Local leaders employ design challenge

Planners, architects fromaround the worldwill convene

OAKLAND — Standing at the edge of Oakland against the backdrop of the Bay Bridge and San Francisco skyline, leaders from across the region on Wednesday denounced President Donald Trump’s promise to break from the Paris climate accord, appealing to global experts and local activists alike to confront the challenge climate change is posing for communities across the Bay Area.

They couldn’t have divined a more timely context for the Resilient by Design Bay Area Challenge, which officially launched Wednesday, 24 hours before Trump formally announced his decision to withdraw from the landmark 2015 agreement between 147 nations to curb climate change.

The yearlong competition is expected to draw small armies of architects and urban planners, ecologists and engineers, public finance specialists and educators, community advocates and activists, and others in a fight for ideas. Those ideas will be contained in 10 projects designed to better defend the Bay Area’s most vulnerable communities against the impacts of climate change.

At the Middle Harbor Shoreline Park, Oakland and Berkeley’s mayors, along with leaders from the Bay Area’s regional environmental agencies, said it was more important than ever to protect communities against extreme, unpredictable weather and sea level rise.

“This morning’s news by President Trump ... makes us more determined than ever to double down on our commitment to not only fight climate change but to promote resiliency in the Bay Area,” Berkeley Mayor Jesse Arreguin said Wednesday. “It now turns to us, the local and state governments, to lead, and we are up to that challenge.”

Armed with a $4.6 million grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, the teams are expected to assemble within the next month. A jury will select 10 qualifying teams that will then spend the fall researching possible solutions. In the new year, those teams will embark on a community design process, reaching out to local residents at 10 sites across the Bay Area to design their projects. Next May, a jury will select which projects “win,” though in reality, the prize is the project itself.

It’s a model for action born out of the devastation left in Hurricane Sandy’s wake. The post-tropical cyclone ravaged the East Coast in 2012, killing 147 people and leaving thousands of others without power for days. And, New York City especially, was not prepared, said Sam Carter, managing director of the resilience team for the Rockefeller Foundation.

“Subway systems flooded, people were forced to leave their homes, the region was brought to a complete standstill for days,” he said, adding the storm wreaked $19 billion in damage in New York City alone.

As the city sought to rebuild, Carter said it was essential to not only restore what had been lost but also improve upon the original designs, making infrastructure better able to withstand extreme storms and offering ancillary benefits along the way. President Barack Obama convened the first competition, called Rebuild by Design, which the Rockefeller Foundation also helped fund, with input from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Municipal Art Society, Regional Plan Association, New York University’s Institute for Public Knowledge, Van Alen Insti- tute and others.

The seven projects that resulted from that first effort are comprehensive and complex, said Amy Chester, the managing director of Rebuild by Design, and all of them are now beginning construction. One, called the “Big U,” will eventually create 10 continuous miles of green space that will double as a barrier against flooding waters in the event of a severe storm and as a community park for sunnier days. The green space will help buffer not only the city’s Financial District but also approximately 95,000 low-income, elderly and disabled residents who live in areas prone to flooding. Another project, called “Living Breakwaters,” will protect Staten Island’s shoreline with an arsenal of oyster reefs that double as educational and recreational opportunities for local residents.

With many of the Bay Area’s low-income communities already living in lowlying areas, Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf said it is essential to act quickly to address the impacts of climate change.

“We have an opportunity to ignite what the Bay Area is known so well for, and that is innovation and grass-roots power,” she said. “This community is ready to step up to this challenge.”