Fragmented Floodplains
Charlestown, Boston, Massachusetts
Harvard University Graduate School of Design
Harvard GSD ASLA Student Award Project Nominee (2023)
Advised by Sergio Lopez-Pineiro
Fragmented Floodplains proposes a landscape-led approach to urban climate resilience along the complex infrastructural corridor connecting Cambridge, Somerville and Charlestown. While the surrounding neighbourhoods are characterised by relatively regular urban grids, this transitional belt is defined by overlapping histories of land reclamation, industrial development and transport infrastructure. Faced with increasing risks of sea level rise, coastal inundation and stormwater flooding, the project challenges the notion that a singular infrastructural solution can address the diverse vulnerabilities of this fragmented urban landscape.
The project examines the city as an evolving palimpsest, superimposing historic waterways, former harbour boundaries and reclaimed land with contemporary road networks, industrial plots and projected flood extents. These overlapping geometries reveal a series of distinct urban fragments, each characterised by different scales, materials and hydrological conditions. Rather than treating the developing flood corridor as a continuous territory, the proposal uses these fragments to generate individual landscape operations that collectively interrupt and redistribute the future floodplain.
Along the coastal edge, historic land reclamation geometries are reinterpreted through a series of elongated spits that attenuate wave action, accommodate rising sea levels and establish new coastal wetland habitats. Further inland, the historic boundary of Mill Pond informs a network of excavated channels that cut through impermeable industrial surfaces, exposing soil for remediation and stormwater absorption. Excavated material is redistributed to construct protective berms, elevated walkways and raised surfaces, integrating flood management with the existing industrial fabric.
Through these interventions, the project develops a diversity of landscape characters that respond to their particular historical, material and climatic conditions. Coastal wetlands, planted channels and remediated industrial grounds evolve over time, transforming the fragmented city into a network of interconnected ecological and infrastructural systems.
Fragmented Floodplains proposes that urban resilience emerges not through uniformity, but through the plurality of local responses. By allowing the geometries of the past, present and future to inform distinct landscape operations, the project transforms a potentially continuous and devastating floodplain into a more diverse, adaptable and resilient urban fabric.