Climate resilience planning in Rhode Island and the U.S. Virgin Islands

With the rate of global sea level rise doubling over the past three decades and 25% more people exposed to floods than in 2000, climate change has caused significant planning challenges for cities.

Master of City Planning students learn how to address such difficulties in the Climate Resilience Studio course that Weitzman School of Design lecturer Scott Page and Jamie Granger have taught since 2016. Page is the founder and principal of Interface Studio—a Philadelphia-based city planning and design team—and Granger is a senior associate there.

They bring their experience helping cities with plans for housing, parks, transportation, public safety, and more into the classroom. For example, Interface is currently working on a comprehensive plan—a set of policies to guide the development of an area—for Knoxville, Tennessee, and they have worked on issues related to extreme heat in Macon, Georgia, and flooding in Fargo, North Dakota.

“Oftentimes, the best value I can bring to class are experiences of work that I’ve done that have either been successful or a complete failure and why,” Page says.

The studio began when a grant from the van Beuren Charitable Foundation paid for students to do sea level rise planning in Newport and other Rhode Island communities.

“Some of the municipalities, particularly Warren, just took the students’ work and ran with it,” Page says. For example, the town is implementing solutions that students recommended around managed retreat—helping residents and businesses move to higher ground. Other proposals by students in Rhode Island included making landscaping more resilient to flooding and elevating flood-prone streets.

Since climate resilience and sea level rise experts tend to know each other, Page says, a colleague suggested he reach out to planners in the U.S. Virgin Islands who needed assistance on a broader range of issues. The studio course pivoted to working in the Virgin Islands for the past few years.

The island faces very different challenges from Rhode Island, Page notes. Sea level rise is less of an issue. But because Saint Thomas is so steep, water that lands on the hillsides is funneled into ravines called ghuts that carry water and pollution from developed areas to the sea. This untreated runoff damages water quality, habitat, and coral, which is essential to the island’s tourist economy. These challenges are exacerbated by severe storms, extreme heat, and drought.

Students this past year were tasked with creating a future land use map for a portion of Saint Thomas, which Page says meant trying to protect vulnerable coastal areas from being developed in an environmentally damaging manner while looking to increase density on higher ground.

“They had partners on the ground who really wanted the students to be there and develop new ideas,” Page says. “They were getting real input and guidance from folks who were dealing with issues in those locations every day.”

Both the Rhode Island and U.S. Virgin Island studios taught students about gathering data on the built environment, impacts of extreme heat or heavy rainfall, socioeconomic demographics, and more.

“We’re having them map tree cover; we’re having them map new development but also environmental hazards, [such as] where’s the flood zone?” Pages says. “Where do they have steep slopes? Where are there sensitive environments, like mangroves, in the case of the Virgin Islands?”

Page and Granger also have students look at what cities have published previously so they understand that they’re not starting from scratch but are “just the next link in the chain of people that are thinking about this issue,” Page says.