Resilient By Design

Working with community and industry partners including Mithun, HR&A Advisors, Alta Planning + Design, Integral Group, Chinatown Community

Development Corporation, Biohabitats, Moffatt & Nichol, Urban Biofilter and the Resilient Design Institute – Streetwyze led the community-engaged design process for a – to participate in the year-long visioning and collaborative resiliency design challenge. Resilient by Design is a prestigious resiliency design and visioning competition sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation in partnership with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Streetwyze brought together local residents, public officials, and local, national and international experts to develop innovative community-based solutions to strengthen resilience to sea level rise, severe storms flooding and earthquakes. The team’s project centered in North Richmond, a historically African-American and Latinx neighborhood.

In partnership with community, we pioneered an innovative community driven approach to visioning, and developing design solutions to impending climate change challenges.  One of the key takeaways from this work was that that funding community engagement upfront, and community-driven, pre-development integration of projects, makes resiliency investments go farther, more effectively in order to better design and build solutions that provide direct and immediate benefits as well as long term value to the community.

Key outcomes/Stats:

• Broadened community engagement by over 50% by using digital tools and techniques to increase outreach and participation (beyond participation from traditional methods of community outreach)
• Crowd-sourced community vision and design solutions for resiliency challenges
• Created a North Richmond Community Advisory Board representative of diverse Richmond stakeholders, which resulted in concept level projects incorporating proven strategies that can have a profound collective impact in the community
• Digitally prioritized resiliency projects through our innovative mobile/mapping platform to collect real-time community feedback including:
• Planting trees for air and water filtering
• Using a range of levee edge typologies that change over time to protect Richmond Parkway, the wastewater facility and the neighborhood
• Introducing a muted marsh that co-exists with industrial uses and allows the marsh to transition upland over time
• Completing a multi-use path overpass to provide shoreline access and creation of a green mitigation fund that continues to grow local jobs