27 Small City Natural Environment • Feature • YUDW Instead of waiting for a multi-milliondollar sewer separation, the YUDW worked with the community to pilot a piece of “green infrastructure.” We identified a small, manageable site within the village adjacent to a parking lot that chronically flooded—and through a volunteer community building process, designed and installed a pilot rain garden. The rain garden was modest, but it effectively reframed water that had previously been a nuisance into something attractive. But more importantly it created a place that could be occupied by residents, and around which they could come together socially to manage the garden. The Seaside Village pilot demonstrated a new way of thinking about the water that diverged from the 20th century idea of making the problem disappear down the drain. It showed that “living with water” didn’t mean surrendering to it; it meant integrating it into the landscape and into daily life. This small pilot served as a “proof of concept” that released a reservoir of political will for what came next. Adjacent homeowners began to see their own properties not as victims of the tide, but as participants in a larger ecological system, to some extent shifting the neighborhood narrative from defensiveness to stewardship. Resilient Bridgeport: Scaling the Pilot The lessons learned in the intimate courtyards of Seaside Village became the foundation for a much larger ambition: “Resilient Bridgeport.” Just south of Seaside Village lies the South End, a peninsula of mixed industrial and residential uses that was devastated by Hurricane Sandy. Following the “Rebuild by Design” competition, the YUDW and our partners took on the task of thinking through flood risk for this entire district. The “Grand Plan” solution—a perimeter wall around the entire South End—was technically possible but socially and economically daunting. It risked turning the neighborhood into a fortress and severing it from the waterfront. If we couldn’t afford to reshape the shoreline of the whole district immediately, could we build a larger “pilot” that proved a new way of living with water at a neighborhood scale? The result was a focus on a specific corridor: a raised street extension and a “stormwater park.” In a state where “flood control” has usually meant concrete walls and channels, this pilot demonstrates that flood infrastructure could be a lush, sunken park that residents could enjoy on sunny days, and which could build social resilience. The design brought
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