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Coastal Strategies

The Netherlands N ation a l Coa sta l St r ategy, Fu t ure Dik e De sign · Germany T he Fu t ure of t he Wa dden Se a · New York, Staten Island Af ter Hurric a ne Sa ndy: T he Compe tition Rebuild by Design · Mississippi River Redesigning t he Lower Delta · New york, Puerto Rico Re silienc y by li ving syst em s · Rio de Janeiro A L agoon for t he Oly mpic Pa rk · Bangkok Wat er sc a pe Urb a nism · Calcutta T he E a st Kolk ata We t l a nds · Shanghai Poldering t he Ya ngt ze River Delta · Research A Design Topology for Coa sts

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Cover: Rebuild by Design, Living Breakwaters Photo: SCAPE Team

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In Dutch seaside resorts like Vlissingen (Flushing), land use claims from housing, tourism and flood protec-

BIG Team

tion compete with each other. In 2013, the Coastal Quality Studio published protective measures for the coast.

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With the BIG U concept for Manhattan, the

K ristina Hill

Danai Thaitakoo, Brian McG rath

16 The New Age of Coasts: A Design Typology

82 Bangkok Liquid Perception

Strategies for flood control

Renewal of waterscape urbanism

J andirk Ho e kstra , I nge Ke rst e n

Karst e n SchrO Ede r

22 The Future of the Dutch Coast

88 Embankments in Bangladesh

The Dutch National Coastal Strategy

Cooperation between people and authorities for flood control

Bonani Kakkar

S t e v e n D e lva

30 Future Dike Design

94 Sustainability through Wise Use

New approaches to dike design in the Netherlands

The East Kolkata Wetlands

A ntj e S tokman

Cathe rin e Se avitt

34 Growing with the Sea 98 Poldering the Yangtze River Delta

by Design competition.

Strategy for the Wadden Sea, Germany

A reasearch project of Princeton University

Coastal Quality Studio

team of Bjarke Ingels Group took part in the Rebuild

He nk Ovink

40 Reform by Design The Rebuild by Design competition: New York City

Miriam G arcí a G arcí a, Manue l Borobio Sanchiz

104 Sustainable Development of the

Spanish Atlantic Coast The Galician Coastal Management Plan

S C A P E t e am

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Mario Moscatelli/Olho Verde

44 Living Breakwaters The ecosystem of the Mississippi Delta is endangered by interventions like logging

canals. The Changing Course Competition is to provide proposals for sustainable solutions.

A contribution to Rebuild by Design big t e am

52 Life Belt for New York A contribution to Rebuild by Design

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J e nnife r E . C oop e r

60 Proving Ground

The waterfront of the Rio 2016 Olympic Park at

Currents 6 News, Projects, Competitions, Reviews

110 Authors 111 Credits/Imprint

Hunter’s Point, San Francisco

the city’s waterfront will be restored and become part of a landscape of sandy lowlands called restinga.

J e nnife r B olstad, Walt e r Me ye r

64 Resiliency for the City and the Sea Studio Urbane Landschaften

Examples of coastal urbanism: New York and Puerto Rico Eli zabe th M ossop

70 Changing Course Redesigning the Lower Mississippi Delta

P i e rre - A ndr é M artin

76 A Lagoon for the Olympic Park 34

Rising sea levels threaten the Halligs in the German Wadden Sea, a part of the North Sea. One concept

Restoration of the waterfront in Rio de Janeiro

K.D. Cheramie

Dorothy Tang

proposes controlled flooding, so that the salt marshes can increase along with the level of the sea.

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Structures such as the Suzhou Creek floodgate

will reach their limits. A research team of Princeton University initiated the Yangtze River Delta Project.

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The Dutch coast with its sandy beaches and dunes can be divided in three parts: the Southwestern Delta, the Holland Arc and the Wadden Sea. An interdisciplinary team, Coastal Quality Studio, developed a strategy that faces the chal­ lenges of rising sea levels. The image is an impression of the possible future coast: broad dunes and beach, with temporal recreational facilities and room for both man and nature.

Jandirk Hoekstra, Inge Kersten

The Future of the Dutch Coast The Netherlands have reacted to the challenge of rising sea levels by launching the National Coastal Strategy.

A research studio developed approaches for how to use natural dynamics in coastal development.

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From 2011 until mid-2013, the Coastal Quality Studio (Atelier Kust­ kwaliteit) investigated ways to improve the quality of the Dutch coast by means of long-term protective measures. The Studio was established as an independent workplace for the development, design, elaboration, dissemination, and discussion of new ideas combining coastal defence and spatial quality. It was founded jointly by the national government’s Delta Programme (Coast Subprogramme), the prov­ inces of Friesland, Noord-Holland, Zuid-Holland and Zeeland, the City of The Hague, the marine engineering contractor Van Oord BV, and Delft University of Technology; the Studio was also supported by the Creative Industries Fund NL. From the outset, the Studio had a clear mission: to serve as a multi­ disciplinary forum for the application of principles from hydraulic engineering to spatial planning, in the quest to achieve high-quality protective interventions along the Dutch coast. At the heart of this ­approach was a long-term vision, with the planning horizon stretching as far as the year 2100. The Studio was designed as an experimental planning environment, in which none of the participants should

necessarily feel formally bound by the final outcome. Its results are briefly described in this article.

The Dutch coast is mainly a ‘soft’ and sandy coast. The coastal zone can be divided into three sections: the Southwestern Delta, the central so-called Holland Arc and the Wadden Sea in the north. In each section, a variety of distinctive landscapes, settlements and, in particular, dune landscapes can be identified.

Research by Design The Coastal Quality Studio used ‘research by design’ to investigate and ­focus on spatial transformation and to structure the debate about the Dutch coast and its defence against future sea level rise. Integrating the disciplines of coastal engineering and urbanism, the Studio’s work led to new concepts combining safety and quality for the coast, which were then discussed and translated into design strategies. These strategies reflected the different scales, challenges, and demands given and proposed solutions specifically tailored to the properties of the coast at the chosen l­ evel.

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Life Belt for New York The concept of the BIG U, developed for the competition Rebuild by Design, is a protective system that encircles Manhattan and that rethinks infrastructure as an amenity. Three “compartments” – East River Park, Chinatown, and the Battery – illustrate the strategy.

A

s the Atlantic Hurricane Zone expands, the most densely populated and economically productive region in America suddenly finds itself in harm’s way. The 90-­degree funnel of the New York Bight concentrates storm surge on New York City, putting half the city and its citizens at risk.

Iwan Baan’s New York Magazine cover photo of Lower Manhattan swept with darkness showed

how unprepared the city was (and gave rise to the naming of a new Manhattan neighbourhood – SoPo: South of Power, according to a resident cartoonist). When studying the historical development of Lower Manhattan, you can’t help but notice the gradual expansion of the island ­ through landfill from the 17th century onward.

The same areas that have been claimed from the sea are almost identical to the neighbourhoods

The BIG U not only shields the city against floods and storm water; it provides social and environmental benefits to the community, and fosters an improved public realm. The BIG U team created coordinated plans for three contiguous but sepaThis text is based on the contribution of the BIG team to Rebuild by Design.

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rated regions of the waterfront dubbed “compartments,” one of them is depicted above Battery Park – Financial District.

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Pierre-André Martin

The wetlands and sandbanks around Rio de Janeiro’s Olympic Park will be restored through the planting and establishment of mangroves and the special restinga vegetation common to this type of landscape. The Olympic Park will thus become part of a mosaic of green corridors stretching throughout the city.

A Lagoon for the Olympic Park B

razilian landscapes change and trans­ form quickly. This process normally runs through an intense period of exploita­ tion like the Brazilwood that gave the country its name, sugar cane, coffee, cattle, soy or more recently intense urbanization. This degradation scenario normally results in losses of nature and biodiversity, which are hardly reversible, but restoration initiatives are becoming more fre­ quent and occur in rural and urban landscapes at the intersection of landscape architecture, landscape planning, landscape ecology and eco­ logical restoration. The Rio 2016 Olympic Park on the city’s waterfront is converting its ­degraded landfill into an ecological restoration project. This is not as an isolated initiative but is part of a larger ecological and landscape strate­ gy for lagoon borders and ecological corridors for the city of Rio de Janeiro.

Our landscape architecture office EMBYÁ was commissioned by a construction firm to detail and pursue AECOM’s preliminary land­ scape architectural study for the Olympic path and the park at the lagoon’s edge. The project for the edge of the lagoon had evolved from the preliminary study, due to the environ­

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mental requirements of creating an ­urban park and carrying out an ecological restoration.

The Rio 2016 Olympic Park has been insert­ ed in the macro-watershed of the Jacarepaguá, (commonly named Barra da Tijuca) district planned in 1969 by Lucio Costa, who was also an urban planner who worked on the city of Brasília. The district’s composition is influenced by rationalism and urbanism, its traffic struc­ tures are bold and its uses observe monofunc­ tional zoning categories. Lucio Costa’s plan has suffered social transformations since its plan­ ning and as a result of market pressure has been transformed into a district of gated communi­ ties punctuated by commercial structures that mostly have a “Miami-like” residential identity.

In forty years it has been transformed from a human desert that only had beaches, swamps, sand dunes, shrubs and thickets into a district with more than 300,000 inhabitants, a second urban center for Rio. The macro-watershed of Jacarepaguá is bordered on its northeast and northwest sides by two ranges of forested hills, two of the ­biggest urban conservation units in the world (Parque da Pedra Branca and Parque da

The Rio 2016 Olympic Park at the city’s waterfront is part of a landscape of sandy lowlands called restinga. It is a very fragile ecosystem that quickly reacts to any transformation or pressure. The degraded border of the lagoon, isolated from the earthworks of the Olympic park, is waiting for its ecological restoration.

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Danai Thaitakoo, Brian McGrath

Bangkok Liquid Perception Bangkok is one of the most vulnerable and at-risk cities in the world, already experiencing severe effects of climate change. Waterscape Urbanism could help to master future challenges.

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The urban hydro-agricultural complex of the Chao Phraya River Delta has been radically transformed as a result of Bangkok’s rapid and expansive urbanization over the last 50 years.

While the delta and city are now in conflict, they were once entangled in a highly resilient, absorbent agricultural matrix, in concert with climatic cycles of monsoon and dry seasons.

Our research begins with a radical shift in emphasis from the current solid state of landscape urbanism toward a more systemic ­approach to urban design based on the dynamic liquid states of waterscape urbanism. This shift in language also represents a shift in thinking about urban design in the age of rapid climate change. Instead of cities thought of as permanent, static, solid, land-based environments, ­liquid perception is based on change, adaptation, and the continuous reproduction of locality as an embedded and evolving cultural practice. Waterscape urbanism is inspired by the

philosophical concept of liquid perception: ­indigenous, water-based cultural practices, as well as emerging scientific techniques of monitoring urban systems through watershed frameworks and networked technologies. Our argument about the liquid perception of waterscape urbanism presents Greater Bangkok, Thailand as a critical case study.

In addition to Bangkok’s status as one of the most vulnerable and at-risk cities in the world, already experiencing severe effects of rapid and unpredictable climate change, it also presents a degraded but still vibrant indigenous, water-based urbanism that remains a model of resilience and adaptability alongside the predictable historical cycles of monsoon rains and wet rice cultivation. Combining new ways of seeing the world, new ecosystem science, and the case study of Bangkok liquid perception will contribute to an argument for a refined concept of waterscape urbanism that

The Chao Phraya River in Bangkok is lined with both traditional dwellings, markets and monastery complexes, as well as luxury hotels and condominiums.

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