Living With (And Not Against) Nantucket’s Rising Tides

About six years ago, a series of winter storms whipped through the East Coast, causing catastrophic flooding throughout downtown Nantucket and on coastal roads like Easy Street and Broad Street. Folks might remember the photos of kids kayaking over flooded roads circulating nationally. Since then, storms have gotten more intense and more frequent on the island, prompting community groups to focus on the impacts of flooding and sea level rise. 

One organization, Remain, which was founded in 2008 by philanthropist Wendy Schmidt, was among the local groups that wanted to dive into the conversation. With the help of local thought leaders including Marty Hilton, Bob Miklos, Cecil Barron Jensen, and Rachel Hobart, Remain started to envision how it could implement nature-based, innovative, adaptive strategies for dealing with storm surge and rising tides.

Remain launched its Envision Resilience Challenge in 2021 — a semester-long design studio and community engagement initiative that connects design and architecture students and faculty from various universities with coastal communities to envision adaptive and creative solutions to sea level rise and the impacts of climate change. 

“The whole idea of using student thinking and student design as a catalyst for community conversation was so that we could help provide a hopeful vision for the future as opposed to this idea of just being kind of shocked or terrified by the projection of sea level rise,” Claire Martin, Remain’s project manager, told us.

In that first year, a cohort of design and architecture students from Harvard, Northeastern, Yale, University of Florida, and University of Miami got to know Nantucket. They listened to local planners, architects, and engineers. They engaged with community members. Getting a broad scope of perspectives ensured “the unique culture and values of the community would be included in proposals depicting a future Nantucket under the impact of rising sea levels,” Martin said. 

Students were encouraged to think freely, focusing less on zoning, regulation, and policy. 

“We wanted them to design for where we hope policy will be in 20 to 30 to 40 years,” Martin said.

Study areas included Brant Point, Washington Street, and downtown, and students worked the inevitability of rising waters into their designs (see them at envisionresilience.org), which were displayed in an exhibition on the island for six months, increasing local awareness about work around climate resiliency and changing people’s perceptions about the future of their community. 

Cassandra Lanson was a student at Northeastern in 2021 and now works as a landscape designer in Boston. She was part of the first group of students to participate in the challenge, and her design reimagined Washington Street back into a salt marsh. 

“A lot of it was about ecological autonomy, and the idea of returning the coastline to what it was in conjunction with the idea of people retreating and changing where they live,” Lanson told me. “But also, can we leave what we’re leaving better, and turn it into something that’s ecologically important, but also acts as a stormwater buffer, helps wave attenuation, retains soil — all the things that help build the coast so that it doesn’t have more adverse effects when there’s this huge storm surge that would damage where people are living.”

Part of why Lanson enjoyed the challenge was because she could think outside the box.

“I really admired the project because it was so bold. … What I proposed would not be built, but I think that’s what’s great about the challenge. It’s very open-ended and there aren’t really any constraints,” Lanson said. “I think especially in that first year, a lot of the challenge was focused on just generating ideas that would be talking points.” 

“We’re hoping the Envision Resilience project has been able to provide optimism in thinking about long term planning and where we go from here,” Martin said. “It’s not all doom and gloom if we think creatively and innovatively about how we can work with nature and not against it.”

The challenge was supposed to be a one-off project on Nantucket, but the model was so successful that Remain decided to expand it into other coastal communities. After focusing on Nantucket in 2021, the group moved into Narragansett, Rhode Island, in 2022, where one of their partners, 11th Hour Racing, is based. In 2023, Envision Resilience brought a cohort of students to New Bedford, and a project is underway there, borne out of student designs to relocate instead of rebuild a playground, Martin said. This year, the Envision Resilience Challenge has expanded into Portland and southern Maine, where the organization intends to stay for a few years. 

“I believe we may even move inland,” Martin said. “We’ve been interested in thinking about not just coastal communities, but river systems as well, and how inland communities need to also think about resilience in the face of climate change.”

On Nantucket, while the student designs from 2021 didn’t become actual projects, the areas they looked at are still top of mind. Washington Street, for example, is a highly visible and critical transportation corridor on the island, and it’s the only road that trucks carrying food and fuel can travel on to get to and from the ferry. The street is regularly underwater during storms. A public-private partnership with the town of Nantucket and the Nantucket Land Bank is underway (with support from Remain) to come up with adaptive solutions for how to better protect critical infrastructure on that road while improving walkability and bikeability,

“As a co benefit, all of these things also help promote biodiversity in the area,” Martin said, adding that the group meets monthly.

Martin also pointed out how many student designs that came out of the Nantucket Envision Resilience Challenge left out cars. Lanson’s was among them.

“Maybe in 40 to 50 years we’re not relying so much on cars,” Martin said. “We’re thinking about walking, biking, public transportation, by necessity and also hopefully a kind of change in culture around how we can become more sustainable and lessen our carbon footprint.”

Equity is also an important component in design. 

“There’s a real interest among students these days in how we are designing in equitable ways — how we’re designing and creating landscape architecture and architecture that feels inclusive and accessible to all people,” Martin said.