Adjunct Professor Kimberly E. Diamond co-wrote an article for NAIOP about leveraging private-public partnerships and new innovation to increase resilience and sustainability when it comes to water access and infrastructure.
Flooding is a critical problem for property owners and developers in coastal areas. The search for solutions has opened the door to innovative approaches involving architects, city planners and investors.
Advanced adaptive architecture and design principles are creating buildings that use — and even benefit from — water flow in coastal cities. These promising technologies have the potential to generate opportunities for public and private investment.
…Many types of water- and eco-friendly architectural designs already exist. For example, fog catcher nets that collect fresh water from the air for irrigation and drinking are used in one of the driest place in the world, the Atacama Desert in northern Chile. Similar innovations could be a boon for coastal smart cities by making fresh water available from more sources.
…American architects have also conceptualized forward-looking inventions. One idea involves water-inflatable barriers that rise when higher tides endanger coastal cities. These can be deployed quickly, and they don’t require the labor needed to build a levee or fill sandbags. Another innovation is buildings with water systems that fill aquariums throughout multiple floors. The fish in the tanks can be used either as a food source or as décor, with the fish-fertilized water being pumped to the top of the building to nourish plants growing in a rooftop garden.