Project by Amalia Kamien, Kuan-Fu Huang, Jihye Park, Wenxin Dai
Raritown begins from a simple but urgent question: what does it mean to stay in place along the New Jersey coast when rebuilding in place no longer ensures survival? Beneath the familiar image of suburban stability, long-standing vulnerabilities have accumulated through fragmented mobility, limited housing choice, and an increasingly unstable relationship with water. Rather than responding to each disaster by repairing damage in isolation, the project asks how coastal communities might remain while fundamentally changing the spatial logic that produced their vulnerability. Raritown explores a new way of staying—one that gradually inhabits water through canals, floating housing, and protective barrier landscapes. Existing creeks become connective infrastructure, linking inland towns to a shared waterfront spine and a new water-based transit corridor. Raritown is a bay community that lives with water, not against it.
