Resilient by Design

Public Sediment Team

Public Sediment was developed for the Resilient by Design Bay Area Challenge, a design competition that brings together local residents, public officials, and local, national and international experts to develop innovative solutions to the issues brought on by climate change in the Bay Area. Principals Margaret Ikeda and Evan Jones along with Adam Marcus were participants as CCA faculty through the Architectural Ecologies Lab. We participated in this multi-disciplinary team on a year-long research and design collaboration focused on the Alameda Creek watershed in the East Bay. The design proposals built upon an earlier research phase and were presented to the public in May, 2018.

Our team proposes that sea level rise adaptation must happen upstream. Public Sediment for Alameda Creek unlocks the creek to feed downstream baylands with sediment and sustain protective tidal ecosystems as the climate changes. Tidal ecosystems are protective infrastructure that cushion the urban edges of the San Francisco Bay. Yet the Bay Area’s tidal ecosystems—its marshes, mudflats—are at risk. These systems require sediment to grow vertically in response to sea level rise – without sediment, our baylands will drown. Low sediment supply and bayland drowning represents a slow but devastating scale of loss that threatens ecosystems, recreational landscapes, and places hundreds of thousands of residents and the region’s critical drinking water, energy, and transportation systems at risk. To creatively adapt to this challenge, our team has focused on sediment, the building block of resilience in the Bay. Our team proposes to actively intervene in this ecological transformation by Designing with Mud and Making Sediment Public.