Fluid Futures: Regional Urban Resilience in Hampton Roads

The environmental and social challenges of our time, including climate change, environmental degradation, housing inequality, and racial discrimination, are often studied separately and are siloed within disciplinary boundaries that undermine the inherent links and common threads running through them. Urban space and its organization through social and technical structures (e.g., infrastructural systems, zoning laws, impermeable surfaces, post-industrial and residual spaces) heavily contribute to these issues and have often exacerbated their severity and impact. In coastal cities of the US, sea-level rise, as well as increasing extreme weather events, threaten the heavily built-up centers of population and economy. Yet, urban development in this country has been slow to respond and come to terms with the impending climatic and social upheavals facing these coastal communities. This is partly due to the one-dimensional and defensive-minded way we have historically built infrastructures and urban spaces which prioritize efficiency and cost-effectiveness over social benefits. By externalizing climatic and ecological dynamics —through hardening of edges, undergrounding of creeks, filling in wetlands, overdevelopment and sprawl, just to name a few— we have made our urban environments more susceptible to the smallest climatic shocks.

To fully capture the extent and gravity of impending climatic and social upheavals facing coastal areas, this project will bring together technical, environmental, and grounded socio-spatial analysis to catalyze a much-needed interdisciplinary lens. While interdisciplinary work in response to climate change has recently increased, this work is often isolated within scientific and technical disciplines and seldom includes design as an active participant. This project highlights the role of design as a critical spatial field combining a qualitative understanding of social needs with technical know-how to complement and extend the applicability of scientific research by proposing equitable spatial strategies that create livable and resilient communities. 

The project will operate based on a series of principles: 1) We believe these issues are regional in nature, hence localized and piecemeal interventions are temporary solutions and are likely to only relocate the problem instead of addressing it. A more regional understanding of issues, as well as the stakeholders and forces involved, can provide a more effective scale of operations. This will entail typological and replicable strategies that expand the scope of operations from individual sites to the entire region. 2) Interventions need to achieve more than just defend against rising sea levels. Adoption of a holistic socio-technical perspective will allow for a more robust set of interventions that leverage the economic and political need to address environmental issues to also respond to the social needs of under-served communities that are historically positioned at the frontline of environmental crises. 3) Matching the fluidity of the climatic crisis facing coastal regions, our interventions and attitudes towards the environment need to become more fluid. This includes how interventions move across scales and respond to a multiplicity of stakeholders and forces, as well as proactive strategies that promote flexible, dynamic interventions that work with water as opposed to constantly defending against it.

To establish an initial urban design and decision-making framework, this project will look into the Hampton Roads region in Coastal Virginia. The threats facing the region are symptomatic of the complex socio-environmental issues with which other coastal regions of the United States are grappling. Working with local and regional stakeholders, the team, from architecture, urban design, urban studies, civil engineering, and systems engineering, will develop a qualitative, multi-criteria decision analysis and urban design framework for the region. The team will use the qualitative framework to guide the selection and establishment of pilot sites for further analytic and qualitative work.