East Harlem Gets Ready. For high school students in the Climate Resilience Leadership Lab, emergency preparedness means mobilizing the neighborhood.
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Climate resiliency in New York City often appears as a gargantuan affair: ten-mile long berm systems; visions of draining the East River; the classic seawall, reimagined. Thinking at the scale of infrastructure is crucial for matching efforts to the scale of the crisis itself. But infrastructure is not just physical. Across the city, from Red Hook to the Lower East Side, neighborhoods have planned for climate disasters by building what sociologist Eric Klinenberg calls “social infrastructure.”

So when the Department of Parks and Recreation approached Starr Whitehouse Landscape Architects and Planners and ONE Architecture & Urbanism to help develop a resilience plan for East Harlem, engaging local residents and institutions would be as important (and more immediately actionable) as costly designs for stormwater management or coastal protection systems. One pilot project launched during the year-long study has driven this point home: an experiential learning program, co-created with DREAM Charter School, called the Climate Resilience Leadership Lab. Read more=>