Assorted projects on Long Island Sound resilience,
nature + communities

As climate change spells mounting risk, from extreme sea level rise to more intense hurricanes in the North Atlantic region, the need for planning that strengthens the resilience of coastal areas is critical.

Still recovering from Hurricanes Irene and Sandy, the State of Connecticut is leveraging $54.2 million in federal disaster resilience funding — awarded through HUD’s National Disaster Resilience Competition — to develop adaptive strategies that will help the state’s coastal counties weather future climate risk and bounce forward. Successful risk reduction solutions will demand municipal cooperation and holistic assessments of human needs and vulnerabilities.

I trace my interest in the fields of sustainable architecture and environmental justice to my early undergraduate research on green infrastructure and resilient design applications in coastal Connecticut at the Yale UEDLAB (founded by Alexander Felson, PhD, Elisabeth Murdoch Chair of Landscape Architecture at University of Melbourne). The topic of a future-ready Connecticut is one that has long interested me—and been the subject of projects at the UEDLAB and in coursework (ARCH 4226/F&ES 888: Ecological Urban Design, Spring 2018).

This page highlights several of those research projects, including:

• Senior thesis, report titled "Spatial statistical study of locations for affordable housing development in Connecticut to inform resilience planning and investment prioritization". December, 2018. Recipient of L.C. Lichty and E.O. Waters Prize in Mechanical Engineering

• "Towards resilience: a mapping study of risk management in coastal Connecticut". February, 2018. In collaboration with Varoon Kelekar

Towards resilience: a mapping study of risk management in coastal Connecticut

When State officials applied for the HUD NDRC Phase II grant in 2015, strong focus was placed on securing benefits for and expanding affordable housing neighborhoods; the challenges of income disparity, critical infrastructure disrepair, and housing blight were spelled out clearly. Several pilot sites, including Long Wharf in New Haven where low-income residents are overburdened by repetitive losses from disaster events, were identified as resilient capacity-building investment priorities [1].

Centered on these objectives for building resilience in low-income communities, the three maps that we produced tell the evolving narrative of how income and age demographics in affordable housing neighborhoods interact with the present and future effects of natural disasters and accelerating sea level rise. Examining different timescales spatially, the maps present not only the current susceptibility of low-income residents to storm and flooding damage but also the locations along Connecticut’s coast that show promise as acupuncture points for realizing transformational change. Embracing the risk management framework of resistance, incremental adjustment, and transformation, we see our multiscalar temporal approach as conducive to informing decision-makers with goals along a spectrum: from identifying existing obstacles to an effective natural disaster response, to improving natural disaster readiness, and even to the reinventing the social- ecological system structure along the Connecticut coast in the long-term [2]. We characterize coastal social-ecological systems along Connecticut’s coast in these maps in a way that can inform any of these three states of risk management.

1. Before

The first map, titled “Before”, overlays worst-case hurricane surge inundation areas for storm categories 1-4 on the current socioeconomic conditions along the state’s entire coast [3]. The map illustrates the existing pattern wherein a large proportion of public housing developments are sited in areas prone to inundation [4]. Because low-income and elderly populations face, disproportionately, the livelihood-debilitating effects of natural disasters, often struggling to evacuate, the spatial correlation of inundation area with public housing location is the main subject of this map [5].

Each orange circular marker, which denotes the location of a public housing development, is sized to reflect the percentage of its residents over the age of 62 (and thereby more prone to fail to safely evacuate). An additional map might scale the size of the public housing development markers to reflect whether residents have a disability or children, or other factors that complicate capacity to evacuate. While the map maintains a primary focus on public housing developments, the background layer indicates the total social vulnerability of each Connecticut census tract using a grayscale gradient. The darkest grey indicates the highest vulnerability according to the 15 social factors weighted in the CDC’s SVI 2016 [6].

2. During

The second map, “During”, looks closely at those social-ecological conditions that impact the efficacy of natural disaster emergency management, narrowing in on the urbanized areas of Norwalk and New Haven. It plots the location of public housing developments and identifies those at a risk of flooding and storm damage using the same worst-case hurricane surge inundation data shown in the first map. Past natural disaster events have left low-income families stranded and brought to the limelight the higher risk borne by these communities which, because of racialized zoning, insufficient resource allocation, or stymied adaptive capacity, often lack flood protection or available mobility to evacuate [7].

It thus becomes imperative to consider their relative distance from hurricane relief emergency services. The location of nearest fire stations and EMS points are denoted around a network of road linkages. Further, the roads, as important egress routes, are demarcated. The roads marked in green denote those with high rates of flooding given future SLR projections (SLAMM v2) [8]. Flooded roads hinder the connections between emergency services and the housing developments, and, thereby, will weaken the emergency response in the time period around when a severe storm strikes.

3. Rethinking the After

The final map, titled “Rethinking the After”, attempts to bridge near- and long-term timescales by illustrating the compatibility of near-term economic development plans with long-term resilience planning. In particular, it explores how economic and smart growth, the provision of an ecosystem service like public space for recreation, and new ecological conditions can coexist, zooming in on three coastal cities (Stamford, Norwalk, New Haven). The map combines multiple results from SLAMMv2, which predicts changes to land cover type due to different sea level rise rates through 2100 [9]. By showing the likely extent of coastal marshes in 2070, the developed land predicted to be flooded by 2070, open spaces and statewide trails, and existing public housing developments, the map attempts to highlight possible places of conflict between current development, any future development plans, and the land forms that will emerge over the next 50 years. However, in doing so, it simultaneously reveals how these places of conflict can be restructured as places of opportunity for conferring benefits on human and ecological-biological communities. This map reveals possible candidate sites for creating a network of green spaces for public use, for cultivating dynamic wetland ecosystems, and for implementing nature-based infrastructure (such as a waterfront park with wetlands to store floodwaters) to reduce severe storm effects [10].

In displaying 2018-2023 Priority Funding Areas (PFAs, CT OPM) [11], the map shows how economic development and support for projects in these sites can be strategically formulated to complement a long-term vision for coastal protection, safety, and human and environmental health. The map can inspire its audience to discuss the potential for creating a dialogue between development in these PFAs and the open spaces and trails within 1-mile of them (see map 3), and, in doing so, increasing accessibility to and the equitable distribution of public space, offering new jobs to low-income residents in environmental conservation or wetland restoration, and better knitting public housing complexes into the urban fabric. In this vein, other interesting map layers warranting investigation include the location of economically significant retail or commercial corridors, emerging transit-oriented developments, or other ecological layers, like critical habitats. The map may influence policymakers to tailor their actions to realize advantages on multiple fronts, or even to direct their actions towards transformational change [12].