Roundtable on Resilience and the Miami Public Realm

Please join Penn IUR and the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy, as well as the Department of City and Regional Planning in PennDesign for a roundtable on resilience. Speakers include Debra McCarty, Philadelphia Water Commissioner, and Richard Freeh, City Energy Project Manager at Mayor’s Office of Sustainability, who will talk about Climate Preparedness Philadelphia; as well as Piet Dircke, Arcadis Global Leader Water Management, who will give a global perspective on adaptation for urban metropolitan areas.

Following the discussion Penn IUR Faculty Fellow Stefan Al’s graduate students will present their work from the spring studio course, “Miami Public Realm”. This studio has taken a design-driven approach to improving resilience in Miami, which, according to The National Wildlife Federation, has up to $3.5 trillion of assets at risk due to sea level rise by 2070, the highest amount of all the world’s coastal cities.Going against standard flood management solutions epitomized by hard, highly engineered structures that obstruct views and access to the waterfront, this studio explores design responses to resilience that create new civic assets for cities. It aims to integrate flood management infrastructure with public realm improvements and nature and which, importantly, preserve open access to the area’s coastal waterways – a defining feature of life in south Florida. Our local partners include the Miami-Dade County Office of Resilience, the Broward County Environmental Protection and Growth Management Department, the City of Miami Beach, as well as Arcadis, a global engineering company with offices in New York and south Florida.