Ideas to build on
Earlier this year, landscape architecture students from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design (GSD) did fieldwork in New York’s Jamaica Bay, a marshy estuary on the southwest coast of Long Island. Little more than a century ago, it was a wetland behind barrier beaches, an ecological feature that attenuated the waves and storm surges pulsing in from the ocean. Since then, dredging, fill operations, roadways, and industrial development have disturbed the sea-buffering ecology. How can designers help? The students — from a core spring studio called Flux City — were there to find out. Just four months before the GSD students’ visit, Hurricane Sandy had punched into the bay, pushing a storm surge over beaches, roads, rail lines, and buildings. The evidence remained, including a swept-away car in a local creek. Rising sea levels and their impact on coastal cities is “a hot topic,” said landscape architect Chris Reed ’91, a professor in...