In the last ten years, the New York City waterfront has come back to life. After a period of disuse following heavy industrial activity and efforts to clean their waterways, cities across the country have embraced their waterfronts as a place for people to relax, swim, fish and boat. Just as this new relationship to the waterfront had taken hold, the unprecedented impact of Hurricane Sandy established the need to strengthen and protect our shoreline, critical infrastructure and neighborhoods.
There is now a need for a double agenda to address both resiliency and access. New York City’s and the Northeast region’s coastal zones are vast and diverse, with an array of vulnerabilities and challenges to the natural and built environments requiring an approach deeply integrated in the local communities, land use analysis, existing infrastructure and building typologies, and financial structures to support options.