Stamford Case tudy

The Ecological Design Approaches to Brownfield Redevelopment seminar, taught by Professor Joan Nassauer, enabled me to work collaboratively with other students from Engineering, Urban Planning, Law, Sustainable Systems and Landscape Architecture, and Art on creative solutions for future brownfield redevelopment.

The Building Resilience: Minimizing Risk on Coastal Brownfield Development in light of Global Climate Change project proposes alternative scenarios of brownfield design and remediation that respond to the unique realities of contamination, coastal proximity and global climate change, while offering solutions to mitigate insurance risk.

Based on a case study site in Stamford, Connecticut, our illustrative results documents a set of three alternative futures organized on spectrum of risk - each future responds to a certain level of insurance risk (low, medium, and high risk. The more risk mitigation measures that are taken, the more resilient a coastal brownfield site is to Global Climate Change.

While the full effects of global climate change will truly begin to reveal themselves over the decades and centuries to come, planning for these effects needs to happen now. Increased storm intensity and sea level rise, two aspects of global climate change, will increase the risk/probability that humans and wildlife will come into contact with non-remediated contaminants.

Protective actions, from engineered barriers like hurricane walls to ecological solutions such as the restoration of wetlands, are key considerations in the upfront planning for coastal developments. In addition to more intensive means of remediation, flood-prone coastal brownfield developments and the larger communities that they are part of will need to be designed with supplemental protective measures as well as different land use patterns to ensure the safety and resilience of the local community and ecosystems.

As coastal development design solutions respond to global climate change (GCC), insurance companies are also responding to these new risk conditions. Today, the insurance industry is responding to GCC by withdrawing from high-risk areas and raising premiums on coastal properties. In the future, brownfield developers will need to demonstrate that they are planning for global climate change to obtain insurance that would otherwise be unavailable or prohibitively expensive.

We have laid out a set of three scenarios on a spectrum of "risk" for coastal brownfield resilience on Stamford's South End. Scenario 1 carries the most risk and highest forecasted insurance costs. Scenario 3 carries the least risk and lowest forecasted insurance costs. Each scenario builds additional resilience into its recommendations to supplement chosen remediation techniques. Using the South End of Stamford as a model, we overlaid what we consider to be best practice remediation techniques with a spectrum of additionally recommended design techniques, and changes to land use patterns to paint a picture of a more resilient coastal brownfield site.

Scenario 1 Minimizes risk by following today's Brownfield cleanup requirements, and suggest that additional engineered barriers such as enhancements to existing hurricane barriers as well as extensions to existing sea walls. Solutions on this end of the risk spectrum would rely heavily on technological solutions to provide additional security from the effects of GCC. Reduced risk will make insurance more available and affordable.

Scenario 2 Recognizes that the inundation of the land through more frequent storm events coupled with rising sea-levels is inevitable. Using the same suite of technologies as in the previous Scenario, this scenario continues to reduce risk on coastal brownfields by promoting a defensible zone, with no structures, that is augmented with largely ecological defenses such as reintroduction of historically based marshes, wetlands, and forest cover. Remediation strategies are suggested to clean or remove the contaminants so that sea-level rise as well as large storm events do not distribute the contaminants. As certain parts of the coast are not built on and reserved for the frequent inundations, containments have been mitigated, and additional ecological protective measures are restored, the overall development is more resilient and risk is reduced.

Scenario 3 Looks at the larger context of development of Stamford's costal brownfield in the context of global climate change and suggest that defending this area is prohibitively expensive to the overall community. Specific to Stamford, this approach is supported by additional context of 80% of the land is within 10 feet of mean sea level, and has been designated as a projected flood inundation site by FEMA SLOSH (Sea, Lake, and Overland Surge from Hurricanes). In this scenario, inundation is recognized as inevitable and the complete peninsula is dedicated to the protection of the upland community. The contaminants are remediated to the greatest extent possible, or moved upland to reduce the risk of spreading the containments. Similar to scenario 2, both ecological and engineered solutions are suggested as well. In Addition, the entire south end is a no-build defensible zone for the City of Stamford. This seemingly drastic recommendation provides excellent security for the upland town and drastically increases resilience to the overall Stamford community. While this suggestion seems drastic, a comprehensive recommendation such as this opens a dialogue for minimizing risk to the greater community as well as creating resilient communities in the face of global climate change.

Overall this was an extraordinary team project where the intellectual capital of each of the team members responded to a challenging real world situation and envisioned a unique, thought provoking response to Coastal brownfield development. This project was also selected by Professor Nassauer to be entered in the Best Student Paper competition sponsored by the University of Michigan Consortium on Climate Change.

Team members included:

Building Resilience: Remediation options