Salty Urbanism: Towards an Adaptive Coastal Urban Design Framework to Address Sea Level Rise

Coastal areas face a gamut of environmental threats that span across spatial and temporal scales and involve collaboration among many disciplines. Participants range from practicing architects and planners negotiating site, infrastructure and architectural issues, to researchers involved in modeling climate, sea level rise and urban development patterns along coastal corridors. The complexity of environmental issues, as well as the diversity of disciplines and methodologies involved, present substantial barriers to establishing integrated solutions that might be possible within a more collaborative and comprehensive framework. Parallel to this, coupling ecosystem services with urban development is at obvious odds with current planning and zoning regulations. The situation summons creative approaches on how to retrofit architecture and planning to address paradigm-shifting threats of storm surge, sea level rise, and fluctuating rainfall and runoff patterns. Defending against water encroachment from all directions is a particularly unique challenge of South Florida (Fig. 1), making it a good candidate for development of an adaptation framework that can be appropriated by coastal communities.

https://doi.org/10.35483/ACSA.AM.108.63

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ISBN
978-1-944214-26-5