Rebuild by Design: Understanding Risk and Accepting Uncertainty

Marilyn Jordan Taylor, former ULI Chairman and dean of the School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania, highlighted the key themes of Rebuild by Design, a multistage design competition sponsored by President Barack Obama’s Hurricane Sandy Rebuilding Task Force, at ULI’s Building the Resilient City: Risks and Opportunities conference in San Francisco.

Related: Rebuilding by Design: The Art of Resilience | ULI Policy Perspective on Rebuild by Design | ULI Fall Meeting in NYC

Established in 2013 to develop innovative and robust responses to natural disaster planning, the competition solicited proposals from top-flight urban design teams to develop regional resilience strategies for waterfront communities in the Northeast corridor—including New York City as well as the states of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut—devastated by Hurricane Sandy in October 2012. Taylor, University of Pennsylvania Paley Professor and dean of the School of Design, served as a special adviser to the competition. The Rockefeller Foundation was the lead supporter of the competition.

“[Rebuild by Design] not only gave permission to think beyond the usual political boundaries, it required thinking in the long term about the terms of human and capital investment to build back better,” Jordan said.

The six winning proposals along with four finalists were announced in June by former U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Shaun Donovan, who also served as chair of the Rebuild by Design jury. Each proposal focused on a specific community within the tristate region, and the six communities associated with the winning proposals will receive $920 million in Community Development Block Grant–Disaster Recovery (CDBG-DR) funds from HUD to develop resilience plans based on the design teams’ proposals.

Taylor said the Rebuild by Design competition offered a fresh approach for and critical lessons on how communities can emerge stronger from severe weather events resulting from climate change. Among these lessons were the importance of taking a regional approach to building resilience, understanding the specific risks each community within a region faces, accepting uncertainty as a fact of life, and building social resilience and stewardship of assets for long-term investment and return.

Perhaps the most significant lesson of the competition was understanding the community risks and assets across the region. “As the clouds finally part, Storm Sandy revealed the vulnerabilities and interdependency across the New York/New Jersey/Connecticut region in a strange new light,” Taylor said.

Rebuild by Design revealed several sobering facts about future resilience planning efforts, Taylor said, including:

• Population growth will continue in high-risk areas and that “many people stay in harm’s way”;
• Large-scale, hard, or “gray” infrastructure like floodwalls can introduce new vulnerabilities, like forcing floodwaters upstream if water has no place to permeate;
• The government has limited capacity to finance rebuilding efforts and that these funds are declining relative to the risks we are facing and our exposure to risk;
• The lack of consensus about investments to be made and steps to be taken will erode momentum and our adaptation efforts.

Momentum around the need for developing resilience strategies that anticipate future risks is difficult but necessary to maintain, Taylor emphasized.

“As we get further in time from the event, the sense of need for fundamental change diminishes,” she said. “We may think it won’t happen again, but most likely we are wrong.”

Immediately after Sandy, the losses were intensely personal—reclaiming one’s home, ensuring the safety of one’s loved ones, and resuming work, family, and financial responsibilities. It is only after moving through a period of intense personal vulnerability that “recovery—both individual and collective—can begin,” she said.