— Celebrate Climate Resilience — Eat, Drink, Play & Plan — A special reception on CLIMATE CHANGE organized in partnership with Shore Up Marin, Marin City Community Services District, County of Marin, and the Urban Works Agency. A light, buffet dinner will be served while you meet and mingle with the 10 teams selected for the Resilient by Design Bay Area Challenge (see below), as well as your friends and neighbors. Play games used to envision solutions to sea level rise and climate impacts from their creators, including Marin County’s Game of Floods and others.
What: a chance to give input, provide feedback and otherwise be part of the proactive Bay Area Resilient by Design. Where: at the Marin City Manzanita Recreation Center, 630 Drake Avenue. When: this Thursday Oct 5 from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m.
This is a great opportunity to informally ask internationally recognized experts your questions about climate adaptation, sea level rise, flooding, etc., and to share your ideas for how Marin can successfully adapt to sea level rise.
The event is FREE to the public, but please RSVP as registration will close once the ticket capacity has been reached. Read more and register here.
This event is now over, but there is excellent coverage of Resilient in the North Bay by Marin IJ reporter Mark Prado: Marin thinkers join effort to tackle sea-level rise
Read the previous Floating Times coverage:
Resilient by Design | Kickoff Celebration
Embracing Sea Level Rise
Sea Level Rise — Resilient by Design
Teams Announced, Collaborative Research Phase Has Begun
On September 10, ten winning design teams (out of a pool of 51) were announced. Over the next few months these teams will be introduced to the various regions of the Bay Area, starting with the East Bay and working through the North and South Bay, and then San Francisco. This week’s focus is the North Bay, with some of the following sites (not an exhaustive list) under consideration: Richardson Bay, Mill Valley and Tam Junction, Marin City and Waldo Point Harbor. Following this regional orientation each Design Team will publicly present 3 to 5 Design Opportunities for consideration, with further input from the public at this juncture. By December 8 the Research Advisory Committee will match one Design Opportunity to each Team, after which the Teams will have ’til May 2018 to develop and present their concepts.
The community has been asked to provide feedback to the Teams as they gain familiarity with the Bay Area. Understanding the complexities of our region is no mean feat when you consider the centerpiece is an estuary stretching from San Jose to Petaluma, and that ultimately this project takes into consideration not just the waterways, but also socio-economic and cultural factors.
Among the Teams selected are international heavy hitters such as BIG + ONE + Sherwood: BIG (Bjarke Ingels Group) the Danish wunderkind architecture firm, who, along with the Dutch firm ONE (One Architecture + Urbanism) participated in and rose to the top of the first Rebuild by Design Challenge, (joined here by engineering firm Sherwood)—BIG are also co-architects of the new Google campus—and THE FIELD OPERATIONS TEAM: James Corner Field Architects (NY-based international landscape architects) responsible for NYC’s game-changing High Line and currently at work on the Presidio Parklands.
Also represented are firms grounded in permaculture: P+SET (Permaculture plus Social Equity), or who celebrate mud: PUBLIC SEDIMENT, to be found working alongside SCAPE (oyster-tecture—oyster architecture)—another winner in the Rebuild Challenge with their Living Breakwaters proposal. Providing the third leg of this 3-legged stool are groups whose expertise and backgrounds are aimed squarely at designing solutions with socio-economic and cultural impacts foremost in mind.
I’d like to close with this thought. The transition from summer into autumn this year has been particularly tumultuous: first the heatwave and then a steady round of hurricanes. While we haven’t experienced all of these events first hand, the events themselves serve to reinforce that we’re at the mercy of forces beyond our control (think earthquakes). A little forward thinking can go a long way to offset potentially destructive and catastrophic (future) events, whether singular events or simply the increasingly unpredictable nature of weather systems.
Resilient by Design is a 2nd generation exercise in problem solving. In contrast to the 1st iteration (the post-Sandy Rebuild by Design) we have the advantage of getting out ahead of the event—whether an earthquake or sea level rise. Looking for adaptive strategies. Something we can all live with.
Download the briefing book here—80+ pages of the Bay Area Resilient by Design Challenge.