, evaluate what’s done, what’s underway, and project into the future about what should happen.

This will be the focus of this seminar: to think longitudinally across time – and about not just post-Sandy development but the broader roles of design, politics, and progress in the face of a rapidly changing climate and an increasingly fragile, combative democracy. The course is open to architects, planners, urban designers and anyone else across the university interested in tackling this broad subject through the lens of their discipline. We will meet with key players and visit sites. Students will choose a project suited to their expertise, whether it is to analyze and report on what has already happened – architecturally but also in terms of community satisfaction and tangible, quantifiable results – or to conceive a new design for a forthcoming phase of the project or at a related site. I am open to collaborations, especially across disciplines.

The goal will be to delve into the messy complexities of real-world developments, which pose obstacles for even the most well-conceived plans, compromising ideals, upsetting timetables and leading to larger questions about public participation, predictive analytics and the role of design in achieving tangible public goods. This will require us to do some reading and research for in-class discussions and shoe-leather field work: site visits, meeting with community groups and public officials, reporting back to the class on conversations and developments. This is not a studio; think of it as a petri dish for growing ideas and architectural plans around big challenges and paths to progress, with New York’s post-Sandy redevelopment as the cultivating agent. There will be texts to discuss, a short paper to write, and the final project, with the bulk of grading based on class participation and the final project. My hope is that we all come away with a richer, more granular understanding of climate change, of how and why things get done, or not, in a place like New York, and, fingers crossed, an inkling of what a healthier, more sustainable, better-designed city might look like.