Curbed NY: Hurricane Sandy, which happened six years ago this week, notably exposed the dire need to improve New York’s infrastructure so that it can stand up to the increasing threat posed by sea level rise. In the years since the storm, city and state agencies have put many different resiliency efforts into place with the goal of protecting NYC from future—and undoubtedly more frequent—storms.

Many of those measures are now in various states of completion. The reconstruction of the Rockaway Boardwalk, for example, has already wrapped up. But others—like a plan to bring new energy generation capacity to Hunts Point, where a power outage would be disastrous for food-processing facilities—are still in the conceptual phases.

Perhaps the most high-profile of these resiliency efforts were those awarded federal funds through the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s 2013 competition Rebuild By Design. “New York can benefit from a lot of wisdom tempered by calamity,” wrote New Yorkmagazine architecture critic Justin Davidson in 2014, when the competition’s local winners were announced. And it rings true: Danish architect Bjarke Ingels’s firm proposed a series of levees that was awarded a $335 million slice of the disaster-recovery pie, and that are now being designed. Continue reading>>