New York Climate Change

The idea of resilience can easily be invoked to protect the status quo and foreclose more transformative change, but resilience can be more just. Jill Eisenhard from RHI describes how they talked about resilience with Red Hook youth way before Sandy hit. And resilience, for them, was both the strength, motivation, or confidence within each of them... See more

There’s one large-scale plan that I end up critiquing quite a bit in the book called the Giant Sea Wall. It’s a plan to create, really, a whole new city on reclaimed land in the bay, with these very large retention ponds that could be pumped low enough that the rivers and canals in the city could drain into them. The planners think they need... See more

Pilot projects are good for localized demonstrations, but in many ways this has to be seen as a much more interconnected system. It will not always flood in the same places because of the dynamics of different storms and different infrastructural conditions.

We were there ten years after the Indian Ocean tsunami, and a lot of the conversations were about how you come up with a place that people know that they can go to and then tell them how much time they have — sometimes it’s only a few minutes — to actually leave. There they are called “escape buildings,” these multistory fortified buildings.

But for hundreds of years, the harbor had given New York its power. In less than 24 hours, it took it away. As we are reminded more and more often these days, it doesn’t take long to turn everything on its head.

The images of water pouring into subways and banks, cars submerged on Avenue A, escalators that needed to be ridden with scuba equipment, brought to mind an apocalypse of a specific kind, another lost city—Atlantis. Was this what New York could become?

Those with cars (and means) could leave, the rest were stuck; some had gas burners, the rest ate their food cold; those with water towers had at least a few days with running water, others had to make do with hydrants. The drama of unequal division uncannily defined the crisis, just as it had an election year that was finally coming to an end.