One key component of my proposal is the floating community. The precedents that are relevant to it includes the Blue City Red Hood Floating community design, the KPF’s Lily Pad idea, the Arx pax’s floating apartment design as well as AECOM’s tidal city design. Other components of my proposal are flood control, energy innovation, and transport adaptation. Dutch’s canal system, microgrid, flywheel, and the Washington I90 Floating Freeway helps me develop my idea.
Alviso is a neighborhood at the north end of San Jose. The design area is northwest of Alviso, surrounded by three bodies of water: the San Francisco Bay, Guadalupe River, and Coyote Creek. It is the lowest point in the San Francisco Bay Area at 13 feet below sea level. So, as you can probably imagine, flooding has always been an issue here.
However, the site, which is in danger of flooding, is home to about 2000 people and many billions of dollars of infrastructure and assets including housing, large business parks, major wastewater treatment plants and freeways. According to U.S. Army Corps of Engineers report, in the most extensive flooding of the city’s core in four decades (shown in transparent blue on the map), streets turned into rivers, forcing residents from their homes and driving office workers from high-rise buildings.
The project consists of 3 components: residence renovation, transportation development, and green space renovation
· residences renovation aims to create a floating community which includes several types of floating facilities and living architectures,
· transportation developed incorporates the canal system, floating highway, and the new proposed trails
· The greenspace renovation is about the restoration of wetland and the tidal marsh
The strategies integrate flood protection, public access, and environmental restoration. Together, they will safeguard hundreds of homes, schools, and businesses from flooding, providing residents with more jobs in construction and public infrastructure maintenance and easy access to affordable and clean energy, green space, transportation, and local jobs and also enhance habitat for marine animals. They together address the need for Green New Deal Goals of Jobs, Justice, and Decarbonization.
This proposal is to be implemented over the course of about one hundred years and in three phases. Overall, phase 1 focus on the northwest of the site, which is closer to the Bay Area. One intention of phase 1 is to protect the site from the bay as well as the rising groundwater and to prepare the district for a more dramatic water level increase in phase 2. So, the project expects a dike to prevent the rising saltwater, a wetland function as a retention basin and slow the water flow, and a self-sufficient flexible floating community that is vulnerable to flood with floating gardens and ponds for recreational convenience and with solar panels and an eco-lab for energy supply.
Another intention of phase one is to the money collects from the sale of the luxury single floating houses which could be used for the construction of affordable floating apartments in the later phase. Phase 2 mostly focus on the inland area and is the construction of the more affordable housing, the floating apartment, compared with phase 1. The green area proposed in phase 2 has the potential for more affordable housing in the future if the flood becomes more severe and more traditional housing is destroyed more communities are displaced by the flood. The goal is to construct a mixed-use floating village of homes, offices, and retail. The floating apartment, inspired by Arx Pax, use a technology that would deploy a group of pontoons beneath the buildings to protect the development from floods and earthquakes and consist of the innovation of Lily Pad which provides protected area when flooding
The canal system is built for flood control and transportation. The Dash line indicates the existing Guadalupe River and Coyote Creek which are one of the flood areas of the site. The project proposed to expand the existing creeks, construct some new ones, and connect them with each other to divert the water and prevent the site from future floods. When Coyote Creek comes close to the newly proposed one, the area they sandwiched formed a tidal marsh that functions as a retention basin. For the access to green space, a recreational park is proposed for phase 2 and a linear community park between the blocks is proposed for phase 3 For public access to transportation, we suggest to change a segment of Highway 101 which is at risk of being flood into a floating highway. And construct an elevated road to connect the north and the south of the site