Inquiring Resilience

How do we imagine resilience at a different frontier of sea level rise?

Seattle's South Park neighborhood is likely to be impacted by 3’ sea level rise by the year 2100 and is the neighborhood most susceptible to flooding caused by climate change.

On mentioning sea level rise, one instantly conjures vivid images of storm-surged shorelines, inundated coastal cities, etc. Its major threat to Seattle, however, proves not to be the communities along the shoreline, but the city’s only river—the Duwamish River. Exacerbated by this new normal are complex risks and threats such as contaminated soil and sediment, pollution from combined sewage system overflow, social segregation, and the riverfront taken away from communities. How do we deal with this complex constellation of risks with more nuanced approaches? How do we imagine resilience at a different frontier of sea level rise: not at the scale of barrier islands or miles of coastal infrastructure, but at the scale of a few blocks within a neighborhood?

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