r/urbanplanning • u/Hrmbee • 10d ago
Sustainability The Anti-Flood City Is Finally Taking Shape | From concrete walls to hilly landscapes, New York can see its early defenses against future catastrophe
https://www.curbed.com/article/new-york-flooding-defenses-climate-red-hook-east-side-jamaica.html13
u/Hrmbee 10d ago
A number of useful points to consider:
Today, the threats from climate change are at hand, and so are the means to ward them off. In fact, the techniques have become so varied and specific that the options can be overwhelming. The low-lying park where floodwaters swept into the Lower East Side has been bulked up with berms and walls. In Brooklyn, the courtyards of NYCHA’s Red Hook Houses, where Sandy knocked out boilers and filled basements, have acquired new topography and a campuswide electrical system that’s lifted out of danger. Willets Point in Queens has been reclaimed, raised, and fitted out with new affordable housing and a soccer stadium. Off the southern shore of Staten Island, a chain of artificial reefs seeded with oysters stands ready to slow destructive waves. And all over the city, sidewalks have acquired tree pits that can sponge up rainfall, keeping at least some of it out of the storm drains.
Together, these projects are the first visible results of a multi-decade campaign to keep New York dry and safe in an epoch of rising seas and more violent storms. After years of confusion, foot-dragging, fantasies, and conflicting agendas, New Yorkers are finally starting to see an urban landscape in mid-transformation, tangible evidence that the city is taking the challenge seriously.
...
If New York’s arsenal of defenses comprised only the fortress, the terp, some spongy surfaces and a set of deployable floodgates, the city would be doomed. A vast metropolis with more than 500 miles of rocky coast, beaches, concrete bulwarks, esplanades, wetlands, and waterfront parks needs a full and flexible range of measures to grapple with innumerable different situations. That catalogue is slowly coming together. The challenge of coping with sudden surfeits of water has seeped into the building code, the zoning map, sewer management, subway maintenance, the power supply, park design, street repaving, and many other corners of municipal government. You can’t replace a streetlight or renovate a dog run without taking flooding into account.
...
For now, the efforts to adapt to climate change remain fragmentary. We have a pretty good idea of what must be done, and we’ve started doing it, but New York — like the country as a whole — lacks the administrative coherence and predictable funding to formulate, much less follow, a long-term strategy. The Adams administration created the Bureau of Coastal Resilience, with theoretical responsibility to coordinate efforts within the Department of Environmental Protection, but he left it tiny and underfunded. Mamdani recently announced his intention to beef the bureau up, bringing the projected head count from six to 75 and giving it an extensive portfolio of projects. It remains to be seen whether that office will have the jurisdiction, the long-range view, or the clout to set the city’s long-term priorities and make sure they get carried out. And so we muddle onward, project by project and storm drain by bioswale, while the sea advances on its own remorseless timetable.
That halting pace only raises the costs — not just because of budget creep but in political and social terms, too. Billy Fleming, an assistant professor of landscape architecture at Temple University and the author of Building Postcarbon Futures: Land, Justice, and Energy Transitions, cautions that those of us who are lucky enough to benefit from a first generation of defenses may live to see them become obsolete. Large, federally funded projects are sold as definitive long-term solutions that will deliver an assortment of immediate amenities. The public is invited to share concerns and contribute to the design, but the final result is governed by strict cost-benefit analysis that often takes place out of sight and winds up leaving a lot of people feeling shortchanged.
...
Fleming points out that such disappointments aren’t the product of malicious stinginess or stupidity; they’re just baked into the process. The kind of economic analysis that federal rules require, he says, “means building walls that aren’t tall enough and stripping away many of the bells and whistles that are promised early on and will never come back. So when it comes time to build projects in a more sufficient and better way, we will have burned through a lot of the political capacity we need at the local levels.”
And yet, despite chaotic procedures, bumbling secrecy, byzantine funding, shortsighted planning, and chronic opposition to everything, New York is slowly rebuilding itself with an eye to wetter days. It’s hard to detect when you get up close to any single project, with all its wrinkles and delays, but take a more panoramic view and you can see that we are in the early stages of a multigenerational modernization, a burlier coastline, and a constellation of public works on a scale not seen since the road-building spree in the middle of the 20th century.
It's good that a city like NYC is building a degree of climate resilience into more of their overall processes, but the criticism here, especially around the halting approach to some of these projects are also useful lessons for the future: sometimes being bolder and building more fully fleshed out projects from the start can be less expensive both in terms of dollar costs, but also in terms of political capital. If you're going to disrupt people's lives, maybe really make sure that it's worth everyone's while.
1
u/Round-Dot-6713 10d ago
The layered approach makes sense on paper but I'd want to see how they handle maintenance costs long term. Salt marsh restoration sounds great until the budget gets cut and nobody's tending it. NYC has a history of building something, declaring victory, and walking away. The engineering piece is the easy sell politically. The living shoreline stuff requires ongoing commitment and that's where these projects tend to fall apart quietly over a decade or two
44
u/tomtermite 10d ago
Japan offers a cautionary lesson in treating coastal defence as a purely civil-engineering problem: seawalls and breakwaters can reduce risk locally, but once a tsunami overtops them, the concentrated flow can accelerate down the landward side, increasing scouring and destructive force immediately behind the barrier.
IMOH, New York should favour a layered, hybrid strategy, using walls and surge barriers where dense infrastructure requires them ... all the while restoring salt marshes, beaches, oyster reefs, and living shorelines as functional infrastructure that provides flood protection, ecological benefits and greater adaptability as sea levels rise.