StructureHub

At least I hope not.  Design competitions are always fascinating, if for no other reason than for the chance to see absurdist solutions to future crises or pure wastes of time in the name of corporate underwriting (entries which, when they win, give hope to every amateur photoshopper with access to Kinkos).

But guess what?  The Rising Tides Competition had none of that!  The just-announced winners were just a few of the 130 entries, all of which attempted to envision practical means of dealing with a 55-inch rise in sea level in the Bay Area by 2100 (you’d think more coastal areas would be having this sort of charrette given the forecasts).  I really hope that the entries’ high quality, the winners in particular, prevent the issue from being forgotten until it’s too late.

The competition was so fierce that the judges cleverly split the winner’s $25,000 prize into six portions and named six winners.  Even better, each of the six winners are at least moderately capable of producing a posterboard graphic that is as well thought-out as their proposal for living with rising sea levels.

Among the entries:

Topographical Shifts at the Urban Waterfront - envisions a “green infrastructure system” of wetlands, eco-corridors, and permeable landscapes that can shift, geographically, depending on environmental conditions at a given time.  Underused industrial areas would also get developed into dense communities and where necessary, given up to the sea (e.g., San Fran’s eastern waterfront).  The proposal strikes me as less than visionary, but plausibly realistic, since it could be executed portion by portion as the political will / funds become available.

100 Year Plan - ignores some of the obvious issues involved with sea levels and urban areas and instead focuses on another future crisis: lack of fresh water.  The clever proposal involves restoring marshland, ending long-distance transport of water, introducing sustainable desalination, and generally using the changing ecological makeup of the Bay Area to address one of the many elephants in California’s room of looming disasters.

RAYdike - strikes me as being better suited as a public-awareness strategy for future sea-level increases than as offering an actual solution for necessary changes in the urban footprint or accommodations for changing environmental patterns involved.  Basically, it involves a laser network that would map, on location, the necessary placement of levees protecting us on land.  This is all well and good (and makes for one of the best poster-boards among the winning entries), but it fails to identify how to change the urban landscape to deal with the inevitable inundations at low elevations.

BAYARC (my favorite) - cleverly points out that the biggest problem with rising sea levels are not their static elevations, but the worse extremes (e.g., periodic occurrences of extreme high-tides), and proceeds to offer an ingenious (and hopefully technically feasible) way to mitigate their effect on the bay’s coast line with minimal disruption of seagoing commerce.  Basically, a collapsible netting would be stretched across the bay under the Golden Gate Bridge; when an extreme high tide is forecast, the net would be deployed (in the water), acting like a dampener, reducing the height of the high tide.  This proposal reminds me of the dynamic land-protection systems in Holland and near London on the River Thames, which can be deployed to similar effect.

Folding Water - contemplates similar use of tidal patterns like BAYARC, but in a massive (and I’d say unfeasible / risky) way.  The proposal involves a series of immense, permeable, water-flow regulators strung alone the coastline, which would act as “dynamic levees.”  They would lessen the height of high tides, but would also create artificial, “micro-bay estuaries” - something which strikes me as having many unknown environmental consequences.