{"id":59556,"date":"2017-09-19T19:24:57","date_gmt":"2017-09-19T19:24:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/metropolismag.com\/projects\/blue-dunes-book\/"},"modified":"2021-12-15T19:02:12","modified_gmt":"2021-12-15T19:02:12","slug":"blue-dunes-book","status":"publish","type":"metro_viewpoint","link":"https:\/\/metropolismag.com\/viewpoints\/blue-dunes-book\/","title":{"rendered":"The Bold Plan to Help Save the Mid-Atlantic Coast from Storm Surges"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Developed by WXY Architecture and West 8, Blue Dunes would construct a series of barrier islands in and around New York. A rendering of the project, which was developed soon after Hurricane Sandy hit the region. Courtesy Columbia Books on Architecture and the City<\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Resiliency seems to be on the tips of everyone’s tongues, from architects and planners to city officials. Hurricanes Harvey and Irma<\/a> demonstrated how vulnerable global coastal cities really are to sea level rise, coastal storms, and flooding. Greater attention must be placed on enhancing the adaptive capacity of built environments around the world.<\/p>\n

Addressing these issues requires thinking across neighborhood, metropolitan, and regional scales. This framework is inherently interdisciplinary and will breed solutions that are entangled in governmental and ecological processes. That is not to discount the architectural dimension, which can play a powerful role in communicating these proposals to the public. Blue Dunes, a project by Claire Weisz of WXY Architecture and West 8, combines all these aspects into a plan that would build artificial barrier islands along the Mid-Atlantic coast of the United States. The project is documented in\u00a0Blue Dunes: Climate Change By Design<\/em><\/a>, which was published by Columbia Books on Architecture and the City in April. Weisz co-edited the volume with\u00a0Jesse M. Keenan, a professor at the\u00a0Harvard University Graduate School of Design (GSD),\u00a0where he teaches and researches\u00a0topics related to urban development and climate change.<\/p>\n

Metropolis\u00a0<\/em>contributor\u00a0Akiva Blander recently spoke with Keenan about the project and its development, the relationship between climate adaptation and resilience, and the future of climate science in light of our current political situation.<\/p>\n

Akiva Blander: Let’s start by talking a little bit about the plan itself. From a technical point of view, how would the construction of barrier islands mitigate the risks associated with climate change, namely coastal flooding and storm surges?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Jesse Keenan: In this case, the construction of these dunes at a regional scale would mitigate one particular type of risk under a particular type of scenario\u2014inundation from storm surge from coastal storm events. It’s not a be-all, end-all. It certainly doesn’t solve, or attempt to solve, the broad spectrum of issues relating to sea level rise and coastal inundation. But, what it does is buy some time from those intervening storms that we know have a probability of occurring in a much greater probability than we care to fully recognize. Blue Dunes allows us to buy ourselves some time as we either adapt or build some measure of resiliency in various places along the coast.<\/p>\n

AB: In the book, you speak a lot about this coalition building\u2014merging all these interests and uniting all these stakeholders and actors\u2014and you really emphasize the interdisciplinary nature of tackling the problem. Is the main contribution of Blue Dunes<\/em> a certain built design, or is its goal more to advance a framework that involves all these disparate interests?<\/strong><\/p>\n

JK: That\u2019s a very acute question that speaks to the heart of why we attempted to accomplish with the book. The designs have a certain ethereal, sort of atmospheric condition to them. You have landscape. You have ecology. You have all of these various aspects. The places themselves, I think, have a certain aesthetic. They have a certain value, both discursively, rhetorically, and also practically, but what the book really memorializes, and I think is of value to readers, is that it’s a methodology. It’s essentially acknowledging the conflicts inherent to when you bring engineers and designers, scientists and urban planners, risk modelers and financial analysts together, where they come at it with different levels of risk and different thresholds of proprietary decision-making. Asking, for example, is it a community decision? Is it an ecological framing? Is it based on science or public policy or judgment? All of these decisions that need to be made in the design process and in the workflow are emulated and abstracted in the book, so that you get a sense that there is a way forward. There are challenges ahead that define all of this, but with some measure of careful planning and management, there are a lot of methodologies that translate to not only inspiring design but also informing and calibrating that design.<\/p>\n

The designs will stand for themselves. There’s a lot of pretty pictures that we can all admire. There\u2019s a certain ambition to achieve a high level of design, but it’s more fundamentally about the methodology.<\/p>\n

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The final Blue Dunes concept plan (2014) considers the effects, both positive and negative, on everything from food chains and water flows to migration paths and sand transport cycles. Courtesy Columbia Books on Architecture and the City<\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

AB: Going off that point, how realistic from both a political will and an engineering perspective do you think this project is? Do you see any possibility that it’s ever going to be sitting eight miles out from New York City in the Atlantic?<\/strong><\/p>\n

JK: The same way that we mobilized a certain industry associated with the space program\u2014and I know this is a metaphor that’s often used and misused\u2014but we have to think at the scale of the challenge that we have [before us]. Just in terms of the material response, not even the social or behavioral response, we have to mobilize a new industrial sector to fully engage this. From an engineering point of view, it’s totally feasible, and it’s feasible in terms of cost and any number of aspects relating to production.<\/p>\n

But, as we highlight in the book, there’s a number of challenges, for instance, relating to a dredge fleet, certain types of environmental regulation for testing the sediment and making sure they’re partially mitigating certain environmental impacts. Can we fully mitigate the impacts? No. That is a highly contentious aspect of the work. In terms of process and due process, it’s a feasible project. In terms of political will relative to the cost and who bears that cost, it’s less feasible. But, my interpretation from the very beginning was that this was more about challenging the conventions of looking at a particular project in a particular place, because if we focus our energies on a block or district, we’re missing the point that this is a regional, national, and global problem, right?<\/p>\n

Unless we’re fully engaging design across a spectrum of scales, and at least in a regional scale, we would be missing an opportunity to fully engage design, because you know what? We’re already doing things, like in transportation planning and investment in infrastructure, that shape a regional footprint. How can we mainstream climate adaptation into existing parameters at a regional level or at a metropolitan level that has a broader scale or effect? Because at the end of the day, we have to economize the limited resources that we have. Very often, working at\u00a0a bigger scale brings you that economy of scale. For instance, a focus on building codes is often misplaced because it is more fundamentally about land use planning.<\/p>\n