Teams help form plans to confront sea level rise
10 design groups selected to map Bay Area strategies
With sea level rise expected to become a pressing threat here within decades, 10 design teams have been selected to map how the Bay Area can respond.
Each team will receive up to $250,000 for its work, which begins this week and will conclude in May with adaptation strategies for 10 distinct locations along the edge of the bay. There’s no guarantee they will be built — but the high-visibility competition could make it easier to attract large-scale grants and funding.
“We want a balance between innovative designs and things that can be done,” said
Amanda Brown-Stevens, managing director of the program, called Resilient by Design.
The teams were announced Sunday at an event on the Richmond waterfront. They include representatives of nine countries, and were culled from 51 contenders.
Members of each selected team will spend this week at scientific presentations, community meetings and site visits to a half dozen or so locations along the East Bay shoreline. There will be similar excursions this fall to other large sections of the bay. Then, in December, each team will be assigned a specific site.
“One of our goals this week is to really provide the teams with a good understanding of the different challenges” around the bay, BrownStevens said. “The teams will need to take a variety of approaches.”
The variety is seen in the makeup of the different teams.
One, which calls itself the Home Team, includes nonprofit housing developers. It stresses the need to adapt low-income communities to environmental pressures without disrupting the lives of residents.
Another, Public Sediment, emphasizes ecological infrastructure and proclaimed in its submission, “We design with mud.”
Several teams also include names that have star wattage, at least in the world of urban design. One was organized by James Corner Field Operations, best-known for New York’s High Line but active on the park planned at the Presidio between Crissy Field and the Main Post. Another features MVRDV, one of the most acclaimed architectural firms in the Netherlands. A third is headed by Bjarke Ingels Group, whose founder has been profiled in such magazines as Rolling Stone and the New Yorker.
Ingels also took part in Rebuild by Design, the competition held after 2012’s Hurricane Sandy that serves as a model for the Bay Area effort.
The local competition, which seeks to be proactive, doesn’t have federal disaster relief funds to draw upon. But the teams are well-financed: Each will receive $100,000 for research and $150,000 for the actual designs.
The impetus for the competition is scientific projections that sea level rise is likely push tides upward with accelerating force in coming decades. A 2012 study by the National Research Council estimated that the average high tide by 2100 could be 66 inches higher within San Francisco Bay.
In some ways, the contest is a sequel to a 2009 competition organized by Bay Conservation and Development Commission — “Rising Tides: An International Ideas Competition.”
The difference this time, besides the sixfigure awards for taking part, is the emphasis on practicality.
“I’m really glad they’re doing this now,” said Will Travis, who was the commission’s executive director at the time. “Ours was to get people thinking. This says, ‘It’s a problem that can be solved.’ ”