A Blueprint for Coastal Adaptation
Uniting Design, Economics, and Policy
Chapter 12. Coastal Urbanism: Designing the Future Waterfront
(pages 259–276) Rafi Segal and Susannah Drake
COASTAL URBANISM PRESENTS a new paradigm of waterfront development and upland adaptation for the twenty-first century. Through an iterative, interdisciplinary, team-oriented design approach, communities can come together with their elected officials to engage in meaningful adaptation of the waterfront to reduce future damage and loss while securing more resilient and healthy environments. In January 2017, the Regional Plan Association (RPA) launched a design competition,funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, that called on architects, landscape architects, and urban planners to demonstrate how policy changes, new investments, and innovative thinking could transform the New York City metropolitan area and theTri-State region at large (New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut). Every thirty years or so since the late 1920s, the Regional Plan Association has prepared regional plans to guide urban, infra-structure, open space, and economic development to promote a better quality of life for the future of the region. Early plans inspired readers with dramatic visualizations of new transportation systems, infrastructure, and architecture. Seeking to garner similar excitement, the 2017 plan (Fourth Regional Plan) challenged design teams to express a vision for the future driven by corridors of common ecologic, physiographic, economic, and cultural conditions. The coastline, referred to in the plan as “the Bight,” is one of the four corridors examined, planned, and designed. Our project, The Bight: Coastal Urbanism, builds upon a systems-based urban approach and knowledge of city, state, and federal regulatory processes to propose a new Coastal Land Management zone(CLM). Understanding the challenges for the region and its historic context have been critical to our design approach. Methods of adaptation were explored and then tested in three case studies of different scales along the region’s coast.
Historically, cities and towns built a hard line between land and water. Fortified bulkheads facilitated commerce and defended buildings and infra- structure from high tides, yet increasingly severe storms and sea level rise are now putting pressure on this line and calling into question the effectiveness of hardened land–water divides. Prior to urban development, coastal and ripar- ian waters occupied broad swaths of land that absorbed nature’s dynamic force and functioned as rich ecological depositories with tremendous value. A new Coastal Land Management zone (CLM) can reestablish the interface of land and water with transformation from a hard line to an ecological zone — a field of protection, recreation and energy production. As such, this zone relieves the tension between city and ocean resulting from extreme storm events, high tides, elevated water tables, and flooding. Climate change affects hundreds of miles of coast, hundreds of thousands of residents, and hundreds of billions of dollars in property. The plan — developed in collaboration with colleagues in our offices (Rafi Segal A+U, DLAND studio) and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) — proposed a set of strategies, design, and visions for this zone and its impact on higher-ground urban development over the next fifty years.
History of the Waterline
Waterlines are the visible demarcation on a surface of the presence of water. Along a natural shore, tidal marshes that characterize the landscape indicate a broad waterline of rich ecology. The dynamic landscape morphology of the Atlantic shoreline in the New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut region shaped its occupation. Early life in this landscape by indigenous peoples worked with the ebbs and flows of natural systems, harvesting the mollusks and fish that bred in the fertile shores. Population and habitation patterns migrated with seasons to follow resources and seek protection from the elements. Rich in resources, coastal soils and waters offered nourishment and fuel to native populations.
To the European explorers of the “New World,” mapping the shorelines opened new opportunity for discovery, settlement, and economic venture. Charting the coast as a stable and fixed line was essential for both navigation and territorial claims. European settlement along the Atlantic coast accelerated the use of coastal land and transformed the nature of exchange from ecological to mercantile. The European settlers took a more aggressive role in changing the morphologyof the landscape to facilitate transportation and commerce. Finger piers, hardened bulkheads, and breakwaters enabled more efficient trade, physically altering both the shape and the function of the line between water and land. Bulkheads stabilized shorelines against erosion from tides and rivers. In port cities and along major rivers providing commercial transport, the threshold was largely built, hardened, and shaped to best function for a single purpose: to serve large boats and ships as the primary means for the transport of people and goods.
Advances in technology leading up to and through the Industrial Revolution brought increased intermodal transport to the shore. Larger ships, railroads, and canals unlocked resources of inland areas, bringing more goods and people to coastal cities. Seaports became a messy, dangerous, industrial land- scape where goods were off-loaded and stored in warehouses that sprung up along the waterfront. Immigration blossomed in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with millions of people all arriving to the region by sea.
The rise of the automobile and air travel in the twentieth century created new dispersed patterns of infrastructure and suburban development. Waterways and their hardened edges gradually stopped being primary urban portals of movement of people and storage of goods, to become vestigial, leftover spaces in cities across America, often blocked off by highways and bridges. New York City’s industrial waterfront peaked during World War II and in its aftermath, but the introduction of new infrastructure and urban development patterns changed the function of the coast. The National Interstate and Defense Highways Act of 1956 created jobs and repurposed military technology in the postwar period.1 Like rail systems almost a century earlier, highways made more of the American landscape accessible for development, industry, commerce, and recreation. Trucking and containerized shipping radically transformed the transport of goods with expansive distribution centers connected to highways outside the city.
As the economics of waterfront exchange evolved and more of the New York industrial waterfront landscape was vacated, master builder Robert Moses recognized an opportunity. In his drive to create new regional parks, housing, and infrastructure, Moses built new thoroughfares around and through the city and out to its peripheries. Many of these new roadways created a hard, physical barrier between life in the city and the waterfront. Given that the waterfront was dangerous, dirty, and increasingly vacant, this was not a politically tough sell. Meanwhile, potential spines of urban development radiating from the city center along historic mass transit rights-of-way were left underdeveloped. In coastal zones, new suburbs developed rapidly, made accessible by the ubiquity of the automobile and low-cost mortgage programs that exacerbated white flight from cities. Concurrent with the increase in suburban development came the construction of public housing in low-lying coastal areas. As was the case with highway infrastructure, development happened on cheap, available land. In many cases these sites were in flood zones. Clearance of whole neighborhoods of properties impacted by repeated flooding institutionalized vulnerability.
Present Challenges to the Waterfront of New York and New Jersey
According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, thirteen thousand miles of coastline are at significant risk from climate change:
Our findings indicate that sea level rise, driven primarily by climate change and even absent heavy rains or storms, puts more than 300,000 of today’s homes and commercial properties in the contiguous United States at risk of chronic, disruptive flooding within the next 30 years. The cumulative current value of the properties that will be at risk by 2045 is roughly $136 billion.
Unprecedented storms are repeatedly hitting the coasts, taking lives and costing billions of dollars in damage. The challenges are multifold: we must plan and design resilient living environments while overcoming entrenched bureaucracies and hurdles of reactive political decision-making at the local and national levels — all of this set against an ever-evolving environment, a climate that does not wait, and unsustainable urban development practices still in place. Proactivechange must start now.
New York
We propose restoring the natural function of Long Island’s barrier islands to reestablish a protective landscape that is much needed in the face of sea level rise and climate change.
The underlying terrain of Long Island is primarily composed of sand, gravel, and other sediment left behind at the end of the last ice age, eight to twelve thousand years ago. When the glaciers melted, they created a series of ridges that run the length of the island. Over time, these ridges were cut by streams of meltwater slicing through the moraine. Many of the areas between the remaining high ridges are ever-expanding wetlands increasingly impacted by tidal flows.
Vegetation in these areas, impacted by soil chemistry, wind, and freshwater availability, is characterized by grasslands, shrublands, vast pine barrens, dunes, and extensive salt marshes. The infrastructure and suburban development that cover much of Long Island have overlaid an impermeable surface of roads and buildings on this landscape, damaging its ecological function and diminishing its biodiversity.
Combined with the more acute rainfall and reoccurring storms, more and more of Long Island’s single-family houses are flooding. Safety, security, and sanitation are compromised by a high water table that impacts individual septic systems. Emergency access roads are blocked by severe storms. Housing stock impacted by flooding is lowering property values in some areas and increasing socioeconomic gaps in the region. A proactive strategy of salt marsh management, mitigation banking, and soft-edge canal construction could strengthen the protective aspect of this landscape and work in sync withnew economic opportunities in these environments.
New Jersey
The geology of upland New Jersey was formed in the Cretaceous period between 65 and 144 million years ago. Unlike the ultra-permeable granular landscape of Long Island, this region has more defined drainage basins that can become more easily overwhelmed by extreme rains. The landscape composition and character include more igneous and metamorphic strata with a rich overlay of organic soils. The topography’s morphology and the hydrologic patterns reveal a vascular structure resulting from the conflict of resistant hard rock and upland freshwater flow to the ocean.
Indigenous communities of the Lenape Tribe settled in the area because of its rich natural resources. The Nevasink River is named for the tribe who inhabited the coastal areas of the riparian zone of the naturally protected harbor estuary. Rich soils and plentiful water resources attracted settlers who supplanted the indigenous communities. The emergence and then collapse of a robust fishing industry occurred in parallel with development of farms farther inland.
Residential development of the post–World War II period supplanted many farms. The tension of a rural agrarian landscape and increasing suburban development is testing the engineered carrying capacity of the landscape. In this region, upland flooding will become a more dire problem in the future. Hardening and paving of the landscape with roads, buildings, and other impermeable surfaces disrupts natural drainage and creates imbalances between rainfall and the land’s ability to absorb water. Flooding is the consequence. Given the underlying geologic and landscape conditions, it is critical that a strategy that maximizes the drainage, permeability, and absorptive qualities of streets, parking lots, and roofs be implemented to manage the flood risk.
Movement away from both the coast and upland riparian zones is critical. Affluent suburbs in Monmouth County, including Fair Haven and Redbank, serving the New York metropolitan region line the shores of the Navesink River. The population to the south of the river is predominantly white. Many of the homes that line the barrier island of the Jersey Shore were originally designed as summer cottages that have been transformed for year-round occupation. In several areas we find homeowners with the financial flexibility to move, yet many have chosen to stay and battle the forces of severe storms and flooding. As resident’s tire of the constant pressure to move cars at high tide, manage increasingly overstressed infrastructure, and rebuild after storms, migration will occur.
Proposal: Toward a Coastal Urbanism
Productive action rather than reflexive reaction guides this proposal. To relieve the tension between city and ocean that threatens hundreds of miles of coast, hundreds of thousands of residents, and hundreds of billions of dollars in property, we propose a set of strategies, principles, and frameworks to change the urbanism and landscape along the coast.
A new Coastal Land Management zone (CLM) would offer a buffer in which land and water commingle, creating new spaces for habitation, work, recreation, and future clean energy production. Rather than futilely trying to hold a hardline, our principles — receive, protect, adapt — aim to reshape the meeting of land and water in this expansive zone. Receive development on higher ground by strengthening and densifying existing higher-ground nodes and spines; protect and maintain vital infrastructure that can double as anchors for amphibious development; and adapt activities in this CLM zone to make the most of connections between the two.
Pressure on the line dividing land and water is thus released. The terrestrial edge becomes a more malleable surface with new economic, cultural, and environmental value. We propose to manage the CLM zone with a regional governing authority — an alliance between states — that we would call the Bureau of Coastal Management (BCM). Similar to the way the federal Bureau of Land Management operates, the BCM would help stimulate recreation, energy production, agriculture,education, and research in the Tri-State area.
Receive, Protect, Adapt
The territory along the coast includes urban, suburban, and more dispersed settlement patterns. Strategies for protection, adaptation, and reception operate across city, community, and block scales through a managed process that creates value. In anticipation of a changed environment, this approach uses proactive strategies to add density and value to upland property out of harm’s way. Energy to fuel new development sites will move away from distributed networks to more localized renewable sourcing. Our plan will allow new work–life models with diversified typologies for more heterogeneous populations. Recreation from large-scale seasonal destinations for visitors to smaller-scale everyday activities are integral to the plan. Likewise integral are strategies for passive preservation of ecologically rich areas and active regeneration of select landscapes.
Receive
High ground will receive greater density. Historic corridors of transit-oriented commercial development on high ground will be strengthened, and value will be added with zoning transfers from coastal areas. Increased floor area ratio (FAR) tied to the transit corridors will enhance mobility and connection to new residential blocks radiating off the high-ground urban spines. Green infrastructure, married with traditional hard engineering, will manage upland stormwater. Recreation spaces will be the heart and lungs of new neighborhoods, with floodable playing fields and courts for a variety of sports.
Protect
At the ocean’s edge, the landscape will serve a primary purpose of protecting upland resources. This dynamic landscape will be allowed to change with the tides, storms, and elevated sea level that impacts the edge most directly. This area is treated as the living reef that buffers storm surge. To the extent that it can be a resource for active regeneration of the ecology and renewable energy production, the reefs will be managed. This living barrier island is not an artificial jetty covered with new vegetation but rather a landscape that is shaped naturally by currents, winds, and deposition patterns.
Adapt
The zone between the Atlantic Ocean and high ground will be adapted. Part of this space will be open water and parts marshy areas where rising waters will make traditional habitation impractical and even dangerous. Thresholds between wet and dry are reinterpreted, in some cases allowing water to enter neighborhoods for transport and recreation. Areas of lower density will use this spongy land as a resource for cleansing runoff, for agriculture, and, where possible, for capturing tidal energy. Adaptation to elevate buildings, those already being reconstructed by private homeowners working under FEMA rules, will likely remain, but public funding, whether federal or local, will cease to be dedicated to infrastructure and utilities serving single-family homes in these zones.
Elevation-Based Zoning
Landscape, urbanism, and architecture adapt to these new conditions of the CLM zone. Gradually over the years, at-risk populations will be relocated out of dangerous high-risk flood zones. Residents and businesses that currently occupy the barrier islands will migrate to safer high ground and be received in new development zones that are better connected to public transportation and offer a variety of housing options and neighborhood amenities. This is a process that will take decades to complete. Our plans for a sustainable future and denser higher ground need to begin today. The policies, strategies, and new development patterns that we will initiate now will determine the scale and success of the unavoidable migration uphill.
Elevation-based zoning appropriates zoning and building regulations to grade elevations through a “sectional” thinking that understands high-ground ridges, the water’s edge, and everything in between as part of a single connected and interdependent system. As such, this approach will enable the dry, protected, higher ground to become a spine of greater density, a linear urbanism that provides jobs and housing to enhance neighborhood life and reduce commuting time.Construction of new transit-oriented development along this spine will be financed through a combination of private and public investment. Low-cost land acquisition, fewer regulatory hurdles, and increased density will incentivize developmentand create space to offer residents of public housing who are currently at risk new apartments in mixed-use, mixed-income, walk-able neighborhoods.
Radiating out from the spine, we imagine a network of new parks, open space, trails, and green infrastructure to manage upland stormwater and runoff. The network will form corridors leading to the waterfront. As they reach semi- wet areas, plantings will change to adapt to the higher salinity and winds of the coast. In the semi-wet and wet zones, the architecture and infrastructure will be adapted for water transport and recreation. The wet zones have the potential to become environmental and agricultural resources. The shifting protective barrier islands that once existed will be given space to evolve as they have historically and become sites of recreation, wind and tide energy production, and new kinds of farming. As different patterns of sediment deposit, the solids carried by dynamic coastal currents will foster natural habitats for vegetation and wildlife.
Sending and Receiving
“Sending and receiving” is the strategy proposed by which the block or the neighborhood, rather than the single home, becomes the unit of residential conservation. A sending block for example, will be identified as a block that is designated over time to “relieve” houses and thus head toward conservation. A sending block will be paired with a receivingblock, located on higher ground, prepared for increased density and the addition of homes. This approach would be scaled up for neighborhoods. Throughout the process, the vacant areas act as pocket parks, community gardens, or “urban wilds” thatoffer new amenities to residents. Neighborhood groups can be engaged as stewards of the land and facilitators of the transitionfrom urban uses to conservation uses to build communities dedicated to change and fellowship.
The increasing flood events and risks in the region have provoked many to consider retreat, a solution that involves removing homes and structures from coastal floodplains. Already, Hurricanes Irene and Sandy have prompted retreat from many coastal areas in the metropolitan New York area. Retreat is currently carried out using home buyout programs where state or local government purchases houses from residents who are willing to sell them. After sale, the home is demolished, and the property is put under a conservation easement that prevents future building construction in perpetuity. This ensures that residents and real property are kept out of harm’s way, while allowing the site to perform as a natural floodplain.
Because home buyout programs have been designed for individual home removals on a case-by-case basis without addressing the bigger picture — neighborhood residential conditions as a whole — the result has been an uneven pattern of retreat along the coast. In some New Jersey shore neighborhoods where homeowners have taken the buyout offer, we find only a few scattered homes remaining isolated inside conservation land. In other cases, only a handful of residents accept the buyout offer, resulting in a patchwork of vacant lots within an equally built-up suburban neighborhood.
It is important to understand that retreat takes place over extended time periods, responding to the progress of sea level rise and increased frequency of damaging storms. With each new storm, the perception of risk increases, and homeowners become more willing to relocate, a process that will likely take decades. Generations will grow up in vulnerable, partially empty neighborhoods before abandoning them for good. Residents that stay must deal with the perception that they live in a dying neighborhood, while towns must devote resources to maintaining empty lots.
The ability of the sending and receiving strategy to operate on the scales of the block and neighborhood allows bothmore controlled and desired long-term planning objectives to be achieved while offering more flexibility of migration in theshorter term. Losing ground in one part of town due to extensive flooding is balanced by gaining space in another safer area. Italso serves to overcome the negative psychological problem many have with the term “retreat,” as it denotes a loss or “givingup.” Sending and receiving promotes notions of belonging, shared interest, and collectivity by situating individual homes as an integrated part of a block or neighborhood, responsive to environmental change and the process of migration across theregion.
Three Case Studies
Our team examined three sites as prototypical approaches for different population densities and developments. We worked in areas where the Regional Plan Association staff had established networks of community outreach and connections with local elected officials. The smallest, Sea Bright, is a low-density residential area (population of 1,387 in2016 according to the US Census) with a declining population in Monmouth County, New Jersey, directly on the Atlantic Ocean. Mastic Beach, New York, with a declining population of 14,762, represents the intermediate scale of suburban development. The largest site, the Jamaica Bay area of New York City, comprises several segregated urban neighborhoods and has approximately one million inhabitants.
Sea Bright
Since Hurricane Sandy in 2012, when much of Sea Bright’s residential and commercial properties were damaged by flooding, the community has emerged stronger and more insistent on staying. The rebuilding of expanded properties created a construction boom that changed the shape of the community. In our plan, the community takes the lead on self-organized and self-financed infrastructure, taking on the construction of new docks, elevated walkways, and energy and waste management systems that are all privatized and managed by local block associations. Even conservative estimates of sea level rise suggest that the barrier island of Sea Bright will be inundated over the next thirty years. As per the international law of EEZ (Exclusive Economic Zone) we accept the premise that land under water reverts to public ownership. Hardening of infrastructure, elevating the land, and continually repairing breakwaters will cease in our proposal, allowing water areas to increase and become public. Residents in such areas will be aware of projected sea level changes years in advance and will have a chance to use the various buyout programs to move.
Mastic Beach
Mastic Beach is a commuter suburb of Long Island, just north of Shelter Island. The village is jurisdictionally part of theTown of Brookhaven, having dissolved its city structure in November 2016. It is a coastal plain, with many tributaries draining to the inland waterways. Protected by a barrier island, the area is impacted by sea level rise more than coastal wave action. Glacial moraines drain well, but the high water table and individual septic systems are creating public health problems. During Hurricane Sandy the coastal evacuation path was compromised, trapping people in dangerous flood zones.
Our research for the plan suggested that projected flooding in Mastic Beach will displace almost seven thousand people from 2,733 housing units. In our proposal, by 2067 Mastic Beach will increase its current population of forty-five thousand to fifty-four thousand people living in higher density on 20 percent less land.
Jamaica Bay Eco Park and City
The coastal landscape of the Jamaica Bay region that stretches from Montauk down to the New Jersey shore will become a new ecologically rich mega-park that can evolve at the scale of the megacity. This regional ecological and recreational resource will include the already-designated National Park lands of Gateway but will also expand to include the meadowlands, new public beaches, temporal islands that only reveal themselves at low tide, and barrier reefs. Jamaica Bay will become the crowning jewel in a series of new park spaces that dot the coast. In the way that Central Park evolved over the years to accommodate different attitudes toward park usage, new technology, and new ecological and management challenges, the plan suggests a new place for people, a place where different modes of transport and different ecologies can coexist.
Surrounding Jamaica Bay will be a halo of new high-density development on high ground outside of the CLM zone. This area will benefit from elevation-based zoning incentives that provide a transfer of value to a maintenance fund for the park in exchange for additional building rights. Development will align with planned expansion and protection of John F. Kennedy International Airport. Enacting a complex choreography of the conveyance of people and goods, in 2016 alone, 60 million passengers passed through JFK’s gates, boosting a $37 billion regional economy with over 285,000 jobs. By leveraging the growth of the airport, the surrounding area will be transformed into a hub for future technologies benefiting from the movement of people and goods. Through taxes and fees, this growth will fund the ecological maintenance of the bay as a mega eco-urban park, a new urban recreational center that serves to coalesce Jamaica Bay into a unified region rather than a string of disparate enclaves.
A future vision of Jamaica Bay is one in which the airport continues to play a key role as an economic engine for the region and specifically for the future urbanism surrounding the bay. Jamaica Bay becomes the new gateway in the United States that responds to both the cycles of nature and the demands of urban life, projecting an image of a resilient, responsive, and eco-powered city.
Project Team
Directors: Rafi Segal and Susannah Drake; thought leaders: Sarah Williams, Greg Lindsay, Brent Ryan, Benjamin Albrecht; project design team: Mary Lynch-Lloyd, Chaewon Ahn, Jan Casimir, Mary Hohlt, Erin Wythoff, Charles Huang, Chang Liu, Ching Ngan; research team: Dennis Harvey, Zach Postone, Ellen Shakespear, Xinhui Li.
Rafi Segal is a practicing architect and associate professor of architecture
and urbanism at MIT, where he directs the SMArchS Urbanism program and
the Future Urban Collectives lab. His current work explores how emerging
forms of collectivity can impact architecture and the design of cities.
Susannah C. Drake, FASLA, FAIA, is associate professor at University of
Colorado, Boulder and founding principal of DLANDstudio Architecture +
Landscape Architecture. Her climate adapted infrastructure work is in the permanent collection of MoMA and Cooper Hewitt. In 2020 her Gowanus Sponge Park received the inaugural Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian National Design Award for Climate Resilience.
End Notes:
- General Records of the United States Government, “National Interstate and Defense Highways Act,” Enrolled Acts and Resolutions of Congress, 1789–1996; RG 11, National Archives, June 29, 1956. The National Interstate and Defense Highways Act of 1956 was an act to amend and supplement the Federal Aid Road Act approved July 11, 1916, to authorize appropriations for continuing the construction of highways; to amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1954 to provide additional revenue from the taxes on motor fuel, tires, and trucks and buses and for other purposes.
2. To cite Robert A. Caro, author of the Moses biography The Power Broker: An extraordinary man who, denied power within the normal framework of the democratic process, stepped outside that framework to grasp power sufficient to shape a great city and to hold sway over the very texture of millions of lives . . . he [Moses] first created a miraculous flowering of parks and parkways, playlands and beaches — and then ultimately brought down on the city the smog-choked aridity of our urban landscape, the endless massive failures of public housing, and countless other barriers to humane living. Moses built an empire and lived like an emperor. He was held in fear — his dossiers could disgorge the dark secret of anyone who opposed him. He was, he claimed, above politics, above deals; and through decade after decade, the newspapers and the public believed. Meanwhile, he was developing his public authorities into a fourth branch of government known as “Triborough” — a government whose records were closed to the public, whose policies and plans were decided not by voters or elected officials but solely by Moses — an immense economic force directing pressure on labor unions, on banks, on all the city’s political and economic institutions, and on the press, and on the Church. He doled out millions of dollars’ worth of legal fees, insurance commissions, lucrative contracts on the basis of who could best pay him back in the only coin he coveted: power. He dominated the politics and politicians of his time — without ever having been elected to any office. He was, in essence, above our democratic system. Robert Moses held power in the state for 44 years, through the governorships of Smith, Roosevelt, Lehman, Dewey, Harriman and Rockefeller, and in the city for 34 years, through the mayoralties of La Guardia, O’Dwyer, Impellitteri, Wagner and Lindsay. He personally conceived and carried through public works costing 27 billion dollars — he was undoubtedly America’s greatest builder. This is how he built and dominated New York — before, finally, he was stripped of his reputation (by the press) and his power (by Nelson Rockefeller). But his work, and his will, had been done. The Power Broker (New York: Vintage Books, 1975), https://www.robertcaro.com/the-books/the-power-broker/.
3. Union of Concerned Scientists, Underwater: Rising Seas, Chronic Floods, and the Implications for U.S. Coastal Real Estate (Washington, DC: Union of Concerned Scientists, 2018), www.ucsusa.org/underwater.
4. “NJ Coastal Plain,” Rutgers Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences https://eps.rutgers.edu/centers-institutes/rutgers-core-repository/nj-coastal-plain.
5. Paul Lewis, Guy Nordenson, and Catherine Seavitt, eds., Four Corridors: Design Initiative for RPA’s Fourth Regional Plan (Berlin: HATJE CANTZ, 2019), 139.
6. Governor Andrew Cuomo, “Transforming JFK International Airport for the 21st Century,” 2nd State of the State Proposal, 2017.
Excerpt from: A Blueprint for Coastal Adaptation: Uniting Design, Economics, and Policy
Edited by Carolyn Kousky, Billy Fleming, and Alan M. Berger
Reproduced by permission of Island Press, Washington, D.C.
Published by Island Press
https://islandpress.org/books/blueprint-coastal-adaptation
