The following is part 2 of Jay Wu’s interview with Catherine Seavitt Nordenson. Check out part 1 here! This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Q. I saw that you’re involved with Jamaica Bay resilience research. I would love to hear a bit about that work and how it relates to these questions you’ve posed.

A. I had been working on issues of sea-level rise and resilience to storm surges since 2007. My husband, Guy Nordenson (an engineer), Adam Yarinsky (an architect), and I received a Latrobe Prize from the Fellows of the American Institute of Architects, a two-year research grant. We were looking at the Upper Bay of New York and New Jersey and thinking about this area in the context of possible flooding from hurricane surge. This was post-Katrina, but pre-Irene and pre-Sandy, so of course people rolled their eyes at the time. But it was a really important question. 

Since the 1970s there have been propositions for the construction of storm surge barriers to protect the Upper Bay from flooding. There was a proposal from Stony Brook to build closure structures at three points—the Verrazzano-Narrows, the Kill Van Kull, and the Long Island Sound at the top of the East River—to essentially seal off the Upper Bay from surge. Surge was pretty rare, but given the Long Island Express Hurricane back in 1938, there was a historical condition of hurricane risk. 

We started thinking, how can we do something that’s not so hard-engineered? What if you thought about other sorts of landscape-based infrastructures, like producing artificial islands to mitigate or break up wave energy and to reduce the height of a surge. We published a book of our findings called On the Water: Palisade Bay in 2010, emphasizing the possibility of a dynamic watery edge in opposition to binary conceptions of wet versus dry, water in versus water out. And then of course in 2011, Hurricane Iren arrived, and in 2012 Hurricane Sandy made landfall with a massive surge—both served as massive wake-up calls. After Sandy, we saw that all of the communities outside of the Verrazzano-Narrows, the whole South Shore of Staten Island and Jamaica Bay and the Rockaway Peninsula, were vulnerable to unexpected and unmapped risk. This became a very important consideration and we refocused our attention. 

Jamaica Bay is an intertidal body of water that’s protected in some ways by the Rockaway Peninsula, but communities along the back part of the bay’s perimeter experienced massive flooding. Given that these areas were so far from the ocean, many people were taken aback by this occurrence, unaware of their flood risk. Sandy’s surge pushed massive amounts of water into the bay, and the pile up of water led to devastating flooding of so many communities around the region. So we turned our attention to the world outside the Upper Bay, that land of lower Manhattan and Wall Street, the world of Goldman Sachs whose risk planning allowed them to keep their lights on after Sandy. The lower Manhattan edge is totally over-studied, reflecting the wealth and power that are so present. We wanted to study these outer boroughs and fringe areas of Brooklyn and Queens that are so much more vulnerable, not just because of their proximity to the ocean, but also because of these communities’ longstanding marginalization. 

With that kind of post-Sandy focus, there were a number of other initiatives from the State and from the US Army Corps of Engineers. We’ve worked closely with the New York District as well as the North Atlantic Division. NAD is based in Brooklyn, but works on the entire east coast from Virginia to Maine. For a while we worked in parallel rather than in partnership with the Corps. Congress gave the Corps two years to produce a post-Sandy study of the North Atlantic region. At the same time, through Rockefeller Foundation funding, we developed Structures of Coastal Resilience, gathering four different university teams to study four different embayments along the North Atlantic coast—Jamaica Bay, Narragansett Bay, Atlantic City, and Norfolk,Virginia on the Chesapeake Bay—that the Corps saw as problem areas to be solved with inlet closure. Again we wanted to redefine risk and find alternatives to the old plan of hardening the outline of the coastal edge. Could there be something more porous and more progressive? What ecologies could support resilience and add protection? 

Q. Can you define closure?

A. Sure! Closure structures are essentially storm surge barriers. They can be gates that swing open and closed, like outside Rotterdam. There are vertical flap closures that float, such as the MOSE structure in Venice. There are a variety of closure structures, but ultimately they all close the flow of water through some kind of mechanical intervention, often operable,because you don’t want to close a bay permanently because of the environmental and ecological importance of having that intertidal exchange. 

Q. Is there a relationship between this project and SRIJB?

A. The Science and Resilience Institute at Jamaica Bay started out around the same time. I think that the initial RFP call for the resilience center at Jamaica Bay went out right before Sandy hit. CUNY coordinates the Institute along with a consortium of other academic institutions.. We’ve worked together with the Institute and collaborated in terms of sharing ideas and knowledge, but our Structures of Coastal Resilience work was a separate initiative. 

There was a lot of interest in the Jamaica Bay area at the time, much driven by the Army Corps’ research. We were able to work closely with our local New York District and think about their long history in the bay, their many “flood control” plans and proposals. We have really tried to unpack what can be done, and assess what has already been done—for example, the innovative marsh island restorations at the bay, undertaken by the Corps in partnership with other non-federal partners. Together with the Department of Environmental Protection, with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the New York District has been doing some really wonderful and progressive projects. We wanted to leverage some of those ideas and think about more ways to incorporate natural processes into the resilience narrative at Jamaica Bay.

More readings:

Structures of Coastal Resilience (the project): http://structuresofcoastalresilience.org/

Structures of Coastal Resilience (the book): https://islandpress.org/books/structures-coastal-resilience

Depositions: Roberto Burle Marx and Public Landscapes under Dictatorship: https://utpress.utexas.edu/books/seavitt-nordenson-depositions

On the Water; Palisade Bay: https://www.hatjecantz.de/on-the-water-2476-1.html