The Hunts Point Lifelines project is an innovative plan to safeguard the hub of New York’s Food Supply through a protective and resilient landscape infrastructure. The plan was a funded winner of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Rebuild by Design competition. The project is an exemplar of design that demonstrates innovative, scalable solutions that increase long term resilience along the Eastern Seaboard and enables cities, towns, and neighborhoods to respond to the mammoth challenges of climate change adaptation. Lifelines was built upon an integrated design process with deep community engagement, research, and analysis. These efforts resulted in popular support for a landscape based flood protection system that encouraged the use of local industries and green jobs in the implementation of flood protection as well as funding strategies that would result in buildable projects along New York City’s urban shorelines. The PennDesign/OLIN team focused on the development of a living shoreline strategy that incorporated the use of levees designed as greenways and habitat rich wetlands to manage stormwater and prevent wave inundation along the low-lying Hunts Point Peninsula. The project’s consisted of four initiatives, known as ‘Lifelines’: The Levee Lab, a protection system that serves dual purpose as a shoreline greenway, Cleanways a multi-step plan for clean infrastructure, Emergency Maritime Supply Chain, and Livelihoods a policy proposal to promote the local economy and create green jobs.
