ICS Colleagues Win ASLA Planning and Analysis Award

ICS Colleagues Win ASLA Planning and Analysis Award

ICS/Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) affiliates Sourav Kumir Biswas and Flavio Sciaraffia won a Planning and Analysis Award from the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) for their project: Productive Conservation. Biswas and Sciaraffia analyzed landscape-scale agricultural practices for the greater Mexico City region that reduce water consumption, resist drought, limit nitrogen pollution, create more structurally resilient crops, enhance native ecologies, and improve water quality. They then explored how to implement these practices at multiple design scales: from a single farm site, to a tributary drainage area, to Mexico City’s entire hydrologic basin.

Their work resulted in funding from Harvard’s Zofnass Program for Sustainable Infrastructure, where they worked under the direction of GSD Lincoln Loeb Fellow and ICS Principal Scott Campbell—to examine how similar frameworks could help communities in the American West think about the needs of cities, agriculture, and nature when grappling with issues related to intense water scarcity.

To see how these efforts contributed to ICS projects, read ICS’s Navigating the Wake of Municipal Water Sales report—a collaborative effort between ICS, the researchers, and members of communities in Colorado’s Lower Arkansas Valley.

Rockefeller Tags ICS for Resiliency Planning Expertise

Rockefeller Tags ICS for Resiliency Planning Expertise

Homes in the wildland-urban interface facing catastrophic fire. Commercial districts in flood zones. Coastal cities confronted by rising sea levels and increasingly devastating storm surge effects. Between 2011 and 2013, there were 67 presidentially declared disaster areas in the United States. The federal government spent $136 billion on disaster response. But how well spent are recovery dollars when recovery focuses on rebuilding communities and infrastructure that are just as prone to subsequent disaster?

With extreme weather events and flood risks escalating, the Rockefeller Foundation and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) partnered to change the paradigm of disaster response and recovery to one of planning, preparation, and returns. The result was the National Disaster Resilience Competition (NDRC)—which awarded $1 billion to communities affected by disaster who could demonstrate an ability to not just rebuild, but to design and rebuild in ways that ensured future resiliency. The 67 disaster areas declared by President Barack Obama were eligible for the funds. Rockefeller ran nine nationwide trainings for eligible jurisdictions, bringing together 350 experts from around the globe to initiate the needed paradigm shift. ICS was one of them.

At the Denver training, ICS provided presentation examples of fire and flood resiliency projects in its home state of Colorado (to see a presentation summary, click here) and served as a technical advisor to the New Orleans applicant team. ICS Principal Scott Campbell spent time in the city studying post-Hurricane-Katrina recovery efforts and the effects 20th century engineering projects on the Mississippi River and its tributaries have had in lessening the city’s ability to withstand storm surges produced by tropical storms and hurricanes. (For more information about ICS’s thinking on river management and restoration activities, including a video lecture—and to learn more about the issues faced by the City of New Orleans and other Mississippi Delta coastal communities—click here.)

New Orleans was one of thirteen fund recipients, receiving over $141 million in NDRC funds to establish its first-ever Resilience District. Investments will support several integrated initiatives that include coastal restoration, workforce development, and creating parks and green streets that will create a national model for retrofitting post-war suburban neighborhoods into resilient, safe, and equitable communities of opportunity. For more about the NRCD competition and the award winners, click here.