Oculus - Spring 2015 - (Page 38)

feature: ADVOCACY When Bottom-up Meets Top-down The benefits of community engagement in post-disaster rebuilding plans BY deB o rA H gA n s , fA iA O dents toward the end. Increasingly, we are grooming a new breed of citizen-architects and engaged bureaucrats and developing new design protocols. The AIA New York Chapter entered the fray in 2004 when, under the leadership of Lance Jay Brown, FAIA, the Disaster Preparedness Task Force began to lobby the State AIA and Office of Emergency Management for Good Samaritan legislation, which would allow architects to volunteer their services outside the constraints of standard malpractice insurances. It also began the work on an AIA NYS Disaster Preparedness Manual modeled on those in place in California, Texas, and Kansas for use by homeowners. The direct descendant of that task force, the current AIANY Design for Risk and Reconstruction Committee (DfRR), sponsors more than 25 educational events a year geared toward informing the public about their environment and its future. At DfRR's suggestion, the AIANY and the Center for Architecture hosted federally-sponsored (free to the public), FEMAsupported courses called Hurriplan: Resilient Building Design for Coastal Communities, which bring together in microcosm the "whole commu- Design teams met with local officials and community leaders in a "town hall" format early in the design process, and then presented proposals to local residents toward the end. Increasingly, we are grooming a new breed of citizenarchitects and engaged bureaucrats and developing new design protocols. (below) Students in Pratt Institute's Rebuild Adapt Mitigation Plan curriculum worked with NYC's Department of Emergency Management in Participatory Urban Planning workshops to create interim housing and resilient neighborhoods in Redhook, Brooklyn. ©David Martinez ur increasingly frequent need to manage complex and expensive coastal disaster has ushered in an emerging rapprochement between "bottom-up" activism and "top-down" governance. In the usual politics of strange bedfellows, the expanding role of community and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in resiliency planning equally satisfies a bias against capital expenditures, libertarian zeal to keep the government out of the backyard, and a progressive belief in the value of community-based activism. This tripartisan appeal has granted it inroads into even large federal bureaucracies, with FEMA calling for a "whole community recovery" process. Even within the format of the recent U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) competition, Rebuild By Design, where there was need to control local expectation regarding conceptual projects unlikely to be implemented, the federal government crafted a sophisticated if limited process to engage the community. Design teams met with local officials and community leaders in a "town hall" format early in the design process, and then presented proposals to local resi- 38 Oculus Spring 2015 Dialogues from the Edge of Practice

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Oculus - Spring 2015

First Words Letter from the President Repositioning All Around By Tomas Rossant, AIA
Letter from the Editor The Edge of New By Kristen Richards, Hon. AIA, Hon. ASLA
Center for Architecture Center Highlights
One Block Over Rough Waters: Squalls continue over the redevelopment of South Street Seaport By Claire Wilson
Opener: Thinking Into Other Boxes By David Zach
Mars in the Bronx CASE gets new environmental technologies out of labs and into buildings at (relative) warp speed By Jonathan Lerner
Spinning Research Into Practice Intense experimentation with digital technologies is yielding remarkable designs and products by ARO By Lisa Delgado
A Results-Oriented Think Tank Defining architectural practice broadly enough to include research, theory, and public discourse, Grimshaw’s Urban Research Unit is a full-circle activity leading to a richer built environment By Bill Millard
The Resilience Factor Perkins+Will is making resilience design and planning a growing area of practice and income By Richard Staub
Socrates at the Drafting Table REX champions a slow thinktank architecture of methodical problem-solving By Janet Adams Strong
Architecture in the Social Data Era Transforming our practice to engage new data sources and design intents By Melissa Marsh
Museum as Incubator The New Museum hatches a multidisciplinary workspace to nurture creative entrepreneurs By Julia van den Hout
When Bottom-up Meets Top-down The benefits of community engagement in post-disaster rebuilding plans By Deborah Gans, FAIA
In Print Bricks & Mortals: Ten Great Buildings and the People They Made By Tom Wilkinson Tales of Two Cities: Paris, London and the Birth of the Modern City By Jonathan Conlin Visionaries in Urban Development: 15 Years of the ULI J.C. Nichols Prize Winners By Trisha Riggs, et al. American Urban Form: A Representative History By Sam Bass Warner and Andrew H. Whittemore Preservation is Overtaking Us By Rem Koolhaas, with a supplement by Jorge Otero-Pailos Reviews by Stanley Stark, FAIA
31-Year Watch Architectural practice once embraced dinner plates and candlesticks produced by Swid Powell By John Morris Dixon, FAIA
Last Words Eve of Construction By Rick Bell, FAIA
Index to Advertisers Alphabetical & Categorical Index

Oculus - Spring 2015