Resources

In response to Bangkok’s green space crisis, our team has created We!park, which is supported by the Office of Thai Health Promotion Foundation, the Bangkok Metropolitan Administration, and the Thai Association of Landscape Architects. We!park works toward creating a system of green spaces within the city’s infrastructure by identifying and designing pocket parks.

Dispersal is easy to critique, but the questions remain whether we truly understand not just the challenges but also the opportunities that this form of urbanity can offer.  Rather than fight against this process, Starter Communities, produced following a design workshop at MIT, asks whether it is possible to design dispersal into something that builds belonging between people and restores our relationship with the landscapes we inhabit. 

Isle de Jean Charles has lost 98% of its land mass, exposing residents to increasingly intense storms and flooding. The tribal community has sought a collective relocation, that will allow them to retain cultural ties and landscape-based practices. The Isle de Jean Charles Biloxi-Chitimacha Choctaw Tribe, in collaboration with partners including the Lowlander Center and Evans + Lighter, have been working towards relocation for two decades. However, the process has been fraught because of a lack of federal tribal recognition and poor institutional support for collective relocation in the US.

Climate-change-induced hazards are causing large scale displacements of communities, destruction of property, and disruption of critical infrastructure. These increasingly unpredictable climate events result in complex and cascading impacts, emphasizing the need for comprehensive, data-driven, multidisciplinary design and planning toolkits. This paper shares the development of Flux.Land, an accessible and collaborative spatial decision support system (SDSS), allows community and planning agencies to visualize climate impacts and take collective action.

The Ayamama River in Istanbul has been substantially degraded due to urbanization of the river corridor since the 1950s. Development throughout the watershed and climate change contribute to increasing severity of flash flooding events that threaten life and property in the floodplain. The decommissioned Ataturk Airport provides a unique opportunity to re-imagine the utility of urban voids in helping cities adapt to increasing flood impacts. In this paper, we explore the use of the decommissioned Ataturk Airport site to relieve development pressure from the Ayamama River by implementing a novel swap strategy for urban voids. The proposed swap strategy design methodology relocates, regenerates, and reconnects decommissioned infrastructures and degraded floodplains simultaneously.

With Metro Manila as a backdrop, this essay addresses gaps in resilience literature and practice by introducing a social-ecological urban design concept of resilience, defined here as: The ability for overlapping place-based and sector-specific networks, systems, and communities that operate across temporal and spatial scales to anticipate and absorb disturbances such that they can transition into more socially, ecologically, and spatially equitable states.

Stable housing is a fundamental platform for individual and collective well-being, and research indicates that a significant disruptive effect of severe environmental disasters is residential displacement. Despite extensive research on the intersection of disasters and housing, the effect of major disasters on evictions remains understudied. How do landlords and renters respond to the economic dislocation that accompanies disasters and to what extent do major disasters lead to evictions?

Residents of manufactured housing communities (MHCs) are disproportionately vulnerable to both hazards and displacement. The cooperative ownership model of resident-owned communities (ROCs) pioneered by ROC USA helps MHC residents resist displacement, but little research assesses how cooperative tenure impacts hazard vulnerability. To fill this gap, we conduct a spatial analysis of 234 ROC USA sites; analyze the co-op conversion process; and interview ROC USA staff, technical assistance providers, and resident co-op leaders.

The goal of this project is to create an equitable and inclusive design and planning process that will purposefully enhance community capabilities and sovereignty over decision-making, while also helping projects achieve more successful long-term outcomes.

Driven by community leaders from eight adjacent communities along el Caño Martín Peña(CMP) in San Juan, Puerto Rico, the work of the Corporación del Proyecto ENLACE offers an equitable and community-driven model for relocation in flood-prone neighborhoods. Residents are voluntarily relocated to resilient infill housing, making space for green infrastructure and keeping the community together. A community land trust protects residents from gentrification while providing a model for collective land ownership.