Come High Water

Soft” is hardly the word most people would associate with the contemporary urban waterfront. In the twenty-first century, we know the strip where city meets sea as a cluttered hardscape, an area typically girded by either highways and piers or luxury condominiums and busy recreational facilities. But soft is exactly what the landscape architect Susannah Drake says our waterfronts will have to become in the future—a future a lot more complex (and a lot wetter) than anything we’ve known before. Drake, principal of Brooklyn-based practice dlandstudio, has developed five case studies for this month’s issue of Metropolis, each one positing a new and innovative coping mechanism to confront changed urban prospects in the wake of climate change, rising sea levels, and extreme storms.

In order to grasp what the Drake team means by soft, it’s useful to understand how our waterfronts got so calcified to begin with. “Those hardened edges were created to facilitate shipping exchange,” Drake notes, and even with the decline of shipping in many post-industrial urban centers, “we’ve put in railings everywhere”—barriers to keep people from falling into the drink. This mania for separation, Drake insists, has been misguided. “We’re hardening everything to fulfill one need, and prohibiting others,” she says, “like being able to provide public access down to the water. And in doing so we’re eliminating all of the softer edges that provide greater ecological service.”

Working closely with dlandstudio associate Forbes Lipschitz, Drake has conceived of a new type of urban perimeter. “We’re not proposing to just put green poché on everything, plants wherever we can,” Drake says. For her, softness isn’t so much about having less asphalt and more greenery; it’s about transforming the waterfront from a definitive boundary into a subtly graded band. The new waterfront as it appears in Drake’s proposals is one in which the line between the water and the city is blurred, diffused, thickened. Additional programming and infrastructure stretch out beyond the conventional urban boundary, while at the same time natural elements penetrate it from without. This notion of softness will yield shorefronts more durable than the rigid ones of old—an imperative given the increasingly severe storms and higher floodwaters that are the bellwethers of climate change.

To see the strategy in action, take dlandstudio’s scheme for its hometown of New York City. On the eastern banks of the East River, a rash of new construction has been steadily reinforcing the frontier that Drake and company are so eager to wear away. Their antidote: creating new wetlands on existing developed land around the shore, with foot traffic rerouted to a series of elevated catwalks. Artificial berms on the water-facing fronts of some buildings would reach as high as the second floor, with access redirected to the side. Offices would be relegated to upper levels, while ground floors would be given over to workshop spaces where flooding would do less damage. The plan recognizes that in some places, the water can’t be kept out—that it simply has to be managed as effectively as possible. This was a lesson the team learned from Hurricane Sandy. “Certain areas were flooded, and given what we know now, we know they’re going flood again.”

The proposal for Miami shows how new installations could reach out into the water to mitigate damage before the waves come ashore. “We can create what you might call ‘landscape obstacles’ that will help to soften the impact of the water,” Drake says. In this instance, reefs and breakwaters would be built to help preserve the city’s famous beaches. Where the current built horizon ends on the inland side of the beach-front street, dlandstudio adds additional structures on the opposite side—buildings within a berm—that would shelter the city from a deluge and add more of the oceanfront programming—cafés, shops—essential to Miami’s economy.

All of Drake’s proposals do triple duty. In addition to thwarting and managing flood-waters, they respond to the cultural and economic needs of the city (protecting Shanghai’s financial services district, for example, or Cairo’s farming community) and contribute to the still-broader project of making cities more ecologically sustainable. “What we need to be thinking about is a much more hybrid approach,” Drake says. Accordingly, her improvements incorporate features like new systems for waste disposal and specialized plantings that will enhance energy efficiency and carbon sequestration. Even as they buffer against the pernicious effects of global warming, these softer waterfronts will help cities produce less of the pollution that causes climate change in the first place.

So how far from reality are these ideas? Not as far as you might think. In Drake’s practice, theoretical propositions like the Come High Water proposals don’t just make their way piecemeal into her day-to-day design work—they emerge from it, the conceptual residue of actual projects currently underway. “Our real work is informing the theoretical as much as the other way around,” Drake says. The firm’s recent endeavors include a park near Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal and surface water management for a New York highway, and they both helped point the way toward the more ambitious, comprehensive plans presented here. “These are just possibilities,” Drake stresses, ones that will require further research to determine their actual feasibility. But they’re a promising step toward solving the daunting problems facing the watery periphery of cities around the globe.