Community Partnerships on Resilience Designs - Aberdeen Gardens in Hampton, VA

Hampton University/ Virginia Tech/ ODU Collaboratory partnership participants for Aberdeen Gardens. pictured in front of Hampton’s Architecture Department.

Snapshot: We’re doing another community resilience design, this time in the historic Aberdeen Gardens neighborhood in Hampton, Virginia.. We just had our first team meeting - and what a team it is: 13 Virginia Tech Landscape Architecture students, 10 Hampton University architecture students, Christopher Newport University’s Communications Department and, in the spring, Old Dominion University’s Civil Engineering Department.

Aberdeen Gardens experiences flooding that needs fixing but they also want to return to their origins and re-introduce community gardening. This initial meeting and tour is the kickoff for a year-long project to meet the community’s needs, as shaped by the community residents (community leaders are center in the photo).

Backstory: We’re taking the Collaboratory into Aberdeen Gardens, an historic African American neighborhood in Hampton, Virginia. The Collaboratory is a novel Wetlands Watch program that partners university students needing practical experience with neighborhoods needing resilience plans and designs - the students get resilience experience and the neighborhoods get conceptual plans for grant applications. The final partner is the local government, here the city of Hampton, who can help make those plans a reality.

Aberdeen Gardens is an historic neighborhood in Hampton, Virginia. It is the only New Deal planned community for African American workers and was designed by an African American Architect. It also is subject to increased flooding, a bit from sea level rise but mostly from the increased rainfall we are seeing. Old stormwater systems in flat neighborhoods with more rain is a problem.

But resilience in Aberdeen Gardens is more than flood prevention. These home sites were laid out in 1935 with large lots to accommodate gardening and even livestock. There is a history of intensive community gardening and trading of crops. The leaders of the neighborhood want to bring that back. They even have established a 4-H club at Aberdeen Gardens Elementary school, the hub of the neighborhood.

Resilience is also based on the social strength of the community. With such a robust origin story and community organizations devoted to it, the history of the community is part of their future as well and we will seek to enhance it.

This community-scale resilience effort is community-led. As in past resilience design efforts, the community will determine the scope and shape of any plan that emerges. As well, we hope to train and employ community members in collecting needed data for the project.

Finally, the partnership with the city of Hampton is essential and their Resilience Office and other vital departments are deeply involved with this project. The city will be conducting a stormwater study of the neighborhood to which this resilience team will contribute. With this city partnership, there may be opportunities to obtain grants to implement the results of this work in the near future as well.

The next year will be exciting and we will keep folks updated.