Over the past year, SCAPE’s team for Resilient By Design’s Bay Area Challenge, Public Sediment, has been working with community leaders, activists, and organizations to help shape the Bay Area’s collective future by tackling local priorities and concerns together. In December, the team was assigned to the Alameda Creek watershed. Since then, they have created Public Sediment for Alameda Creek. Public Sediment for Alameda Creek represents a paradigm shift in how we plan for climate change. Rather than hardening the edge and ignoring the long-term consequences, we must recalibrate our relationship with sediment and water resources and invest today in living systems that will grow over time to adapt to sea level rise. Public Sediment is a methodology for unlocking and remaking broken systems, and we must apply this methodology at other scales– to the necklace of tributaries that feeds the Bay, to the Delta and the larger Rivers of California. Our risks are invisible yet they increase dramatically over time – we must act now to set up functional ecosystems and sustain living bayland infrastructure for the future.
Public Sediment for Alameda Creek moves beyond the tidal edge to span four geographies (uplands, creek, baylands, and bay) and results in three proposals: Unlock Alameda Creek, Rethink the Sediment Shed, and Plan + Pilot for a Future Bay. Read more about these proposals here.
If you are in the Bay Area, be sure to check out the Resilient Bay Summit on Friday afternoon from 1 – 5PM PST at the Rock Wall Wine Company. More info here.