In recent years, politicians, lobbyists and voters in the United States have often seemed polarized—or paralyzed—over where to draw the line between private and public rights in land. Common property, defined as group- or community-owned private property, straddles that line.

Most recognized common property is in natural resources, and most recognized commoners are rural people in developing countries. But the concept of commons might also apply to some aspects of urban land in the United States. At the least, common property theory may help U.S. policymakers understand more clearly what is at stake in debates about land rights.

At Voices from the Commons, the June 1996 conference of the International Association for the Study of Common Property in Berkeley, California, the Lincoln Institute assembled a dozen researchers and practitioners from the U.S. to discuss these new forms of commons, some of which are described in this article:

• land trusts and limited-equity cooperatives
• incidental open spaces
• housing, including group homes, gated or common-interest developments and
• the use of urban public property by the homeless
• converted military bases

Property Rights and Land Use Strategies

Economist Daniel Bromley and legal scholar Carol Rose have proposed independent but roughly compatible schemes for classifying property regimes. Bromley focuses on the form of land rights, while Rose focuses on management strategies:

PROPERTY IN LAND

Bromley Rose

1. private property rights

2. state keep out

3. nonproperty do nothing

4. common property right way

Option 1 on each of these lists is classically private property. The owner’s rights are exclusive, and the owner decides what to do with the land. Option 2 is often associated with public land, in the sense that government owns it and decides what, if anything, can be done and who can do it on the land. Option 3 is the situation often lamented as “the tragedy of the commons,” in which the land is owned by no one, and everyone therefore has both access and incentives to abuse it. Despite the “tragedy of the commons” language, this option is better described as “open access,” “unowned” or “nonproperty.” Option 4 is most often associated with common property, defined as private property owned and managed in a specific “right” way by a group of people.

There is not a perfect correspondence between Rose’s strategies and Bromley’s categories. “Keep out” as a strategy may apply to either private or group-owned property as well as public lands–wherever the main strategy is to restrict access to a defined group, or to no one. The “right way” strategy may apply to “nonproperty” as well as commons–if anyone, and not just members of a specific group, can use the resource simply by following the prescribed rules of use.

Nevertheless, putting Bromley’s and Rose’s lists side-by-side suggests that the distinguishing feature of common property may be assigning land both to a specific group of people and to prescribed uses.

Most urban land in the United States is defined as either private or public property. Yet such land may be more like common property than is usually recognized. Zoning and environmental regulations, for example, do not allow private landowners to do anything and everything with “their” land. Instead, for example, the private owners of land next to a river may not be permitted to install underground oil storage tanks. Those aspects of land use that affect the community’s quality of life or shared environment are managed almost like common property.

What Makes a Successful Commons?

Elinor Ostrom has identified two prerequisites for successful common property regimes: the system must face significant environmental uncertainty, and there must be social stability in the group of owners/users. As Ostrom puts it, commoners must have “shared a past and expect to share a future.” They must be capable not just of “short-term maximization but long-term reflection about joint outcomes.”

Environmental instability gives commoners an incentive to share risks. Social stability allows or forces them to preserve resources for future generations. For example, in many Alpine villages, herds are private property but summer pastures are common property. To avoid overgrazing and free-riding, individual farmers cannot graze more sheep and goats on the summer pastures than they can feed privately over the winter. Access to the summer pastures helps to guarantee all families, whatever their private resources, a chance to earn a living.

Environmental instability and social stability are usually associated with rural places. Rural landowners face the random risks of droughts, floods and plagues, and are known–accurately or inaccurately–for their sense of community.

Do these requirements exist in the urban United States? Perhaps. Environmental instability is easy enough to find, if “environment” is defined as social and economic as well as physical. For many inner-city residents, depopulation, gentrification, or plant and base closings are just as random and devastating as floods or plagues. The social stability of these neighborhoods may be largely involuntary, created by economic and racial barriers to mobility. But some community activists also see human knowledge, social relationships and the land itself in such places as “social capital,” which can be mobilized for development through new forms of ownership.

Pros and Cons of Common Property

Most scholars who have written about common property have seen commoners as political and economic underdogs. A classic example is villagers defending their traditional forest grazing grounds against timber companies or government foresters who want to prohibit grazing to protect tree seedlings or prevent erosion. But commoners may also be prosperous or even highly privileged. For example, many private or gated “common interest” communities attempt to wall in high home values and wall out social and economic diversity.

Commoners are by definition conservative. To preserve their shared resources, they must exclude or expel anyone not willing to follow their land use rules. They must also keep the individuals who make the most productive or profitable use of the common property from taking their share of the proceeds and “cashing out” of the system. Although less comforting than the stereotype of downtrodden commoners who share and share alike, exclusionary commons may still be preferable to either privatization or state control.

But in practice, both these options may speed up resource exhaustion. Private owners may extract the maximum cash value from their land as quickly as possible, rather than preserve resources for their own or anyone else’s future use. “Keep out” signs may not keep local people from extracting resources unsustainably from government lands–in fact, hostility toward a distant government may encourage such behavior.

Economist William Fischel has applied this implicit comparison to U.S. local governments’ primary dependence on land-based (property) taxes. He sees all residents in a jurisdiction as commoners who share an interest in maximizing local land values. Fischel argues that California’s Proposition 13 was exactly the equivalent of turning a village commons into a national park. By restricting local property taxes and giving state government a stronger role in school funding, Proposition 13 transferred “ownership” of the schools from face-to-face communities to a distant government.

From the local taxpayers’ vantage point, this upward transfer of responsibility changed their schools from a local “commons,” with strong norms about the “right way” to finance and use education, into state property, which local residents almost saw as nonproperty. As a result, the quality of California schools was leveled across local jurisdictions, but it was leveled down rather than up. Education was exhausted rather than managed sustainably.

New Commons

A few experimental forms of land ownership and management in the U.S.–including land trusts, neighborhood-managed parks, community-supported agriculture and limited-equity housing cooperatives–explicitly avoid the extremes of private or public property. All these “new” forms of common property fit Carol Rose’s description of option 4: “right way.” All aim to foster or protect specific land uses or groups of users.

These experiments with property rights and responsibilities raise questions that few researchers, either on urban development or on common property, have yet addressed. When and how should local policymakers support experiments with “common property”? For example, should local and state officials help to remove regulatory barriers to group ownership of land, or support new criteria for mortgage financing of group-owned land?

There are also long-standing legal objections to “perpetuities”–trying to tie the hands of future owners about how to use their land. To avoid these objections, land trusts must sometimes seek special legal exemptions, or even change state property laws. The long-term costs and benefits of common property experiments, however, may depend less on the initial distribution of land rights than on shifting local politics and economic conditions. Finding answers to these questions will require close collaboration between researchers and practitioners.

Sidebars

Land Trusts and Limited-Equity Cooperatives

Much of land’s market value depends on whether it contains important natural resources, is located in a thriving community, or has access to services and infrastructure provided by government. The nineteenth-century American philosopher Henry George argued that all these values were created by something other than private action, and should therefore be captured for public use through taxation.

In recent years, land trusts and other groups have experimented with distributing the costs and benefits of land development in much the same way as proposed by Henry George, but through new forms of land ownership rather than taxation. Some of these experiments include limited-equity cooperatives and land trusts such as Boston’s Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative. The Dudley Street project has made the land in an inner-city redevelopment area the common property of a nonprofit group, while allowing private ownership of homes and other buildings.

Using similar arguments, groups such as the Connecticut-based Equity Trust have dedicated the “social increment” in property values–the increase in land prices as a neighborhood recovers from blight, or a small town grows–to social purposes. For example, the portion of a home’s sale price that is due to the increase in land values rather than housing construction costs is used to subsidize the purchase price for the next homeowner.

Incidental Open Spaces

Vacant lots, old cemeteries and partially buried urban streams raise a host of questions about managing urban landscapes as commons. Groups seeking to reclaim or use such incidental urban open spaces must often persuade private owners to let them use and help to maintain the land. Some geographers and planners have remapped cities’ neglected, and in practice often “unowned,” open spaces.

Groups such as the Waterways Restoration Institute in Berkeley, California, have built on this research to help low-income city residents uncover and restore forgotten streams and their banks, turning them from neighborhood eyesores into neighborhood treasures. The process increases residents’ appreciation of the interdependence between the city and nature, which they often think of as exclusively suburban or rural.

Housing

For the elderly, single-parent households and many low-income families, detached single-family housing is either inappropriate or priced beyond reach. Yet traditional land use regulations, grounded partly in concerns about property values, favor only single-family housing. Advocates of privatization, in the U.S. as well as in developing or transitioning economies, often argue for converting common property into private ownership to promote reinvestment or increase property values. Organizations serving the homeless, such as San Francisco’s HomeBase, are seeing this argument applied even to traditionally public spaces such as doorways, parks and bus benches. To discourage the homeless from occupying these spaces, some local businesses and neighbors support regulations that convert them into quasi-private property.

Yet in all these settings, some researchers and practitioners have also proposed to manage the housing stock as a whole as a form of common property, both to meet needs not met by single-family detached housing and to encourage neighborhood reinvestment. In the U.S., researchers such as Cornell’s Patricia Pollak have examined the sources of opposition to, and the consequences of, converting some single-family homes into group quarters, accessory apartments and elder cottages. Many home and business owners who oppose these land uses in interviews, expecting them to depress property values, are ironically unaware that their neighborhoods already contain some of this alternative housing.

Converted Military Bases

For each base closed, the federal government offers planning funds to a single organization. That organization must represent the entire local community affected by the base closing, from public to private interests and across local political jurisdictions. Researchers such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Bernard Frieden are now studying the way that communities around these bases, which often include very diverse interests, are being forced to create at least temporary “commons” structures to receive federal grants.

Few bases have been all the way through the conversion process yet, so it remains to be seen whether these temporary structures will be converted for permanent land ownership or management. In the Oakland-San Francisco area, however, the Earth Island Institute’s Carl Anthony and others on the East Bay Conversion and Reinvestment Commission consciously considered long-term group or community ownership of some base lands as a way to meet regional needs for housing, open space and jobs.

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Alice E. Ingerson, director of publications at the Lincoln Institute, earned her Ph.D. in cultural anthropology, for research on the politics of rural industrialization in Portugal. She moderated the session “Is There an Urban Commons in the U.S.?” at the 1996 Voices from the Commons conference in California.

References

Steve Barton and Carol Silverman, Common Interest Communities: Private Governments and the Public Interest (Berkeley, CA: Institute of Governmental Studies Press, 1994).

Daniel Bromley, Environment and Economy: Property Rights and Public Policy (Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, Inc., 1991).

William A. Fischel, Regulatory Takings: Law, Economics, and Politics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995).

Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

Carol M. Rose, “Rethinking Environmental Controls: Management Strategies for Common Resources,” Duke Law Journal 1991, no. 1 (February 1991), pp. 1-38.

Lawrence Susskind is the Ford Professor of Urban and Environmental Planning at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and president of the Consensus Building Institute, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He graduated from Columbia University and received his Masters of City Planning and his Ph.D. in Urban Planning from MIT. As current head of the Environmental Policy Group in MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning, he teaches courses on international environmental treaty negotiation, public sector dispute resolution and environmental planning. He also holds a joint appointment at Harvard University as visiting professor of Law and director of the Public Disputes Program at the interuniversity Program on Negotiation, which he helped to found. Susskind has published many books and reports and held many visiting appointments and guest lectureships. He is a faculty associate of the Lincoln Institute.

Land Lines: How did you become interested in land use mediation?

Lawrence Susskind: Land use planners are supposed to ensure that the public is involved in all growth management decisions. Yet, most efforts to ensure such public participation lead to protracted political battles. Within the planning profession it is not clear how competing conceptions of appropriate land uses ought to be reconciled. Since the early 1970s I have been trying to introduce the concept of mediation as well as other conflict management tools into the lexicon of professional planners. In my view, in the absence of consensus building strategies of some kind, most communities are doomed to use resources inefficiently, unfairly and unwisely. I got interested in land use mediation as a way of helping the planning profession do a better job.

LL: What types of land use disputes are most difficult to resolve?

LS: Land use disputes that revolve around values or identity are the most difficult to resolve. When values (as opposed to economic interests) are at stake, people often feel that their identity is threatened and in such situations they are rarely open to considering the views of others. For example, proposed changes in land use that would eliminate agriculture as a way of life are not likely to be accepted, even if financial compensation is offered to the landowners involved.

LL: When did you start collaborating with the Lincoln Institute?

LS: My ties to the Lincoln Institute go back a long time. When Arlo Woolery was executive director in the late 1970s, we worked together on a multiyear effort to analyze the impacts of the Property Tax Limitation Law (Proposition 2 1/2) in Massachusetts and on the state’s Growth Policy Development Act. Two decades later, in 1997, I began working with Rosalind Greenstein and later Armando Carbonell, co-chairs of the Institute’s Department of Planning and Development, on a series of research projects that evolved into the training programs on land use mediation that we (LILP and CBI) currently offer together.

LL: Explain a little more about CBI.

LS: The Consensus Building Institute is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1993 to provide consensus building services to clients involved in complex disputes. Building on the “mutual gains” approach to negotiation developed at the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School, CBI offers conflict management assistance, negotiation training, dispute system design services and evaluative research to public agencies, corporate clients and nongovernmental agencies on five continents.

Our staff now includes a dozen full-time professionals, mostly based in Cambridge, and a network of more than 30 experienced affiliates around the world. We have become known as expert public and environmental dispute mediators and have helped to resolve complex disputes related to the siting of controversial facilities, the setting of public health and safety standards, the formulation and implementation of development plans and projects, and conflicts among racial and ethnic groups.

LL: When did the joint Lincoln and CBI training programs begin?

LS: After several years of careful analysis of land use mediation efforts throughout the United States, CBI developed a curriculum with Lincoln Institute for public officials and planners, and that course has been offered since 1999 at a number of locations. During the first few years we offered only a basic course designed to familiarize participants with assisted negotiation as a method to resolve land use disputes, and then we expanded our offerings to include more detailed skill building for experienced mediators and practitioners. Today we offer a full range of courses at multiple locations around the country.

LL: Who are the primary participants in these introductory and advanced courses?

LS: We are trying to reach three different audiences. First, we have identified and invited local elected and appointed officials who preside over land development disputes and administer land use regulatory systems at the local, regional and state levels. They need to know that there are techniques they can use to help resolve land use disputes before they escalate.

Second, we are trying to attract real estate developers and their attorneys so they know how to participate effectively in dispute resolution efforts when they are offered or suggested by public officials. Third, we have a special interest in attracting professionals of all kinds who want to learn how to be better facilitators, particularly of multiparty land use dialogues that involve complex technical dilemmas.

LL: What are the key goals and lessons of these programs?

LS: The introductory course offers a quick overview of the reasons that land use disputes seem to escalate so quickly and often end up in court. We then introduce the basic principles and tools of dispute resolution and show how they can head off such escalation. They are presented in a very interactive way using gaming and simulations. Participants are given a number of hands-on opportunities to apply what they are learning in hypothetical situations and to bring their own cases before the group. We spend some time talking about techniques for overcoming resistance to the use of mediation and other consensus building strategies.

The advanced course is aimed at experienced mediators or planners and lawyers who think they might want to become mediators. It assumes that the participants have mastered the material presented in the introductory course and moves to a set of dilemmas at the next level, including methods of handling science-intensive disputes through the use of joint fact finding. We also review key theoretical debates, such as managing unequal power relationships in a mediation context.

LL: How do you incorporate both theory and practice into the curriculum?

LS: We expect many of the participants to bring their own stories about land use disputes in which they have been intimately involved. We model in real time how the theory we are teaching can be applied in their cases. We also try to ground all of our theoretical presentations in detailed case accounts of actual practice. Finally, as mentioned above, we use role playing simulations. Students can’t just sit back and take notes. They have to wrestle with the application of the ideas we are presenting.

LL: What other projects have you undertaken with the Institute?

LS: About a year ago, in May 2004, I joined Institute President Jim Brown at a Lincoln-sponsored seminar in Cuba on the problems of restoring and redeveloping Havana Harbor. Energy production and inadequate attention to pollution control have spoiled one of the most beautiful harbors in this hemisphere. Some of the many different committees and groups concerned with economic development, environmental cleanup, restoration of the harbor ecology, historic preservation of Old Havana, and enhanced tourism are seeking advice on strategies for balancing these (sometimes) competing objectives.

CBI is beginning to develop a new joint course with the Lincoln Institute and some of its partners involved in local economic development efforts around the country. We believe conflict resolution tools and negotiation skills can be of great use in neighborhood development disputes, not just growth management conflicts in the suburbs. With Roz Greenstein CBI is creating a new set of training programs for community-based organizations that we plan to offer for the first time next summer.

Another new initiative is a collaborative Web site that highlights recent research by the Lincoln Institute and CBI, as well as timely news articles, background material on consensus building, and links to related programs and publications. One section of the site will provide an interactive platform that will permit hundreds of alumni of our joint courses to remain in touch with each other and share their mediation experiences. This “virtual learning community” will be a valuable resource for public- and private-sector stakeholders involved in land use disputes (even if they haven’t taken the course).

LL: What is the outlook for future joint programs?

LS: I believe our ongoing CBI–Lincoln Institute partnership holds incredible promise. We have conducted an Institute-sponsored study on the use of consensus building to resolve land reform disputes in Latin America and hope to expand on that work, as well as to address land issues facing China and the newly independent states of Eastern Europe. The Institute is already involved in research and training programs in these regions, and land use disputes are at the core of many of the challenges facing national and local policy makers.

The Lincoln Institute is an ideal partner for CBI. We both care about applied research, theory building and sharing new knowledge through educational programs of all kinds. We both measure our success in terms of real improvements on the ground, and we share interests in both domestic and international arenas.

Conservation Leadership Dialogue

On March 1, 2011, the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy hosted its tenth annual Conservation Leadership Dialogue with a focus on The Future of Large Landscape Conservation in America. The session was organized by James N. Levitt, a fellow at the Lincoln Institute, with support from Armando Carbonell, senior fellow and chair of the Department of Planning and Urban Form. Held in the Members of Congress Room of the Library of Congress, across the street from the U.S. Capitol in Washington, DC, the meeting took place on the 100th anniversary, to the day, of President William Howard Taft’s signing of the landmark legislation that allowed for creation of national forests in the eastern part of the country. The Weeks Act of 1911, named for Congressman (later Senator) John Wingate Weeks of Massachusetts, changed the nature of cooperative conservation involving citizens active in the public, private, nonprofit, academic, and research sectors in the United States.

In the tradition of previous conservation dialogues, a cross-sectoral, geographically diverse group of conservationists convened to seek a path forward—in concert with the Obama administration’s recently released report on America’s Great Outdoors (Council on Environmental Quality 2011), as well as myriad initiatives at the state and local level. Their goals were to advance collaboration on a large landscape scale among landowners, land managers, and citizens from the public, private, nonprofit, and academic sectors. They also sought to understand and expand on the example set by large landscape initiatives that are achieving measurable, durable conservation outcomes that will provide benefits for generations to come.

Just as we can now appreciate the revival of the White Mountains of New Hampshire from their barren, moonscape-like conditions around 1900 to their majestic, verdant stature today, twenty-second century Americans ought to be able to appreciate how our foresight in working across property, jurisdictional, and even national boundaries has become a key element in the nation’s multigenerational effort to preserve essential sources of clean water, sustainably produced forest products, and expansive recreational opportunities.

Speakers’ Comments

The conference speakers emphasized the importance of sustained cooperation across many organizations and sectors to achieve lasting results. Proudly recounting how some two million acres of Maine forestland has been conserved over the past dozen years, Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, reported that “we have done this by building a partnership among government at all levels, the forest products industry, environmental, forestry and recreation groups, and landowners. Through this partnership, we have been able to maintain or increase productivity for wood and harvest levels, supporting a diverse and robust forest products industry that employs tens of thousands of workers who produce paper, other wood products, and renewable energy. At the same time, we have been able to protect biodiversity, old growth and late succession forest, and public access to recreation, and also increase opportunities for tourism” (Levitt and Chester 2011, 72).

Representatives Peter Welch, Democrat of Vermont, and Rush Holt, Democrat of New Jersey, each stressed the importance of perseverance in such efforts. Welch remarked on the value of sustaining land conservation budgets during the current round of budget negotiations. He reminded the audience that in 1864 President Abraham Lincoln took his attention off a monumental crisis—the Civil War—in order to sign a bill deeding the area of Yosemite to the state of California for public use and recreation. If Lincoln could create Yosemite in the midst of the Civil War, Welch asserted, we can do our part in a time of tight budgets and economic volatility.

Holt focused his remarks on achieving a longstanding promise to fully fund the federal and stateside portions of the Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF), as well as a number of other legislative initiatives such as the Wildlife Corridors Conservation Act. Holt was emphatic in urging the conservation community to respond to the need for urgent action for our own sake, and for the sake of future generations. He reminded the audience of the admonition of President Lyndon Johnson, signer of the original LWCF legislation and the Wilderness Act in 1964: “If future generations are to remember us more with gratitude than sorrow,” said Johnson, “we must achieve more than just the miracles of technology. We must also leave them a glimpse of the world as it was created, not just as it looked when we got through with it” (Henry and Armstrong 2004, 123).

It was evident from the discussions that leaders from every sector stand ready to help implement the cooperative conservation aspirations of Collins, Welch, and Holt. Bob Bendick, director of U.S. government relations at The Nature Conservancy, stated that “the overall objective of AGO [America’s Great Outdoors] should be to create and sustain a national network of large areas of restored and conserved land, water, and coastlines around which Americans can build productive and healthy lives” (Levitt and Chester 2011, 74). Accordingly, Bendick shared with the assembled group his personal dream that someday his young granddaughters might, as adults, look out from the arch at the gateway to Yellowstone National Park and note that “all across America, 400 million people have been able to arrange themselves and their activities across this remarkable country in a way that reconciles their lives with the power, grace, beauty and productivity of the land and water that ultimately sustain us all” (Levitt and Chester 2011, 75).

Will Shafroth, acting assistant secretary for Fish and Wildlife and Parks of the U.S. Department of Interior, and Harris Sherman, undersecretary for Natural Resources and Environment at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, shared their frank assessments of the current situation. Shafroth described the hard work and extensive comments that helped shape the America’s Great Outdoors report. While this work serves as a good foundation for the effort ahead, Shafroth noted that it takes considerable creativity and proactive thinking to sustain conservation momentum in these times of sharp budgetary constraints.

Sherman added that the whole idea of landscape-scale conservation implies that we need to move from performing random acts of conservation to more comprehensive and collaborative large-scale initiatives that engage many agencies and ownership types. Of particular importance, he noted, will be the outcome of the debate on the 2012 Farm Bill, because its conservation provisions will be critically important to the success of large-scale conservation efforts.

The enthusiasm for large landscape conservation on the part of speakers from large public and nonprofit organizations was strongly reinforced by Jim Stone, a private landowner and ranch operator in Montana’s Blackfoot Valley. Stone helped to start the Blackfoot Challenge, a grassroots organization that has yielded impressive, measurable results over the last three decades using a landscape-scale approach.

Stone’s colleague Jamie Williams of The Nature Conservancy explained that the Blackfoot Challenge has achieved remarkable success over the years because it has taken the time to engage so many landowners and partners in consensus-based approaches to conservation. Initial small successes were critical to building the foundation of trust that led to larger successes later (Williams 2011). In the area of stream restoration alone, the Blackfoot Challenge has helped to engage more than 200 landowners in some 680 projects involving 42 streams and 600 stream-miles that have contributed directly to an 800 percent increase in fish populations in the 1.5 million acre valley. Stone is emphatic in saying that, with the right people in the right places, what has been done in the Blackfoot region could be done across the nation.

Complementing the program was a panel of researchers and academic officials representing universities, colleges, and research institutions that are helping to catalyze large landscape initiatives. Matthew McKinney of the University of Montana moderated a dialogue with David Foster of Harvard Forest and Harvard University, Perry Brown of the University of Montana, and Karl Flessa of the University of Arizona. They explored how institutions, within their own walls and beyond, can use their analytic and convening capacities to advance initiatives with extensive impacts.

Perry Brown pointed out that those universities that will play a role in real-world conservation initiatives will not be insular, but rather will cherish their relationships with nonacademic partners such as Indian tribes, state and federal government agencies, and large national and small local nonprofits. David Foster reinforced that idea by describing the Harvard Forest’s outreach efforts to develop and disseminate its recent report on Wildlands and Woodlands New England (Foster et al. 2009).

Large Landscape Cases

There are many exemplary cases of on-the-ground progress in large landscape conservation across the country from Maine to Montana and from Southern Arizona to Northern Florida. One of the longest operating and most important cases is in the ACE Basin in South Carolina’s celebrated Lowcountry. The ACE Basin, comprised of some 350,000 acres that drain into the Ashepoo, Combahee, and South Edisto Rivers between Charleston and Beaufort, is one of the largest undeveloped estuaries along the U.S. Atlantic seaboard (figure 1).

In the late 1980s, a group of public, private, and nonprofit organizations banded together to form a partnership that would protect the remarkable scenic, wildlife, and water resources in the region. Among members of the ACE Basin Partnership are federal agencies such as the Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; state agencies including the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources; national nonprofits including The Nature Conservancy and Ducks Unlimited; local nonprofits including the Coastal Conservation League and the Lowcountry Open Land Trust; philanthropic organizations and individuals including the Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Foundation; and private interests such as MeadWestvaco Corporation.

Partnership members have conserved more than 134,000 acres, covering a contiguous core in the heart of the ACE Basin that stitches together easements on private land, a National Wildlife Refuge, South Carolina Wildlife Management Areas, and a Charleston County natural and historical interpretive center, among other properties.

As a large landscape initiative, the ACE Basin truly stands out from other efforts. Mark Robertson, the executive director of The Nature Conservancy in South Carolina, has noted that the effort “set a standard of how to get conservation done on a large scale using collaboration between private landowners, conservation groups and government agencies.” Asked about the significance of the progress in the ACE Basin to date, Dana Beach, director of the Coastal Conservation League, is emphatic: “It’s real importance is that it has given many people for the first time hope that a place of great importance is not inevitably going to be developed” (Holleman 2008).

Next Steps

The leadership dialogue concluded with general agreement that there is a great deal of work to be done, as well as an historic opportunity to expand on initial progress in the field of large landscape conservation. The discussion of next steps was organized to focus on four types of initiatives.

Policy Dialogues

There is a need for ongoing policy dialogue, both among conservationists in the public, private, nonprofit and academic sectors and between the conservation community and local, state and federal decision makers, regarding the very timely opportunities to realize landscape-scale conservation initiatives across the nation. The dialogue should celebrate existing success stories about both cultural and nature-oriented properties (both being highly valued by the public), consider ongoing regional conservation efforts, and envision new ones.

In the political sphere, these dialogues should connect with conservation caucuses at multiple layers of government (local, county, state, federal, and international). In nonprofit and academic contexts, the dialogue should reach across disciplines and institutional boundaries. Such intersectoral, interdisciplinary discussions are most likely to come up with creative solutions and novel ideas. While the dialogues may be able to take advantage of the socially neutral nature of universities as conveners, they nevertheless need to be responsive to the practical, on-the-ground issues of vital concern to field practitioners and landowners.

Research

Another immediate need is to build on existing maps and inventories (e.g., the Regional Plan Association’s Northeast Landscape Partnership database) to offer a more comprehensive picture of existing public, private, and nonprofit initiatives. A more comprehensive overview of nationwide efforts should be of particular use to groups and networks working to advance the practice of large landscape conservation, including the Large Landscape Practitioners Network, a program of the Lincoln Institute, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Landscape Conservation Cooperatives (LCCs).

Such research efforts should be more regionally relevant and cost-effective if they involve cooperation among a wide assemblage of public and private organizations. They might also serve to augment environmental education initiatives that already are spread thin.

Additional research is also needed to measure the impacts, performance over time, and conservation outcomes of landscape-scale initiatives, and to identify the key factors of success for initiatives that are able to show significant measureable results. Of particular importance is research that is able to identify where, when, and how certain efforts are able to yield measurably improved ecosystem services, such as improved water quality, increased wildlife populations, and enhanced sustainable production of forest products.

Networking

A number of large landscape networks have been created recently or are now emerging, including the Large Landscape Practitioners Network and the LCCs mentioned above. As they evolve, the networks are likely to nest within one another at larger and larger geographic scales, but they will also need to focus on sharing knowledge and building capacity at the local level to yield lasting results. Notwithstanding the need to be grounded in local realities, the networks have an opportunity to reach out to international partners with lessons to share. Within their own territories, large landscape conservation networks need to be linked to diverse constituencies, including philanthropists interested in landscape-scale conservation, university faculty and students, a range of public agencies, and, most importantly, property owners and land managers.

Demonstration and Implementation

Given what are expected to be very tight constraints on new conservation programs at the federal, state, and local levels over the next few years, participants focused much of their attention on the creative use of existing budgets for landscape-scale conservation purposes. One noted the significant role that is already being played by the Department of Defense to conserve (and limit development on) lands adjacent to active military reservations. Such programs are now being used effectively to protect habitats and working lands from development and to limit landscape fragmentation. They also may be used in the future to address water supply protection issues. Another participant noted the potential significance of state and federal transportation budgets that could be used to mitigate the disruptive impact of new roads and highways.

Particularly enthusiastic support came from several participants for public-private-nonprofit partnerships that have a proven track record for protecting and enhancing locally valued natural and cultural resources to form the backbone for a regional green infrastructure. Examples include Santa Fe, New Mexico; the Chattahoochee/Apalachicola basin in Georgia, Mississippi, and Florida; the Crown of the Continent in Montana, Alberta, and British Columbia; and the New Jersey Highlands.

Additional opportunities for funding large landscape conservation initiatives include state incentives for private land protection that can be used to match selected federal programs (e.g., the matching monies required by funds provided by the North American Wetlands Conservation Act); community forest programs that are now gaining momentum around the nation; selected opportunities for foundation Program-Related Investments (PRIs); and emerging ecosystem service markets assisted by federal policy and public-private partnerships, including mitigation banking and statewide markets for carbon credits, such as those in California.

Conclusion

Notwithstanding evident federal budget constraints, myriad opportunities are available to pursue conservation projects that are expansive in scale, extensive in scope, able to achieve measureable conservation outcomes, and enduring. The conference participants themselves offered clear evidence that the concept of large landscape conservation has spread to initiatives across the continent. These individuals and their colleagues at home and abroad are now and will continue to be at the forefront of initiatives that protect nature in the context of human values at a scale commensurate with the conservation challenges they face.

About the Author

James N. Levitt is a fellow in the Department of Planning and Urban Form at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and director of the Program on Conservation Innovation at the Harvard Forest, Harvard University.

References:

Council on Environmental Quality. 2011. America’s great outdoors: A promise to future generations. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. http://americasgreatoutdoors.gov/report

Foster, D., D. Kittredge, B. Donahue, K. Fallon Lambert, M. Hunter, L. Irland, B. Hall, D. Orwig, A. Ellison, E. Colburn, A. D’Amato, and C. Cogbill. 2009. Wildlands and woodlands: A vision for New England. Harvard Forest Paper 32. Petersham, MA: Harvard Forest.

Henry, Mark, and Leslie Armstrong. 2004. Mapping the future of America’s national parks: Stewardship through geographic information systems. Redlands, CA: ESRI.

Holleman, Joey. 2008. Ace Basin: Protected forever. The State, Local/Metro Section, November 10. http://www.thestate.com/2008/11/10/584599/ace-basin-protected-forever.html#ixzz1W3yQd7KP

Levitt, James N., and Charles N. Chester. 2011. The future of large landscape conservation in America. Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. http://www.lincolninst.edu/pubs/1916_The-Future-of-Large-Landscape-Conservation-in-America

Williams, Jamie. 2011. Scaling up conservation for large landscapes. Land Lines 23(3): 8–13. https://www.lincolninst.edu/pubs/dl/1923_1246_LLA_071103.pdf.

Related Resources

Levitt, James N., ed. 2005. From Walden to Wall Street:Frontiers of conservation finance. Washington, DC: Island Press and the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

———. 2010. Conservation Capital in the Americas: Exemplary Conservation Finance Initiatives. Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, in collaboration with Island Press, the Ash Institute for Democratic Governance and Innovation at the Harvard Kennedy School, and the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University.

McKinney Matthew J., and Shawn Johnson. 2009. Working across boundaries: People, nature, and regions. Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

McKinney, Matthew J., Lynn Scarlett, and Daniel Kemmis. 2010. Large landscape conservation: A strategic framework for policy and action. Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Gran parte del consumo de energía del país se produce en las ciudades. En los Estados Unidos, alrededor de tres cuartas parte de la energía consumida está relacionada con las áreas urbanas. De acuerdo con esto, las ciudades ofrecen oportunidades significativas para ahorrar energía aumentando su eficiencia, pero sigue habiendo obstáculos importantes: ¿Las fuerzas del mercado bastarán para producir ganancias de eficiencia cuando corresponda, o estas soluciones de mercado se verán impedidas por fallas del mercado, tales como información imperfecta, falta de financiamiento o riesgos incomprendidos? ¿Cuánto valora la gente el ahorro de energía, y cuán sensibles son a los cambios en los precios de la energía? El Instituto Lincoln organizó una conferencia sobre la eficiencia energética y las ciudades en octubre de 2012 para tratar estos y otros temas relacionados. A continuación esbozamos algunos de ellos.

Valoración de la eficiencia energética

Los consumidores deberían estar dispuestos a pagar más por espacios de vivienda que usan menos energía. La evidencia demuestra que los usuarios de espacios comerciales valoran la eficiencia energética y están dispuestos a pagar más por ella, y muchos estudios confirman que el espacio de oficinas y comercial con certificación LEED se vende o alquila a precios superiores en comparación con el espacio tradicional. La evidencia de esta preferencia es claramente menor en lo que se refiere a las residencias, en parte porque la mayoría de los compradores de viviendas no puede determinar fácilmente la eficiencia energética de una vivienda, sobre todo si es nueva y no hay registro sobre su consumo energético.

Algunos desarrollos residenciales se están clasificando ahora mediante procedimientos similares a la certificación LEED o la clasificación Energy Star, como la utilizada en los equipos electrodomésticos. En California, las viviendas que tienen la mayor clasificación de eficiencia energética se venden por un precio de aproximadamente un 9 por ciento mayor que las unidades con eficiencia energética promedio. Similares diferencias de precios para casas certificadas con el nivel de eficiencia máximo, usando un procedimiento de certificación europeo, se han observado en los Países Bajos. Algunas de estas diferencias de precios se justifican por el mayor nivel de confort brindado por estos edificios, además del ahorro de energía. También parece probable que el aumento de precios por eficiencia energética que se observan en California sea tres veces mayor que incremento gradual del costo del aumento de eficiencia en dichas viviendas.

Cómo determinar el costo

El costo de integrar eficiencia energética en los edificios nuevos es menor que el costo de mejorar la eficiencia en edificios existentes. Una casa construida después del año 2000 usa alrededor del 25 por ciento menos de energía por metro cuadrado que una casa construida en la década de 1960 o antes. El potencial técnico para mejorar la eficiencia energética en casas más viejas parece ser obvio, pero sus propietarios enfrentan dos desafíos: determinar qué mejoras tienen el mayor beneficio por dólar invertido y obtener un contratista y financiamiento para realizar el trabajo. Si bien hay muchas herramientas de diagnóstico disponibles para evaluar las viviendas existentes, su exactitud es muy variable y depende completamente de las características detalladas tanto de la vivienda y como del estilo de vida de la unidad familiar. La obtención de un contratista y de financiamiento puede suponer altos costos de transacción para los propietarios, en términos de esfuerzo, tiempo y dinero. Muchas compañías de servicios públicos ofrecen soporte técnico y financiero para la modernización de la eficiencia energética, pero el progreso ha sido lento.

Cómo cambiar el consumo de energía

Quizá sea más fácil cambiar los estilos de vida residenciales que modernizar los edificios viejos, y muchas compañías de servicios públicos están experimentando con métodos para modificar el comportamiento de la unidad familiar. El programa más común consiste en “animar” a las familias a desarrollar hábitos más eficientes proporcionándoles informes periódicos del consumo doméstico de energía que comparan su reciente uso de energía con el de sus vecinos. Los análisis demuestran que estos informes tienen no solo un impacto a corto plazo en el consumo de energía del hogar sino también un impacto acumulativo a más largo plazo que continúa después de interrumpidos los informes. Los ahorros de energía de estos programas son pequeños, y oscilan entre medio kilovatio-hora hasta un kilovatio-hora por día para un hogar medio, pero el bajo costo del programa lo hace tan rentable como muchas otras estrategias.

Reconocimiento a John Quigley

Esta conferencia fue organizada conjuntamente con John Quigley, profesor de Economía de la Universidad de California en Berkeley, quien falleció antes de que ésta se llevara a cabo. Además de sus artículos originales sobre la energía y las ciudades, algunos de sus antiguos alumnos, colegas y coautores presentaron otros artículos sobre economía urbana. Todos estos trabajos serán publicados en una próxima edición especial de Regional Science and Urban Economics, que reconocerá las contribuciones de John Quigley a lo largo de su larga y sobresaliente carrera.

In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, with more frequent extreme weather events and rising sea levels, the vulnerability of coastal cities and towns has become a matter of urgency. But out of disasters can come opportunities for innovation. Post-Sandy, a range of new initiatives, tools, policies, governance frameworks, and incentives are being tested, including competitions such as Rebuild by Design (RBD). Spearheaded by the Hurricane Sandy Rebuilding Task Force and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), the contest used design as a key tool for creating integrated strategies to build resilience, sustainability, and livability.

After HUD announced the winners in June, Land Lines discussed RBD with Helen Lochhead, an architect, urban and landscape designer, and 2014 Lincoln/Loeb Fellow at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University and the Lincoln Institute. Previously, she was the Executive Director of Place Development at Sydney Harbour Foreshore Authority. She is also an adjunct professor at the University of Sydney.

Land Lines: How did Hurricane Sandy differ from other storms in the United States?

Helen Lochhead: Sandy caused unprecedented damage and underscored the vulnerability of coastal cities and towns to more frequent extreme weather events. Given the financial costs, topping $65 billion, and the excessive human toll, with 117 people dead and more than 200,000 displaced from their homes, it was clear from the outset of the recovery process that rebuilding what existed before was not a viable option.

All levels of government—federal, state, and city—clearly articulated the imperative to build greater resilience in the Sandy-affected areas of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. To ensure the tri-state region fares better next time around, it was acknowledged that we had to build differently. Because every $1 spent on mitigation and preparation can save $4 down the road on post-disaster rebuilding, government agencies are testing a range of new initiatives, including competitions that promote resilience through innovative planning and design, such as Rebuild by Design.

Land Lines: How did Rebuild by Design differ from other recovery efforts and design competitions?

Helen Lochhead: The RBD competition acknowledged design as a key tool for dealing with extreme weather events, with potential to reframe questions and develop new paradigms that challenge the status quo. Designers are collaborators, visualizers, and synthesizers. RBD provided them the opportunity to unpack issues and put together scenarios in new and different ways.

RBD’s approach was also regional. Hurricane Sandy defied political boundaries, so the competition aimed to address structural and environmental vulnerabilities that the storm exposed across all affected areas. It also promised to strengthen our understanding of regional interdependencies, fostering coordination and resilience both at the local level and across the United States.

The procurement strategy was different as well. The standard model for federal design competitions is to define an existing problem, develop a brief, and solicit solutions from the best experts in the field. But a problem of such unprecedented scale and complexity as Sandy cannot easily be defined until it’s understood in all its dimensions. This takes time. Such unchartered territory suggested the need for an open-ended question and an interdisciplinary, cross-jurisdictional approach.

First, a diverse pool of talent was engaged by a unique consortium of project partners—President Obama’s Hurricane Sandy Rebuilding Task Force and HUD in collaboration with New York University’s Institute for Public Knowledge (IPK), the Municipal Art Society (MAS), Regional Plan Association (RPA), and the Van Alen Institute (VAI), with financial support from the Rockefeller Foundation and other major foundations. Rather than limiting the field, the project partners sought integrated teams of interdisciplinary, collaborative thinkers, to facilitate a broad range of ideas and approaches as well as more holistic strategies.

Second, the competition process itself was different. Eight months total, it was short, sharp, and focused. The process involved research and design to interrogate the issues and maximize the breadth and range of ideas through open innovation paradigms. The process was research-led, open-source, and collaborative, to better refine the nature and scope of the complex regional challenges and develop comprehensive design solutions.

Third, RBD set aside HUD Community Development Block Grants (CDBG-DR) funding—$920 million specifically—to help implement winning projects and proposals. Typically, grantees are required to develop action plans only after receiving these funds. But RBD informally changed this procedure by fostering innovative proposals before awarding money. Thus, federal dollars became a catalyst for innovation as well as a mechanism to facilitate implementation. Teams were encouraged to secure their own funding for additional design development as well, fueling the extension of their outreach and their project’s scope.

Finally, RBD interacted with communities, not-for-profits, government agencies, and local, state, and federal leaders at every stage to build new coalitions of support and capacity in tandem with each design proposal.

Land Lines: How effective was Rebuild by Design as a vehicle for driving innovation and delivering resilience across the region? And what are the key possibilities and challenges of such a design-led process?

Helen Lochhead: We will not know for some time if RBD will ultimately deliver innovations that better prepare and adapt the region to a changing climate or whether the projects can be successfully implemented and leveraged to build resilience in other vulnerable communities. However, it is possible to identify where the competition has demonstrated innovation and potential impact over and above more standard processes.

The sheer number of participants, range of disciplines, and integrated team structures facilitated a multiplicity of ideas and approaches but also more holistic strategies. From a field of 148 submissions, RBD selected 10 multidisciplinary design teams to research and develop a range of proposals. These finalists included more than 200 experts primarily from planning, design, engineering, and ecology.

The multifaceted research phase, which began in August 2013, also differentiated the competition process from the start. Teams immersed themselves in design-based research, targeted discussions, and field trips to Sandy-affected areas to help understand the enormity of the challenge. The Institute for Public Knowledge led this stage as a way to address a broad range of issues and involve local community input and fieldwork. The IPK research identified vulnerabilities and risk, for which the design teams could then propose better, more resilient alternatives. This framework enabled the project teams not only to identify, understand, and respond to core problems, but to define opportunities and create scenarios. The process also facilitated the sharing of research and ideas across teams.

The designers undertook extensive precedent studies, examined global best practice, and met with community members to elicit input on what might be most effective in local contexts. They identified new and emerging approaches to coastal protection, finance, policy, and land-use planning, as well as communication models that demonstrated promise in other contexts and could be adapted in the Sandy-affected region. Visual tools were key to the exploration. Teams tested scenarios using GIS mapping tools to collate, synthesize, and communicate complex data. Three-dimensional visualizations helped to convey various options and engage stakeholders.

The power of design-led propositions cannot be underestimated as a means to translate intangible problems into tangible solutions that stakeholders can relate to and discuss in meaningful ways.

Land Lines: You mentioned that RBD built new coalitions of support. How was the outreach different?

Helen Lochhead: Ten ideas were selected for design development in October, commencing the final stage of the competition. Teams worked closely with MAS, RPA, and VAI to transform their design ideas into viable projects that would inspire cooperation from politicians, communities, and agencies across the region and thus facilitate implementation and funding. Because of the regional approach of these far-reaching projects, the role of the partner organizations was pivotal here in bringing together local networks of often vastly different interests.

Coalition building was essential to ensuring that the approach was inclusive as well as comprehensive. Even more important was the grassroots support for implementation, to create the necessary momentum to deliver projects in the long run, as inevitably some will roll out over time as funds become available.

Land Lines: What were some key themes in the proposals?

Helen Lochhead: The overarching logic in the proposals is that the greatest benefit and value is created when investment addresses not just flood or storm risk, but also the combined effects of extreme weather events, environmental degradation, social vulnerability, and vital network susceptibility. By restoring ecosystems and creating recreational and economic opportunities, the projects will enhance sustainability and resilience.

What prevailed were layered approaches that incorporate more ecological green/blue infrastructure as well as gray infrastructure systems, along with proposals for new, more regionally based governance models, online tools, and educational initiatives that build capacity within communities. Many demonstrated place-based solutions that also had wider application. All highlighted interdependencies, fostering coordination and inclusion.

Land Lines: Among the winning projects, announced by HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan on June 2, what are some of the key innovations?

Helen Lochhead: SCAPE/Landscape Architecture’s “Living Breakwaters” could have far-reaching application if the engineered protective oyster reefs are successful. Although the proposal faces some challenges—in-water permitting and potential broader environmental impacts that need to be worked through—it has the potential to be piloted and tested on a much smaller scale, with the buy-in of local communities and champions such as the New York Harbor School, to iron out teething problems early on. If feasible, it has the added benefit of self-sustaining biological systems that keep replenishing themselves. The ingenuity of this scheme is the use of a pilot project to challenge the policy and regulatory framework with a radical rethink of the possibilities. Regulatory hurdles are often a significant barrier to innovation, so a small-scale trial is a low-risk investment. If it fails, there is little downside; if it succeeds, it will have circumvented major policy hurdles, paving the way for other new approaches to more ecologically based storm protection.

MIT CAU + ZUS + URBANISTEN’s “New Meadowlands: Productive City + Regional Park” proposal for the New Jersey Meadowlands affords another equally innovative approach to implementation. It’s a striking example of green infrastructure in the form of thick, multifunctional, landscaped berms along the water’s edge that act as a flood barrier but also allow occupation. The proposal features a productive regional park, with berms and wetlands ringing the waterway, that buffers vital property and infrastructure from floods, rebuilds biodiversity, and hosts recreational and social programs as well as a mix of development to take advantage of the new parklands.

The project also proposes a compelling opportunity for a regionally based governance model to help implement the vision. The New Jersey Meadowlands Commission—with existing land use zoning in 14 municipalities—is a case study in intermunicipal collaboration with latent powers that position it well for a coalition-building effort over this regional landscape. With some re-engineering, it could potentially become an ecological and economic development agency. There are many regulatory hurdles embedded in this proposal that a strong governance body such as this one could potentially streamline. The regional scale of many of the proposals means that they cross jurisdictional boundaries, which complicates implementation. By identifying the untapped potential of this existing governance framework, this team has shifted a major roadblock.

The BIG Team’s “BIG U” is a compartmentalized, multipurpose barrier designed to protect vulnerable precincts in lower Manhattan from floods and storm surge. The team focused on the Lower East Side. The project integrates green space and social programs and, in the longer term, proposes much-needed transit. While it aims to redress the lack of recreational open space in the neighborhood, it inadequately addresses systemic shortcomings, such as the shortage and quality of low-income housing in the area, access to services, and the potential gentrification this project could accelerate.

In Nassau County, Long Island, the Interboro Team’s “Living with the Bay” sought to enhance the region’s quality of everyday life in nonemergency times while addressing flood risk. Taken as a whole, the initiatives present a collection of relatively low-risk propositions that can be readily implemented and that sow seeds for a more strategic and resilient future. Over the long term, improvements would include denser housing close to mass transit and a new community land trust.

PennDesign/OLIN’s “Hunts Point Lifelines” proposal for the Bronx focused on social and economic resilience. While the team considered environmental vulnerabilities, its chief concern was the critical role that the Hunts Point Food Market plays in the local community and the regional food chain. The team worked with the community and industrial property owners to develop site-specific designs for integrated storm protection as well as green infrastructure that offers high-quality social space using components that can be manufactured locally and built cooperatively. The project demonstrated the potential of hybrid port protection and ecology throughout the estuary.

OMA’s comprehensive strategy for Hoboken—“Resist, Delay, Store, Discharge”—represents a catalogue of interventions that incorporates extensive green/blue infrastructure as well as a protective barrier for critical transport infrastructure. While it shares many similarities with the Hoboken Sustainable Communities project, its strength is the comprehensive approach achieved through a series of key initiatives that brought Hoboken and Jersey City to the table with more than 40 stakeholders who will be essential to implementation.

Land Lines: What were the most winning aspects of projects that didn’t win?

Helen Lochhead: Open-source frameworks enabled online engagement that informed both the process and the public, so teams could tap into a much broader range of users than just those who traditionally attend community meetings. For example, Sasaki’s “CrowdGauge for Rebuild” first asked users in Asbury Park, New Jersey, to rank a set of priorities. Then it demonstrated how a series of actions and policies might affect those priorities. Finally, it gave users a limited number of coins, asking them to put that money toward the actions they supported most.

Various teams demonstrated a kit-of-parts approach, drawing on economic development initiatives, how-to toolkits, and urban improvement projects in various combinations to achieve resiliency objectives. HR&A Cooper Robertson’s proposal for Red Hook, Brooklyn, is an example of this method. With all the layers in place, a number of these strategies could be scaled up and result in systemic transformation and benefits. Such granular approaches facilitate phased implementation and with funding are immediately actionable, impactful, and scalable.

Sasaki/Rutgers/Arup’s “Resilience + the Beach” shifted the focus inland from the Jersey Shore to higher, drier headlands, by redefining the coastal zone as the six-mile deep ecosystem between the beach and the New Jersey Pine Barrens. By revealing the scenic attributes and recreational potential of the hinterland’s waterways and forests, the strategy encourages development to migrate from the barrier island edge to stable inland areas to grow a more layered tourism economy. The site for this project is Asbury Park, but the approach has broader regional application by capitalizing on the geographical attributes characteristic of the New Jersey coast—the Pine Barrens, inland bays, and barrier islands—to create new attractions. The strategy includes a range of actions including new green/blue infrastructure, open space and development, and a community toolkit to educate landowners on local risk and options for resilience.

Another prototype for regional coastal cities, WB’s “Resilient Bridgeport” consists of a resilience framework and specific design proposals for the Long Island Sound region. A set of integrated coastal, urban, and riparian design strategies and planning principles provide multiple lines of defense to protect Bridgeport against flooding and storm surge while stimulating environmental restoration, economic development, and neighborhood revitalization focused around social housing.

Land Lines: In sum, what have been the key successes of the competition so far?

Helen Lochhead: The urgency of the problem and the fast pace of the competition provided a level of intensity, drive, and momentum that yielded results in a short time frame. Many of the design solutions were characterized by a quantum and richness of ideas, depth of resolution, and cleverness of approach. The focus was not just on recovery and risk reduction, such as flood and storm mitigation, but on long-term resilience and sustainability. All propositions deliver multiple social, economic, and environmental benefits—improvements related to amenities, ecology, education, capacity building, long-term savings, and community health and well-being—and so tend to be higher-performing, holistic solutions.

The impact to date has already been catalytic. If nothing else, RBD has generated momentum and delivered major benefits to the region by starting the conversation on resilience by design. Granted, the real measure of success is in the implementation, but a robust, innovative process is required to provoke cultural change in practice. RBD has set that example.

Land Lines: What will be the key challenges of implementation?

Helen Lochhead: Finding the sweet spot between the visionary and the pragmatic.

The carrot for the winners was the possibility of building these projects with disaster recovery grants from HUD and other sources of public- and private-sector funding. As such, a key part of the final phase was an implementation strategy that demonstrated feasibility, support of local grantees, phasing, and short-term deliverables that can be delivered with CDBG-DR funding as well as ongoing revenue streams for later stages.

The real opportunity for HUD now is to leverage this process and its exemplary projects to benefit other regions at risk on a national scale.