Home On The Riparian
2020 Warming Competition
First Place
As climate change yields extreme heat waves and rising sea levels, New York City - with its existing urban heat island effects and high risk flood zones along its 520 miles of coastline - is in a particularly vulnerable position. For New Yorkers living in many public housing sites across the city, the heat-related health risks are exacerbated by a dearth of affordable cooling options inside homes, and flood-related risks threaten the stability of lives and communities in public housing developments historically built on low-lying flood-prone untenable land.
Rather than rely on immobile, energy-intensive cooling centers across the city, and build walls to shut out rising waters, can the city embrace and rise above the incoming tides, pioneering a new form of urban amenity on the grounds of the public housing sites for protection, relief, and pleasure?
This project introduces new urban riparian zones as resilient flood protection and public recreational amenities to the most flood-prone public housing sites in New York City.
Redefining New York City’s coastline, the waterfront penetrates deep into existing NYCHA sites, utilizing the new flood-resilient landscape for active recreation and natural cooling. A diverse array of public spaces are created not just along the water’s edge but beneath the towers.
A riparian zone imagined on an East Harlem NYCHA site that creates an additional 1.25 miles of waterfront access.
The center of the site, typically bisected by a street, is closed off to all traffic besides bike and bus lanes, and is transformed into a water filtration zone. Water to the left of this zone can become safe enough for swimming and active recreation.
A dashed white line threading through the site proposes the line of raised topography that would offer flood protection.
1 COOLING & RECREATION
There is a greater need for relief from heat as global temperatures rise. Aggravated further by the urban heat island effect, existing cooling centers often rely on energy intensive means of cooling it’s occupants. This proposal redefines New York City’s coastline by inviting the waterfront deep into the neighborhood, extending a naturalized shoreline, increasing biodiversity, and utilizing the landscape and water as a series of civic centers of active recreation and cooling.
2 RESILIENCY & PROTECTION
Historically, the sites of many NYCHA (New York City Housing Authority) public housing projects were selected based on inexpensive land in declining neighborhoods or in undesirable areas in proximity to polluted post-industrial waterways. These sites, often low-lying and stripped of natural systems of storm buffers, are reimagined with a new raised topography enveloping and overlooking the new riparian zone. The flood protection becomes indistinguishable within the landscape.
3 HABITATION & COMMUNITY
The impulse to completely demolish and build new is not only unsustainable but can uproot and displace residents, disrupting long-standing social support networks. NYCHA is the largest holder of land in the city. This proposal seeks to maintain and improve NYCHA’s existing housing stock, leveraging its underutilized green area at the base of the typical “tower-in-the-park” typologies by combining the city’s need for flood protection and communal amenities. Flood-prone units at the lower levels of each tower are relocated to higher topographies on-site, and the resulting ground level voids create covered outdoor community rooms and sheltered gathering spaces. The new waterfront landscape protecting the NYCHA towers give a reinvigorated identity to the city’s aging housing projects - an identity of adaptation, resilience, and community.
Landscape improvements prepare flood-prone NYCHA neighborhoods for rising ocean levels and storm surge while increasing transit connectivity to the greater city. This proposal seeks to create a new inventory of spaces for the community and the neighborhood through embracing and adapting to rising water levels.