Flooding and sea level rise are substantially and increasingly threatening the integrity of New York City’s waterfront historic built environment. In 2012, Hurricane Sandy brought 8 feet of floodwater into the South Street Seaport area, and inundated the Empire Stores in Brooklyn; in 2019, Wyckoff Farmhouse — the oldest building in New York City and State — was flooded by Hurricane Ida. Such physical flood risk is further compounded by potential adverse streetscape impacts brought by flood adaptation interventions such as structural or non-structural elevation as required by the city’s Post-Sandy Building Code, and the city’s underdeveloped heritage resilience policy framework which is unable to provide much guidance on the flood adaptation of historic properties.

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Aiming at the intersection of flood adaptation and historic urban form change, this project seeks to fill in the missing pieces that lie within New York City’s heritage resilience framework by better understanding the vulnerability of the city’s historic built environment under physical flood risk and adaptation interventions, exploring design and policy tools that help facilitate an adaptive transformation of the city’s historic urban forms towards flood resilience, and creating a collective dialogue on heritage resilience that bridges practitioners of different professions and the public.

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Please browse this website — the project's publicly available online portal — to explore the Interactive Map: Flood Adaptation × Historic Preservation in the United States that lays out design, policy, technical, and financial resources on heritage resilience across the country; a series of Policy-Maker & Stakeholder Interviews that features conversations with planners, preservation policy-makers, architects & contractors, and community stakeholders; and the Digital Policy & Design Reports, which incorporate my original research on flood adaptation and historic urban form change in the context of New York City.

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This independent research project is sponsored by Onera Foundation under 2022 Onera Prize for Historic Preservation, and is an expansion upon my M.S. Historic Preservation thesis "Living Above the Street: Flood Retrofitting and Adaptive Streetscape of New York City’s Historic Districts" completed in April 2022 at Columbia University.

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This online platform is designed to be viewed primarily on computer screens, with resolutions that range from 1280 px to 1600 px in width.