'It Happened Here: Hurricane Sandy's Impact" by Fred A. Bernstein
An immediate look at recent and past storm surges. Katrina and Sandy had devastating impacts on their respectively hit built environments. Sandy's flooding and physical damage are matched by the catastrophic long term economic and cultural impacts. Soon or later, Bernstein states, the questions will arise as to why the city (Manhattan) did not make better preparations for a storm they knew was coming? He explores and analyzes many possible solutions and ideas that have been discussed such as a proposed five mile steel barrier and the recent Museum of Modern Art's Rising Currents: Projects for New York's Waterfront Exhibition. He briefly introduces the Dutch and their architectural approaches to "living with water".
"Market forces will shape the city of the future" (Bernstein), but how will developers and architects work to respond to the problem that has been explored by the Dutch, and now violently pushed to the front of our drawing board. How do we design so that we can "live with water"?
"Learning the Hard Way" by Michael Sorkin
A first hand account of living in Manhattan during and post Sandy. Sorkin starts the article stating that he and his wife had just managed to get heat and power back almost two weeks after Sandy's departure. Living in an apartment in Lower Manhattan, Sorkin posits the question: "What are some of the lessons that Sandy teaches us about the way we build?"
The above image shows that if you remove the areas most at risk of flooding (shown in pink in the top map) you get the original outline of Manhattan.
He discusses the unevenly distributed misery a storm like Sandy forces to the surface. The privileged areas of the city, where police response are immediate and heat and power are back up the quickest, and the public housing sectors, where two weeks after the storm there were still 15,000 apartments without heat, hot water, and power. Comparing Sandy to Katrina, Sorkin opines that while the system failed miserably, New Orleans was much better prepared for a superstorm than Manhattan. That New Orleans had in fact acknowledged its topographical realities long ago and addressed them (however poorly).
The overarching consensus is that we have built ourselves into a predicament. The question is how do we correct it? For Sorkin, "the economics are clear: our failure to protect our lowlands will cost, just for Sandy, perhaps $50 billion, and the cost curve for repair has surely crossed the one for protection.....It's time to recognize that we can no longer focus such disproportionate resources on yesterday's risks. Let us hope that the poisonous anti-government and anti-environmental politics of today do not prevent us from using our peace dividend to solve this urgent threat"
The third article is a review in the perspectivebooks section by James S. Russel
"Lessons From the Dutch"
Sweet and Salt: Water and the Dutch by Tracy Metz and Maartje van den Heuvel
"As cleanup from Hurrican Sandy segues to rebuilding, Sweet and Salt could have been ripped from newspaper headlines". Russel's analysis of the book serves as a brief synopsis of the book's topics. "Sweet & Salt is an intensely visual consideration of the history, culture, and engineering of water that engages our senses and our emotions - not just our intellect - with its ravishing (and beautifully printed) photography, cartography and art."
More important than the book in general is the theme presented by the book. The Dutch are highly regarded for the design and involvement within an culture of water. How can we as architects, landscape architects, planners, and developers take the "culture of water" informed design presented by the Dutch and start to introduce that manner of thinking where it has become inevitably needed?
good idea in a stressful situation
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