More Student Teams At Work on Resilience/Adaptation

Snapshot: Jori Erdman (formerly with the Coastal Sustainability Studio at Louisiana State University) brought a combined team of students to Hampton, Virginia to work on the Resilient Hampton plan, in partnership with city staff. Jori is teaching an undergrad architecture class at James Madison University and a graduate planning class at University of Virginia. She brought them to Hampton to work on resilient solutions to the flooding on Newmarket Creek. This is another Collaboratory project, where we partner Virginia’s academic institutions with local government resilience needs..

Backstory: Hampton, Virginia, is among the leaders in the nation in developing a plan for addressing flooding, both today’s flooding and tomorrow’s. The work started with the City’s proposal for the National Disaster Resilience Competition (NDRC) in 2015. Part of that process in the Southeastern Virginia region (Hampton Roads region, to be exact) was a four-day design charrette, “Dutch Dialogues-Virginia: Life at Sea Level.” During that process the first conceptual designs were developed to transform the Newmarket Creek watershed from a tortured, flooding, built-over creek to an urban asset.

Hampton then continued the work, developing a city-wide resilience plan, “Resilient Hampton.” They developed a more refined plan for Newmarket Creek and took that to the public - listen to a radio feed on meetings.

Now Jori Erdman’s students are going to drill down on some of the concepts, developing details on the project but, more importantly, learning the skills they will need as professionals in the future dealing with the impacts of climate change in design and planning. We are so proud to be able to facilitate this process through the Collaboratory.