If all goes well, the biggest winners in a competition to spark ideas for protecting coastal areas in the wake of 2012's Superstorm Sandy may be the cities of the world. The most ambitious of the six winning schemes of the U.S. Dept. of Housing and Urban Development's "Rebuild by Design" competition calls for landscaped storm-surge protection that doubles as parkland along Manhattan's edge in New York City. The scheme's designer envisions the plan as a model for all vulnerable cities.
Called BIG U, it calls for a 10-mile strip of land around the southern- most edges of Manhattan. BIG U camouflages 8- to 10-ft-tall earth berms as landscape, usable mostly as parkland yet doubling as a storm-surge barrier.