Visualizing Climate Resilience, from New York to Bonaire
Gateway Park, one of the projects proposed in the Camden Coastal Resilience Plan developed by PennPraxis and community partners, is envisioned as "the Central Park of Camden."
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Hurricane Melissa, the Category 5 storm that tore through Jamaica last month after also claiming lives in Haiti and the Dominican Republic, was just the latest reminder of the urgency of preparing coastal communities for the effects of a warming planet. In three different locations in the US and abroad this year, Weitzman researchers have been helping coastal communities understand and document the risks from climate change and develop plans to mitigate or adapt to them. Regardless of the approach, the work begins with understanding the hopes and fears of community members for their hometowns.
Fittingly, some of this work begins not far from Penn’s campus. Ellen Neises, a landscape architect, professor of practice at Weitzman, and the Lori Kanter Tritsch Executive Director of PennPraxis, was hired by environmental justice leaders at Camden’s Center for Environmental Transformation, to develop a community-based coastal resilience plan for the city. Thanks in part to a grant from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation to the Center for Environmental Transformation, Neises and her team at PennPraxis, eDesign Dynamics, and the Water Center at Penn began analyzing the data and, for the first time, building models to study and predict flooding based on each of the three sources, identifying flooding from rivers, from rain, and from sewers backing up.
“At the same time we were doing the modeling, we were meeting with community members,” Neises says. “They kept saying they thought rain was the issue, not the rivers rising.” Turns out, what they saw in most neighborhoods—flooding from rain that was trapped by fill and couldn’t drain to waterways—was backed up by the data except in a few locations like the Marlton neighborhood of East Camden, where all three kinds of flooding interact to create enormous environmental burdens for residents.
This insight was invaluable as Neises began conceiving what would become the Camden Coastal Resilience Plan. Made public last month, this shared set of policy and investment recommendations incorporates knowledges from people on the ground not only in its content, but also its form. Anushka Samant (MCP’24) is a project manager and research associate at PennPraxis, and collaborated with the Center for Environmental Transformation, experts on the team, and community members to translate those engineering models into information those most affected by the flooding could easily access and understand such that the community could actively shape solutions rather than simply receive them.
One of the community workshops held for the Camden Coastal Resilience Plan (Photo: Taquan Allen)
“We had very successful community design workshops,” Samant says, “where the goal was to make flood data and solutions accessible and also recognizable.” The workshops used various visualization tools including cards showing precedent projects, table maps of neighborhood assets and flooding, and presentations with design drawings that overlaid flooding on photographs of actual streets and blocks. “We produced visualizations of the three types of flooding and how it happens in Camden and possible ways to prevent it.” Samant explains that people understand risk at a very fine grain, at the level of where they live and move daily—the streets they use and the block they live on. So, seeing interventions overlaid on familiar neighborhood images helped translate how proposed solutions would function in their specific context.
Often, the best strategy is to center people’s experiences in unexpected ways. A graphic novel, perhaps—one like Finding Ground, co-written by Hassan Saleem, Jiefei Yuan, Amy Chester, Johanna Lawton, and Matthijs Bouw as part of the Making Room for Our Neighbors initiative organized by Weitzman, Rebuild by Design, and One Architecture & Urbanism. Available in English, Chinese, and Spanish, the book comprises three stories of New York communities in the aftermath of a flood, as they decide whether to rebuild or sell their homes.
The novel originated with a Rebuild by Design effort to address managed relocation. Given its emotional weight, says Weitzman Professor of Practice in Landscape Architecture and Architecture Matthijs Bouw, “even the phrase managed relocation is difficult.” As founder of the Amsterdam- and New York-based design and planning firm One Architecture & Urbanism, Bouw has spent the last fifteen years thinking through best practices to implement climate mitigation and resilience projects from Manhattan’s floodplains to World Bank projects in Asia. “We know that it’s better if a community gets ahead of things,” he says. “It’s important for those on the coast or in the floodplains, but also in areas that are at much less risk, because the challenges are not only of having to move away, but in welcoming newcomers and creating space for them.”
Finding Ground, the graphic novel produced by New York Rebuild by Design with the Weitzman School and ONE Architecture and Urbanism
Saleem worked as Bouw’s research assistant while earning a Master of Landscape Architecture at Weitzman in 2024. They spent over a year going to community meetings, houses of worship, and groups of those on the frontlines of environmental justice. “My focus was mainly looking at the barriers to community engagement,” Saleem says. “What were the tools that planners and designers were already using to help facilitate these conversations? And there wasn’t too much coming up.”
So they decided to create their own. During his final semester, Saleem took a speculative studio with Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture Sean Burkholder. “He challenged us to try storytelling through comic form,” Saleem says. While conducting interviews with Bouw, he made the connection of applying the graphic novel format to the academic research and policy recommendations. “The language is straight from the meetings,” he says. “I feel like that’s a big part of what makes the comic really impactful.”
Professor of Fine Arts Joshua Mosley had also been looking to drawing in animation as a persuasive medium for climate stories. “I’ve primarily made artworks with animation, and most MFA students have this art focus,” he says. “But another exceptional opportunity at Penn is to work with students across many majors, who want to develop ways to use animation in conjunction with research.”
In 2023, he co-founded the Penn Animation as Research (PAR) Lab with Class of 1965 Endowed Term Professor of Germanic Studies Simon Richter. “I’d been trying to figure out ways to place my teaching and research in service of the climate emergency,” Richter says. With some students, he’d organized Climate Week at Penn, now in its sixth year. But he sought a broader reach for his culturally informed insights about climate adaptation—on the internet, in the areas most threatened by climate change, and in the rooms that contain the power to mitigate damage and foster adaptation. On Twitter (now X), he’d developed the persona of Dr. Poldergeist, the name a portmanteau of the supernatural force and the Dutch term for reclaimed wetlands. He and Mosley received some funding by the Center for Undergraduate Research, the Sachs Program for Arts Innovation and the Center for Public Art and Space; formed teams of design students, and made a series of animations which analyzed water management strategies in the Netherlands, a country whose reputation for wise adaptation to rising sea levels he thought could use some unpacking. The videos were a hit, with thousands of views. With a grant from the Penn Global Engagement Fund, the team decided to broaden the scope of the project.
One of the community workshops organized by the Penn Animation as Research Lab in Bonaire
This summer, Richter and Mosley began conducting interviews on the former Dutch colonial island of Bonaire, researching local efforts to regenerate the ailing coral reef and sue the Netherlands over climate inaction. They returned with a group of former and current students in August. “We wanted them to see the colors and the landscape, to hear locals describe their vision of adaptation, and to snorkel the coral reef, to see the bleaching and the regeneration efforts,” Richter says. “And to sketch goats, because kept and feral goats are a powerful cultural symbol of resilience.”
From this research, the team developed a script and storyboard, which they brought back to local experts on the island. “We keep asking them, are we getting it right? Is there something missing? And the feedback is that we’re right on the money and going to ruffle some feathers. Which is, of course, what we want to do,” he says with a laugh.
The videos aren’t just a provocation, however. They’re intended to be productive, empowering people to tell their own stories about the impact of climate change. “We’ve held an animation workshop at the public library on Bonaire for people from nature and cultural organizations and artists,” Mosley says. “We’ve been sharing the method of our research and production.” In the Dutch Caribbean, the Netherlands, and the Penn campus itself, these animations can be a toolkit. “The public has messages that are urgent, and they can utilize our collaboration. It’s a research project where we visualize something with them that’s difficult to communicate.” Their animations get seen.
