the waters rise

a vision for the autonomous floodplain assembly

spring 2022
in collaboration with Nicole Cheng and Eduardo Martinez

This speculative design project imagines a contested climate future for Southwest Philadelphia.

Rising seas and sinking homes are familiar images of the worsening climate crisis, but visions for the future of our floodplains remain largely based on technocratic and modernist planning principles. Rather than assuming that these top-down plans will continue to make the city, we begin with the belief that social and political interruption will shape the future of the floodplain. This project imagines a process of disruption from the present day to 2050 in the Eastwick neighborhood of Southwest Philadelphia. In the face of well-intentioned but failed climate adaptation plans by the local government, a growing climate refugee population and existing Eastwick residents form the Autonomous Floodplain Assembly (AFA) to take over the 100-year floodplain. Through a series of strategic demolitions, occupations, and blockades, members of the AFA interrupt and transform the conditions produced by failing infrastructure and organized abandonment by the state.

Starting with these sites of interruption throughout Eastwick, this project moves from social contestation to built interventions that reimagine industry, housing and transportation in the neighborhood. Vacant industrial land is occupied and appropriated by the AFA into a mixed-use campus that supports the creation of an independent, community-controlled local grid powered by solar production. Two typologies of housing emerge where ‘temporary’ FEMA trailers are retrofitted to become high quality flood resilient housing and the local strip mall is transformed into a mixed use residential and commercial area. Finally, expanded local mobility infrastructure extends the trolley route throughout the neighborhood and turns a regional rail blockade into a local connection.

Spaces for collective life are central to this speculative future, where AFA members are able to strengthen their social fabric and realize their power as everyday people to make the city.