Sea-level rise puts millions of people at risk in coastal cities worldwide. As the climate warms, melting glaciers and the thermal expansion of water are expected to cause the global mean sea level to rise significantly in the next 50 years. Compounded with increasing rainfall and coastal populations there will be greater flooding, polluting, and housing displacement. Sea-level rise has particular relevance to New York City where many residents live directly on the coast or only marginally above the current waterline. Red Hook is one neighborhood that is especially vulnerable to sea-level rise due to the climate crisis within the New York metropolitan area, sitting only ten feet above the shoreline. And it is a community still recovering from Hurricane Sandy in 2012. It shares the community Board district with Carroll Gardens, a more affluent neighborhood. After the initial site visits, we decided to move forward with these two areas for our intervention.

Before creating an intervention of any kind, you have to create trust with the residents. This means having conversations with a variety of community members. The function of the design from the beginning should directly involve the users and uplift their voices not the voice of the designer. Then the process becomes a learning opportunity for everyone and is part of the design itself. The human aspect of designing should not refer to the user as a cog in a system, or as a number in a data set, but as individuals with the voices to inform and co-create the end result.

Our field interviews tapped into the feelings of the residents living in both the neighborhoods. To start the conversation we asked “what do you love about your neighborhood” and “what do you want your neighborhood to look like in 50 years”. We visited community centers, coffee shops, and a laundromat to interview a variety of residents.

We interviewed staff at the Red Hook Initiative and Jalopy Music center, two prominent community hubs in Red Hook and Carroll Gardens. If we were able to continue field research in person (thanks coronavirus), we would hope to build stronger coalitions and broaden the stakeholders. Prototypes could have been made and tested with the residents as well, creating dialogue not just about sea-level rise is but what design for community means.

The Waterline Cart would be in the form of a boat. This boat would be wheeled between Red Hook and Carroll Gardens during the five days leading up to Earth Day. It includes activities that engage the community of Red Hook and Carroll Gardens to be in conversation with one another. It is also used to educate and empower residents and passers-by about the rising sea’s link to the climate crisis, to their community well being now and in the future. We found that a large reason for the feeling of powerlessness and voicelessness is access to education through accessible means. The residents of Red Hook don’t necessarily have the time, or the conscience to protest climate change because the information hasn’t been given to them in an understandable and relatable way. Having the time, the means, and space to go to a protest is also a privilege that many do not have. That's why we decided to bring our intervention to work with the communities, to lower the barrier for protest and to this information. Community members are also rarely asked to participate in community solutions and plans in an accessible democratic way. This leads to neighborhoods feeling separated from one another, and feelings of voicelessness. That’s why our cart also gives users a place to add their ideas and thoughts about what they want their community to be like in the future while giving a face to the issue at hand. This will hopefully empower those interacting with new knowledge, and stitch together the divide between those with different backgrounds around one central issue. The Waterline Cart educates, empowers, and builds dialogues around climate change and sea-level rise through a moveable interactive structure that elevates people’s voices educates and emphasizes the urgency of the issue of sea-level rise.

The cart will be wheeled in between the two communities on the “Waterline” the projected floodplain line fifty years from now. The boat is playful and satirical to the issue, as there should be no “boats on land” yet, the water will rise to the areas in the future. It also offers a unique set of interactions it could have with users, a sail which can be seen from afar, but also a top surface which includes a map of the Red Hook area, and the future floodplain. Users will interact with the cart without our presence, and during “sailing” interactive events during the 50th anniversary of Earth Day.

Our boat will have several simple visual educational tools to help residents understand how sea-level rise affects themselves, the neighborhood, and how behavior affects sea-level rise. These tools will help make the boat more accessible to the public while we are not present and will aid in informative events that we facilitate in person. The deck of the boat will have a map of Red Hook showing where the waterline will be in fifty years. The map will also feature prominent locations in the area and the path of the boat. People will be encouraged to write their names on a sticky note and place them on the map where they live along with their stories and feelings. As names are collected people will get a sense of where people will be affected and who they are.

The boat will have a sail that helps to complete the shape of the boat and invites passersby to interact with the boat. Whether the boat is sitting on the sidewalk unattended or involved in an event, we wanted it to stand out and encourage participation. The sail’s vertical shape will offer a space for the people to visualize how high the water will be. On the sail will be the different heights that the water level could be depending on where you are in the neighborhood. During events, we’ll ask people to write their name on a sticky note and place it on the sail at their height. This will help people position sea-level rise relative to their bodies.

To provide insight into the reasons that oceans are rising we created a carbon dial on the back of the boat to help explain the process of climate change and offer solutions for how individuals can change their behavior to reduce their carbon footprint. People can spin the dial to reveal how much carbon is produced by different behaviors and ways to reduce their impact. But the individual impact is not enough to combat the climate crisis, nor is the main responsibility up to individual people. Government action and accountability are needed to address these systemic issues on a much larger scale.

Understanding and education must go hand in hand with actionable items we wanted to elevate people’s voices and offer simple ways to protest against the destruction of their community. The boat would come with a polaroid camera so we could gather people’s pictures and pens so they could write down their stories. These photos and stories would stay with the cart during its travels giving a face to the problem of sea-level rise. We would also offer postcards with pre-addressed to government officials with a message about the importance of climate change mitigation. The stories and data would also stay with the community. A commemorative collection of all of the items, photographs, and words would be given back to these neighborhoods and to our coalition partners.
Ultimately, sea-level rise is not going away anytime soon, large community-citizen-human actions are needed to fight back against climate change right now and into the future. Governments need to step up and face the challenges intertwined with the climate crisis. Corporations must be held accountable for their actions. Entire power structures need to be addressed and combatted. This is an intersectional and systemic issue that affects all peoples and all walks of life. It is a racial, class, gender, indigenous rights, housing, economic, and health issue to name a few. Unfortunately, those who had little to do with creating the problem in the first place are most vulnerable and throughout history have been left out of the halls of power. By leaving out the voices who will be impacted the most, the future solutions will not be inclusive and serve the population’s needs. Our Waterline Cart is only one piece to a much larger issue that will carry far on into the future. It informs people in a fun, understandable, and interactive way, therefore, lowering the barrier for protest and giving them a voice. This Cart can go beyond the streets of Red Hook, and serve as an example for other activist causes as a way of reaching communities who may not have been sought out or valued before. New York City is one of the most vulnerable municipalities to sea level rise and continues to address this issue. Areas such as Far Rockaway and parts of Long Island will be even more impacted by rising seas, than Red Hook, as entire islands will be submerged with ongoing, worsening floods. The Cart’s map, sail, and interactive activities could be easily modified to those localities creating coalitions in conversation with each other. The more voices uplifted, the more powerful this protest becomes.