What would man-made islands do to the Houston Ship Channel?
The Palm Jumeirah Islands in Dubai captured mine and the world’s imagination in 2001.
Created in the shape of a palm tree, the man-made archipelago and its surrounding ring were a bold declaration that the United Arab Emirates, an oil-rich member of OPEC, had entered the 21st century.
The wealthy Persian Gulf nation, which exported $50 billion worth of oil in 2019, threw $12 billion at the ambitious project. The islands have since been populated with high-rises, luxury homes, resorts, an upscale water park and other tourist attractions.
Nearly 20 years later, a renewed call to build a chain of man-made islands along the Houston Ship Channel, a critical route for the growing amount of U.S. energy exports, is capturing imaginations and raising important questions.
The ship channel is being widened and deepened over the next few years to accommodate growing exports of crude oil, gasoline, diesel and petrochemicals, as well as increased cargo container traffic.
But a team that includes members from Rogers Partners Architects, Rice University and the civil engineering firm Walter P. Moore has made an eye-catching proposal to use the dredging material from the project to create a chain of man-made islands that will become the 10,000-acre Galveston Bay Park.
With most of the land surrounding the bay taken up by industry and homes, architects Rob Rogers and Tyler Swanson argue that man-made islands built along both sides of the ship channel would create thousands of acres of habitat for wildlife as well as trails, parks and campsites for people.
Expanding on a 2015 proposal from a Rice University team, their proposal also calls for building a bridge from Texas City that would allow cars on the western chain of islands, while another bridge from Baytown would allow access to the eastern islands.
The proposal is among 26 projects selected for public exhibition in the Houston 2020 Visions contest. Spearheaded by the Houston chapter of the American Institute of Architects, the contest was a worldwide call for creative and sustainable ideas to make the region more resilient post-Hurricane Harvey.
Drawing more than 50 submissions, the Galveston Bay Park was one of the three proposals labeled by judges as a “visionary.”
The Houston office of global engineering and architecture firm Stantec submitted a proposal called the Lily Pad Network.
Under the plan, existing neighborhood structures such as schools, community centers and faith centers would be activated as a network of safe havens, or “lily pads,” during disasters.
The Houston office of architecture firm Gensler submitted a proposal named High Hackers that calls for transforming vacant office space in high-rise buildings into park space, community gardens, retail and housing.
All the proposals will be displayed on the contest website on Aug. 31, and later this fall they will be exhibited as part of the relaunched Architecture Center Houston, which was damaged by flooding during Hurricane Harvey.
I posted a photo and a link to the Galveston Bay Park proposal on my Twitter account and LinkedIn page last week, where they got thousands of views.
Many readers were intrigued by the proposal and shared it on their social media networks. Others had some really good and critical questions.
One person asked where the money was going to come from for the project, while another expressed concerns about how polluted the dredging material would be and if it would be safe for use by wildlife and people.
Another reader reminded people that the fate of the proposed Ike Dike, a coastal barrier that would be built along Galveston Island and the Bolivar Peninsula to protect the region from hurricanes, remains unsettled.
Some expressed concern that the island would affect water quality and oyster beds. One person pointed out how levees destroyed hundreds of thousands of acres of freshwater marsh in Louisiana and Mississippi.
Although the Galveston Bay Park proposal captures the imagination, it is clear that people have serious concerns that would need to be addressed before the project could move forward.