Salty Urbanism: A design manual for sea level rise adaptation in urban areas
Project Narrative
Sea-level rise, pollution, over-development of impervious surfaces, and loss of habitat and species diversity are all compounding environmental issues of our times that threaten to erode valuable ecosystem services, degrade the quality of life for society, and exacerbate existing socio-economic problems and inequities in other areas of the social fabric. This is especially true with heavily urbanized areas, and nowhere is this reality more apparent and dire than in urban South Florida, where climate change and population growth are rapidly accelerating these synergistic issues in a low-lying and environmentally sensitive context.
But just as these environmental pressures have synergistic causes, there exists a great potential for their synergistic solutions. Academics and urban designers have given increasing attention in recent years to “green infrastructure” and “nature-based features” as potential solutions to multiple problems at once, including infrastructural issues normally “siloed” within engineering-only frameworks. While these previous efforts have been invaluable, they have, so far, failed to produce meaningful changes in the way that “resilience” in the urban environment is understood and practiced. In this sense, a new form of “place-building” for waterfront design and the built environment in South Florida is sorely needed, one that engages existing design standards as well as advances in socio-environmental development challenges, particularly nature-based features, which are necessarily extremely place-specific.
Such an integrative framework should ideally yield a new ecology of the city necessary to address the greatest ongoing challenge to planning and design: ecological design within human-dominated ecosystems . This framework will require an interdisciplinary perspective that integrates the traditionally siloed perspectives of architecture, civil engineering, reconciliation ecology, and urban planning.
Project Summary and Objectives
In 2019, Florida Sea Grant granted an interdisciplinary team of FAU architects, civil engineers, and social-environmental scientists funds to address these apparent urban planning issues by creating a common design language with an urban landscape design manual for South Florida that focuses on innovative, nature-based solutions to sea-level rise and climate-driven flooding. This effort and the forthcoming manual were christened “Salty Urbanism” by the concept’s progenitor and project’s lead P.I., FAU’s School of Architecture professor Jeffery Huber.
This design manual was also meant to be reviewed in a draft form by a select group of relevant stakeholders and potential end-users to solicit feedback on designs and approach frameworks.
Project Approach
Salty Urbanism has been executed in multiple phases, most of which were conducted as stipulated in the funded grant proposal but some of which were more fluid and dynamic, as iterative, interdisciplinary ideation within and among the team evolved and changed expected outcomes (and as precautions for COVID-19 called for extenuating circumstances).
The first phase approach of this effort was to identify a representative set of locations within Broward County, which is one of the lowest lying regions in all of southeast Florida. This phase of the project was largely GIS-driven and depended greatly on the novel orchestration of existing geodata commonly used by ecologists, urban planners, and engineers.
The second phase was to conduct a series of down-scaled sea-level rise models to produce a series of “scenarios” for the future of Broward County. These scenarios characterized the extent and depth that 1, 2, and 3 feet of sea-level rise would have on the landscape, as well as the compounding effects of these increases in sea-level with storm surge from category 1 and 3 hurricanes.
The third phase was to integrate these example locations and their accompanying urban planning geodata with the picture developed of the same area’s historical ecology from other data sources. The main objective here was to understand the hydrological relationships that drove place-specific variation in the pre-development ecosystems of those areas and condense these landscape characteristics into typologies for urban design. This was essential to help scope and inspire the design criteria necessary for nature-based solutions and the reconciliation ecology approach. The project team took to calling this approach framework “ecotypic design”.
The fourth phase was to integrate existing design standards for infrastructure, architecture, policy, and landscapes into a unified framework with respect to all of South Florida, as well as to the specific example location typologies (in Broward County), and to create a series of “adaptation menus” that combined this new concept of ecotypic design with those above-mentioned, pre-existing standards.
The fifth phase was to use urban design and planning principles to combine these “adaptation menus” into “adaptation recipes” that apply the 3 main, over-arching strategies for coastal adaptation identified by the greater research community: resistance, accommodation, and retreat.
The sixth phase, which has not yet been initiated, would be to survey and/or otherwise solicit feedback on the products of the previous project phases from relevant, local stakeholders, experts, and intended end-users of the design manual. The intention with this phase being to incorporate various ways of knowing and previously unseen perspectives/knowledge, as well as more practical design interface considerations, from those individuals surveyed and include these in the draft manual.
Project Outcomes
This project is still underway and not yet complete. Phases 1 through 3 have been completed but phases 4 through 5 continue to unfold in an iterative process within the interdisciplinary research team. Phase 6 has been difficult to initiate and plan for a number of reasons, not least of which being scheduling issues that have arose during the COVID-19 crisis.
While a no-cost extension for this research is planned to provide additional time to finish the design manual itself, and to figure out a way to integrate with intended end-users, a wealth of novel urban planning perspectives, data, and findings have already been compiled by the team and archived. In addition, numerous unique and innovative designs and graphics demonstrating the approach phases have been created that reflect the intent and scope of phases 3 through 5, these providing a wide-range of potential uses for future projects associated with sea-level rise adaptation and planning.
