Big U New York

Hurricane Sandy was one of the worst natural disasters to hit New York City in modern times, which resulted in blackouts and flooding throughout the city seen in Figure 4. This resulted in the need of a resilience plan to help protect the city from future natural disasters. The plan Big U was initiated in 2012, as a community-based resilience plan towards sea-level rise and flooding. It focused on building a protection system throughout southern Manhattan that catered to the need of each neighbourhood. Various designs and solutions were developed along the coast.

The concept is to build various designs throughout the coast of Manhattan to help protect the city from sea-level rise and storm surge floods. These various designs are focused on connecting the existing city’s infrastructure with the community and people of Manhattan. By doing this, it creates a unique landscape along the coast, that helps to protect the city. With the designs being compartmentalised in each of the neighbourhoods, it creates a system that breach in one of the compartments will not affect the others. 

The Big U project is still just a plan and hasn’t been realised. Resulting in a unique variety of solutions which include a storm surge wall, flood retention parks, and dikes to be built throughout the city. The main strength of the project is the inclusion of the community in the design phase of the project. As great as these solutions are, they mostly focus on the periphery of the city, without really planning on storm surge within the inner city. During storm surges, water does not only come in from the coast of the city but could also flood up from the sewers and underground systems. These problems should be looked into as well, as protecting the outer rim of the city might not be enough.

Neighbourhood diagram of Big U