A Seat at the Table
Lynn, MassachusettsHarvard University Graduate School of Design
In Collaboration with: Cory Page + Makio Yamamoto
Advised by Daniel D’Oca
In front of you, we set the stage to create a plan to connect Boston St. (Lynn Massachusetts) with the existing hydrological network of the Saugus River in three parts. Currently plagued by inland flooding, our proposal seeks to activate the existing Strawberry Brook watershed plan through a porous bioswale network which crosses commercial, public, and residential lines.
We decided to focus on this area of Lynn as it is already cited as an intense area of inland flooding in the Lynn Hazard Mitigation Plan. On the ground, this was corroborated by community engagement at Market Basket, where residents pointed to losing an essential service when streets are shut down due to flooding from rain events. With both increased threat of flooding from climate change, the area near the coast has more impervious surface. This impervious pavement contributes to increased runoff and inland flooding. Furthermore, the Boston St. corridor is not included in the FEMA flood insurance designated zone, this is creating an increasingly vulnerable local population.
By sitting at this table, you are engaging as a stakeholder in the Market Basket, a churchgoer to the continually-flooded Lynn Sacred Heart Church, or a homeowner along Beaver Brook. We come together, enriched by our local identities, to mark up a better, and more porous, future for the Boston St. corridor in Lynn.
Instead of the typical schedule of community engagement after the vision of the plan has been set, we wanted to see how to bring together top-down planning with grassroots initiatives in this nearfuture condition.
Sat at the table, we imagine a near-future scenario whereby the exhausted residents of the Boston St. corridor take things into their own hands. Becoming insurgent planners in themselves, they build a community meeting table from the artefacts of their continually flooded neighbourhood. With the table built and set, the residents invite city planners to propose new flooding-mitigation plans laid atop the existing printed tablecloth plan.
The table is structured from milkcrates salvaged from Market Basket, carried away in floods whilst waiting to be collected. Planners are invited to sit on retrofitted traffic cones which were used to indicate flooding corridors along closed streets. Refashioned as benches, empty water jugs are collection from homes, purchased in preparation for the ever-increasing Nor’easter storms. Tarp is taken from patched-up flood-damaged ceilings to re-upholster old chairs for the meeting’s guests.
The table is a symbol of the community’s ingenuity and desperation to find a solution – the scene is set.