PERVIOUS PLACEMAKING
Narragansett Bay, Rhode Island / Fall 2018 / Landscape Architecture + Ceramics Advanced Studio / Critics Emily Vogler + David Katz / Fabrication, Accessibility, Placemaking, Resilient Design
Concrete / 3D Printed Modules
Section 17 of the Rhode Island Constitution guarantees a person’s right to passage along the shore, between mean low and high tides. This means public access will dramatically shift with higher sea levels. Climate change increases the volume and speed of precipitation, increasing upland flooding and runoff. Coupled with the loss of marshes on Narragansett Bay, more water moves across surfaces faster, increasing erosion of the fragile shore. The impervious surfaces are the result of human development, typically roads and sidewalks, that directly meet the bay. The pavement is impervious, so stormwater is unable to infiltrate the soil and drains directly into the bay, bringing along harmful chemicals and pollutants.
By documenting the impervious surfaces of built conditions, and indicating the failure points of roads due to sea level rise and storm surge, one can recognize “end of road retrofits” that are optimal for a pervious paving system.
The proposed paving system has multiple components- it is light and simple enough to manufacture by community members, can be placed to create a walking path for beach access, and storages and filters of stormwater at the edge of the pavement. The module is made of concrete, and can be filled with on site material, such as soil, gravel, or sand. The retrofits themselves form a new network of small access points along the bay, allowing for community placemaking and actively remediate damage from stormwater erosion.
early prototypes
