Author(s): Dalia Munenzon
As climate risks intensify, Houston’s bayous reveal the contradictions of urban development: drainage networks coexist with petrochemical corridors, residential expansion intensifies flood vulnerability, and ecological systems are constrained by fragmented governance. These conditions require new frameworks that integrate design with systems, infrastructure, and community resilience, using methods such as cumulative cartography, scenario-based design probes, and community-grounded GIS analysis. The Gulf Futures Design Studio, supported by the National Academies’ Gulf Research Program, situates design research within the contested terrain of the Lower Galveston Bay watershed. Over the past two years, the studio has examined territorial resilience and industrial remediation, traced the flows of water, energy, and health across neighborhoods and industrial corridors, and is now advancing typologies of adaptation that integrate design, policy, and governance. Methods combine cartography, environmental analysis, and speculative design with narrative construction. Student work serves as design probes: watershed transects, public-facing GIS layers, and phased master plans that translate contamination, flood risk, and governance fragmentation into spatial propositions for wetland repair, public health infrastructure, brownfield remediation, and adaptive mobility. By organizing research across multiple cohorts, the program builds cumulative knowledge that connects architecture, engineering, and public health with advocacy partners. It argues that design’s role in climate adaptation is to coordinate relationships between land and water, infrastructure and governance, and communities and ecosystems, turning uncertainty into shared visions of resilience and justice.
Volume Editors
Reed Kroloff & Francisco J. RodrÃguez-Suárez
ISBN
978-1-944214-52-4