Designing Infrastructure Around Evolving Sea Level: A Physical Scientist Looks at Architecture

Sea level rise is among the most tangible and costly global changes facing societies and economies worldwide in the near future. Our response to sea level rise, including adaptation of coastal infrastructure, requires planning guided by good predictions of what sea level may actually do. Much scientific and policy effort is already being directed to these ends.

However, there is a wrinkle in this plan, and one that has not been thought about much: Sea level will in all likelihood continue to rise at rates significantly higher than 20th century rates for the indefinite future, and there will be no single future sea level to which we must adapt and at which future coastal infrastructure can be built according to "normal" principles and practices.

How do societies and individuals approach the task of designing (and thinking about) the built environment under conditions that are essentially in a permanent state of change? What will future coastal cities and infrastructure look like if the position of the coast migrates steadily inland at, say 5 km/century? Are coastal cities even possible under these conditions? What would the answer be if the migration is 0.1 km/century, or 10 km/century? How do we optimize the communication between physical scientists studying environmental change and designers, architects, and engineers developing the means by which we will occupy that environment? My presentation – well informed from the physical sciences side, and interested but novice from the design side – is an effort to start a conversation about what future coastal environments will look like from the point of view of human habitation and land use.

Speaker: W.T. Pfeffer, Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research and Department of Civil, Environmental, and Architectural Engineering

Room 316

Room 316