RESILIENCE: THE CRUX OF THE MATTER
When I left the Department of City Planning, I went a few hundred yards across the Hudson River to form CRUX: a research and education center at the Stevens Institute of Technology dedicated to the proposition that coastal cities can increase their resilience to extreme weather while simultaneously improving their quality of life. CRUX stands for “Coastal Resilience and Urban eXcellence” and was founded in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy to bring together three necessary technical disciplines in one center:
· Hydrodynamics — understanding the force of water
· Urban Design — understanding the force of the city
· Complex Systems — modeling cities to understand the way people use them
CRUX provides the vision, and works with leaders in their disciplines like Professor Alan Blumberg, the Director of the Davidson Laboratory and Professor Bill Rouse, Director of the Center for Complex Systems and Enterprises.
By bringing together the tremendous harbor waters forecasting expertise of the Davidson Lab with the dynamic data analytics and computer modeling skills of the Center for Complex Systems and Enterprises, CRUX takes on real world problems in critical infrastructure and urban systems around New York harbor. A current project involves modeling Hoboken — the buildings and the streets, the parks and the shoreline as well as the complete sewer system, using techniques like back-pack LIDAR and a new autonomous Sewerbot that students are prototyping. We’ll hit the digital model with digital rain and tides and be able to predict flooding at a very high degree of resolution.
We take resilience personally at CRUX. My own house was flooded during Sandy and CRUX is building out a facility in a Hoboken warehouse that also flooded during Sandy. CRUX is tackling the storm surge problem head on, designing the facility to be resilient, so that it can survive and be up and running within 72 hours of the next flood.
Alexandros Washburn is the Founding Director of the Center for Coastal Resilience and Urban Xcellence (CRUX) at Stevens Institute of Technology. Previously, Alex worked as Chief Urban Designer at the NYC Department of City Planning.
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