BOSTON, USA
Among Beantown’s coordinated efforts to preserve its historic waterfront: buried bulkheads, “living edges” and other discreet yet effective infrastructure
When it comes to protecting cities from rising tides, few pieces of infrastructure are as effective as seawalls — stone, steel or concrete barriers that repel ocean water just as the ramparts of medieval castles once thwarted enemy invaders. There is nothing subtle, however, about a seawall: It’s hard infrastructure that very much looks like hard infrastructure. “Who wants to be on an urban waterfront and see a giant wall blocking the harbour?” says Pippa Brashear, a planning principal at Scape Landscape Architecture. “Think about what that does to people’s experiences and to the cultural identity of a city.”
To help formulate a plan for Boston, which they dubbed the Resilient Boston Harbor Vision, Brashear and her team at Scape studied the waterfront and came up with renderings — she calls them “vignettes” — depicting flood defences that are well-integrated into their surroundings. In some vignettes, the seawall hangs back, buried beneath a green berm that’s tucked behind an expansive beachfront. In others, it is replaced — or enhanced — by a “living edge,” often including a salt marsh that extends into the harbour, absorbing and calming the waves.
Boston is known for its Harborwalk, a waterfront promenade (still under construction) that follows the shoreline, linking wharves, piers and famed historic sites. As Scape envisions it, the Harborwalk skitters, floats and dances, sometimes cantilevering out past a seawall, sometimes stepping overtop a terraced seaside bulkhead. At other times, it flanks elevated roadways or piers, which are mounted on stilts to sit safely above the waves.
These vignettes aren’t blueprints but templates. As part of the city’s wider Climate Ready Boston initiative, each of Beantown’s neighbourhoods — from historically Irish South Boston to the Italian North End — will have to reimagine its own waterfront. Scape has given them a range of options to choose from. “We’ve created a suite of techniques,” says Brashear. “Boston is a city of beaches, marshes and promenades. We want it to stay that way.”