10 Years After Superstorm Sandy

PRATT INSTITUTE’S RESILIENCE WORK AND THE ORIGINS OF THE RAMP INITIATIVE

by Semire Bayatli and Walker Johnston

Introduction

Late October to early November of 2022 marked the ten year anniversary of Superstorm Sandy, the largest Atlantic hurricane ever recorded, that left a path of devastation—communal, physical, and emotional—along the eastern coast of North America from the Caribbean to Canada. The most populous city in the United States was not exempt from the destruction; in New York City, at least 43 people died, thousands of homes and businesses were damaged, and major flooding and electrical outages impacted households across the metro region, all causing billions of dollars in damage. The disaster forced affected communities to reckon with their own vulnerability to climate change and to focus on planning for increasingly more frequent severe storms. The New York City government took action by “establishing a Mayor’s Office of Climate and Environmental Justice, developing berms and levees along its shorelines, and restoring wetlands.”1 At Pratt Institute, students and professors mobilized, forming the The Recover, Adapt, Mitigate, and Plan (RAMP) project, an initiative which still exists today; its mission is engage with with “frontline waterfront communities in New York City to co-create and accelerate values-based, equitable, innovative, and effective strategies to recover, adapt, mitigate, and plan for the impact of the climate crisis.”2

This article details the formation of the RAMP initiative and is based on an interview, edited for brevity and clarity, with Ronald Shiffman in October 2022.

1 Afridi, Lena P. “10 Years After Sandy, Renters Remain Most Vulnerable to the Impacts of Climate Change,” October 28, 2022. https://www. thenation.com/article/environment/10-years-after-sandy/.

2 “RAMP22 Home.” RAMP Site (blog). Accessed November 24, 2022. https://ramp-pratt.org/.

3 Ibid

Ramp Origins

The RAMP initiative formed from a group of Pratt students’ collective reaction to what was the devastating impact of Hurricane Sandy. The disaster required emergency response, and many students contributed by preparing food for frontline workers and isolated community members. Amidst these activist efforts was a sense of both hope and anxiety, along with motivation to do more than making sandwiches—a drive to take action to help communities become more resilient with the threat of future storms.

Faculty in the programs for Sustainable Planning and Development (PSPD)—now the Graduate Center for Planning and the Environment (GCPE)— and Undergraduate Architecture created the RAMP project with this forward-looking viewpoint. Pratt Institute GCPE Professor Emeritus Ron Shiffman, Jaime Stein, and School of Architecture faculty including Zehra Kuz and Deborah Gans, were among RAMP’s founding leaders.

Early work concentrated on coastal communities most impacted by Sandy, including Sheepshead Bay, Red Hook, Coney Island, and the Rockaway Peninsula in Brooklyn and Queens. Collaborative workshops and training sessions, working groups, and academic curricula—including the current Delta Cities Coastal Resilience joint studio in the GCPE and Undergraduate Architecture departments—molded RAMP’s framework. While undergraduate architecture students thought about what new design strategies may make living with and on the water sustainable, planning students created policy proposals.

Interdisciplinary Approach

From Spring 2013 through Fall 2014, graduate and undergraduate studios were set up with funding from the Kresge Foundation to study how to adapt and safeguard shoreline communities in the face of increasing sea levels, severe storms, and habitat loss while preserving their historical identities. Direct engagement, relationship and trust-building, collaboration with community groups in the impacted areas were essential to this. Additionally, RAMP was intentionally designed as an interdisciplinary undertaking, operating with the understanding that change could not occur through solitary labor. Superstorm Sandy served as a stimulus to bring students across disciplines together, which resulted in a new array of classes working on the same projects with the same communities. The classes would meet up to share with one another what they were learning, representing a new pedagogical approach of weaving curricula together. This approach continues at Pratt today.

“Participation must be multi-faceted and has to carefully weave together a set of values that recognize diversity, equity, and justice, addressing the needs and engaging the voices of all impacted. The process of planning is as important as the products of that process and, indeed, if the process is well designed the end product—the places we live in, work in and embrace—will be far better.”

Community is an important pillar of the RAMP initiative. RAMP aims to be a model for communitydriven academic partnerships, and a way to build capacity to address the present and future climate crises. Significantly, the initiative seeks to highlight the interrelationships of social, racial, and climate injustice— acknowledging that the regions most impacted by climate change are typically low-income communities of color. At the root of the RAMP initiative is a spirit of co-creation and drive to bring together Pratt students, faculty, and local community leaders to create participatory design solutions addressing environmental, social, and economic pressures that can be implemented and replicated in other communities. Ron emphasizes the need for “culturally appropriate public participatory tools that engage people in planning and development processes in such a way as to minimize their alienation and enable them to benefit from all stages of the development process—including being beneficiaries at the end of the process.”4

The Pratt Ethos

Embedded in the fabric of Pratt Institute as we know it today is the ethos of community engagement and co-creation. According to Ron, the vision behind this is the belief that the work of architects and planners should be made available to everyone. This approach emerged in the 1960s as a backlash against the school’s curriculum, which focused on esoteric projects that lacked any relation to the declining communities surrounding the Pratt campus. Students in the School of Architecture went on strike to protest the disconnect between the curriculum and communities, and things started to shift.

The Pratt Center, founded in 1963 as the first university-based community planning organization in the United States, embodies this ethos. The center engages on the ground with community-based organizations to combat systemic injustices and foster sustainable development. It does this by utilizing professional talents in urban planning, architecture, design, and public policy. The objectives of the RAMP Initiative and the Pratt Center are both based on the conviction that achieving a community's vision and dislodging stagnant paradigms result from challenging inequities, making courageous decisions, and being receptive to the possibilities that a process of collaborative exchange can produce. Both the planning field and academia have a reputation and history of being extractive, using residents for their research and leaving them with participation fatigue and little to no concrete improvements to their communities. The recognition that partnerships with communities must be sustained beyond the academic calendar is fundamental to RAMP’s approach and lasting impact on the GCPE operations.

Looking Forward

From Ron Shiffman’s personal perspective, consistent effort remains the most important ingredient for success with the RAMP initiative. RAMP illustrates how the path forward in disaster planning, resilience, and adaptation must be a steady, collective effort, built by deep collaboration and leveraging resources across disciplines and communities.