Review
Landscape Architecture for Sea Level Rise:
Innovative Global Solutions
REVIEW BY: SAMANTHA SOLANO
June 13, 2025
Sea-level rise, flooding, and the suite of cascading system failures associated with the climate crisis require transformative measures in contemporary landscape architecture theory and practice. Weather-related catastrophes across the globe prove that the built environment is ill-equipped to accommodate the residual demands of increased wetness and saturation. Every extreme storm event reinforces the uncomfortable reality that current yet outdated control infrastructures are failing, and alternative measures of protection are urgently required. Designers engaged in the built environment must consider innovative infrastructures capable of withstanding climate projections into the twenty-second century. These conditions have fundamentally altered how designers must visualize, measure, draw, and interface with landscape; the uncertainty of it all is undoubtedly overwhelming.
Landscape Architecture for Sea-Level Rise: Innovative Global Solutions, by Galen Newman and Zixu Qiao, first addresses how the discipline of landscape architecture is presently responding to the unprecedented futures ahead and then provides a toolkit of infrastructure strategies for designers to reference. Newman is a professor and department head in the Department of Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning at Texas A&M University, where he leads research in community resilience, landscape performance, and advanced visualization. Zixu Qiao is a professional landscape architect and visualization scholar engaged with research and design concerning resilience and the improvement of cities. Their combined expertise speaks to their unique and explorative approach, presenting their case for enhanced and hybridized flood control measures through a refreshing mix of visual data diagrams, research, case studies, and analytical drawings.
In the introductory chapters, Newman, Qiao, and contributor Rui Zhu provide an overview of the current scientific data on sea-level rise and flooding, while contextualizing adaptive responses for the design and planning professions. They state the need for increased integration with hazard exposures that extend beyond the physical effects of floods, such as design considerations accounting for economic and social vulnerability. Furthermore, they introduce readers to various flood mechanisms discussed throughout the remainder of the book and address the geographic contexts contributing to this global narrative.
The book’s second part presents eighteen global case studies of design and planning projects from a range of contributors who interface with these topics in both practice and academia. The projects represent multiple scales: ten are located along the United States coastlines and eight are dispersed across Australia, Japan, New Zealand, China, the Netherlands, Korea, and Thailand. Newman and Qiao organize the case studies into five sections based on the project’s main infrastructural design framework: structural heavy design or grey infrastructure, nonstructural heavy design or green infrastructure, hybrid heavy design—a combination of the previous two—and the final two categories of balanced design and scenario-based design where the frameworks utilized are less discernible in having a definitive design strategy. To elucidate the suite of design solutions discussed, each case study provides an informative table of the flood control mechanisms or programmatic elements used and whether they are classified as having a structural, nonstructural, or hybrid strategy. This feature helps to describe the applicability of specific design solutions and could be used as a comparative tool across project types and locales. In the structural heavy design section, Traci Birch and Haley Blakeman—scholars from Louisiana State University—present the Bucktown Harbor Vision Plan located in New Orleans, Louisiana. The proposal utilizes the “multiple lines of defense” (MLOD) strategy consisting of structured, nonstructured, and hybrid design mechanisms to reduce storm surge and stabilize shorelines. To add to the existing but vulnerable levee protections of the region, the project relies on additional structural components such as levees, floodgates, and pump stations while adding key green infrastructure components such as constructed wetlands, edging, and segmented breakwaters. Amy Whitesides, landscape architect and former director of resilience and research at STOSS Landscape Urbanism, contributes to the nonstructural heavy design section with a design proposal for Moakley Park in Boston, Massachusetts. The design incorporates nature-based technologies with the construction of coastal dunes, stormwater meadows, bioswales, and pervious materials while simultaneously employing structural components such as flood walls, subgrade stormwater tanks, and tree trenches to accommodate sea-level rise and storm surge. Whitesides suggests that Moakley Park is a great example of a multiscalar planning and design strategy that extends beyond the bounds of a singular site and contributes to a larger resilience protocol for the region’s vulnerable coastlines. A similar message is evident in the majority of the case study projects presented in this book.
While the case study section offers a notable review of infrastructure strategies, informative visuals, and contextual conditions, there is also a considerable gap in the breadth of work necessary to represent a global perspective. A map of case study locations depicts this disparity (4), leaving out critical design perspectives and conditions from vulnerable cities and populations such as those in Chennai and Kochi in India, Lagos and Accra on the Gulf of Guinea, and the Sao Paulo metropolitan region of Brazil, to name a few. Another limitation of the portfolio of case studies is that they are proposals either in the process of being built, for academic exploration, or studies for planning purposes. The projects have yet to be tested for their efficacy in providing the desired level of protection required to combat sea-level rise and flooding. This is not unique to the book and comes with the territory of designing for future scenarios, but is nonetheless important to consider as the book will be used as a reference for future designs.
The third and final part of the book is a visual delight of the flood mechanisms discussed throughout the case studies section, where they are expanded, detailed, analyzed, and organized into an index of ninety unique axonometric drawings. The index spans from the structural to the nonstructural, from small to large-scale applicability, while each axon provides a summary of its technology, best-suited location, ability to address hazards, and relative cost. This toolkit provides a valuable resource for design exploration and presents further opportunities for combinations. Newman and Qiao have visualized flood control mechanisms in a digestible format for all audiences. Newman and contributor Dongying Li wrap up the book by leaving readers with a new framework for identifying and treating landscapes under threat. They align their critique with the limitations of the traditional reliance on FEMA flood designations for vulnerable landscapes, noting that these vectors are static and do not consider future sea-level rise and flooding projections. Instead, they introduce the classification of “urban periculum” (301) to demarcate grounds susceptible to numerous saturation threats. Upon looking at the map of these landscapes (302), the territories of urgent intervention extend inland, beyond a coastal focus: a timely interrogation as parts of the United States recently witnessed unexpected extreme flooding from Hurricane Helene.
Landscape Architecture for Sea-Level Rise offers an impactful, timely, informative guide, capable of engaging both academic and professional design audiences. Readers interested in landscape architecture, planning, architecture, and allied disciplines will find both the writing and the projects ripe for integration into their work; I have used this volume in the academic studio environment, where it has served to launch student innovation and thought. However, it is important to understand that designers are dependent on external inputs from the latest climate science, ecology, and engineering discourse. The data is complex, multifaceted, continuously evolving, and rarely in consensus across fields and politics. Designers must recognize that any proposed solution comes with a series of unknowns, and there is no way to confidently claim that the resolution is safe and free from failure. But at a time when all projects, no matter the scale or location, must account for the precarious futures ahead, this book provides an important resource for, at the very least, negotiating a design response to the present moment of uncertainty and pessimism.
Samantha Solano is a professional landscape architect and assistant professor of landscape architecture at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst where she teaches courses in advanced representation and design. Her research and design methodologies are centered on using critical mapping to reveal unrepresented narratives hidden throughout landscape architecture theory and practice.