Adaptive Land Lab

This collection of Storymaps shares the students' work. 

New flood maps show that much of the City of Ithaca is in the floodplain, at risk of flooding, and must pay for flood insurance. These changes will have significant impacts on the city's physical form, housing affordability, and long-term fiscal health. 

In spring 2023, a collaborative workshop course was offered by the Department of City and Regional Planning and the Department of Landscape Architecture at Cornell University, headed by Drs. Linda Shi and Jamie Vanucchi, respectively, supported the City of Ithaca in considering potential responses. Eighteen students from planning, landscape architecture, and environment and sustainability at the undergraduate and master’s levels took part in the course. We asked, How can we use the flood risk problem to open dialogue around collective responsibility, address the root drivers of flood vulnerability, and imagine new social and ecological relationships? How can responses redress historic inequities in residents’ ability to thrive in Ithaca? How can we work across disciplinary boundaries to create strategies that offer multiple benefits rather than singular solutions to narrow problems?

In partnership with the City of Ithaca, we analyzed past and present contributors to Ithaca’s flood vulnerabilities and developed integrated approaches to addressing them from the neighborhood to the regional scale. The projects imagine integrated solutions across housing conditions, infrastructure, landscape and ecology, policy, financing, zoning, and taxation that broadly expand the envelope of possible responses for the City of Ithaca, its neighborhoods, and Tompkins County. Over the semester, the class spoke with dozens of community leaders, residents, government officials, and businesspeople from across Ithaca and Tompkins County to listen, learn, and gain perspective on the many factors related to flooding and how different communities are affected by flooding and its associated policies. We presented to a packed audience at the Tompkins County Public Library.

Students developed four major proposals:

1. Six Mile Creek would have the highest new floodwalls under the City's proposals. This project imagines how to incorporate them in ways that would be ecologically and socially beneficial to the community.

2. A new master plan for the Meadow Street Corridor and Cayuga Inlet that proposes, in the long-term, moving development away from the channel, building new dense and elevated mixed-use developments atop existing parking lots, and expanding the channel’s floodable areas. This would reduce the area's flood risk should the state Department of Environmental Conservation not dredge the channel.

3. Ithaca faces an affordable housing crisis that will be worsened by flood insurance. This project develops block-level strategies to infill neighborhoods with diverse models of elevated and adapted homes that can be affordable and resilient to lower-income groups.

4. With most of its taxable property lying within the floodplain, Ithaca cannot provide all the region’s needs for housing and water retention within its boundaries. This project shows how communities throughout Tompkins County can contribute to and benefit from responsible regional development and land stewardship.