Queen’s Necklace
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city sinking,
rats go down with the ship.
come spring bodies will float up
in neighborhoods FEMA will skip.
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Only 54% of the $ 14 Billion allocated for rebuilding after Hurricane Sandy has been spent. Many homes remain destroyed, people remain uncompensated. And while bureaucracy slows down the rebuilding the expiry date on some of the money draws close, the HUD funding for sandy rebuilds will expire in 2023. No surprises who is going to get left behind when the clock runs out: poor neighborhoods in the outer boroughs.
All of the resiliency plans seem to focus on Lower Manhattan. Indeed, it represents a significant amount of train lines (75%), it is extremely dense both with residents and workplaces. However, the real reason Lower Manhattan is the site of the only large scale infrastructure plan is the valuable real estate. The total value of all properties on New York’s 100 year floodplain (not just Manhattan) is a staggering 101 Billion Dollars. Certainly, Brooklyn and Queens now boast of very expensive waterfront real estate- but Lower Manhattan includes neighborhoods like Tribeca and the financial district which have some of the highest real estate values in the world. The plan to create a sea wall around Lower Manhattan, The Queen’s Necklace, is fueled by real estate interests, and whether or not a high sea wall exacerbates flooding in neighboring boroughs or Jersey City is simply an after thought.
So now, while the subway floods contractors, city officials, and private developers point fingers at each other while nothing changes. People are at the mercy of apathetic power systems.
“Code”
Admittedly, I was unable to achieve what I set out to accomplish. My initial intention was to simulate the action of a flood wall. But that led me down a rabbit hole of how to simulate water itself in Unity. This process led to looking at assets other people created and thinking about how to manipulate them in a way that may become useful for my group later. The closest I got was using an asset that simulates hydraulic erosion in a terrain. It only works to get better visuals for a terrain but perhaps there is a way to look at how the creator coded the water simulation. I assume it is very complicated.
