Meadowland Matters

The New Jersey Meadowlands have been drained, diked, filled, landfilled, built over, and — in parts — let go back to marsh. Whatever they are now, they are not a baseline. That is what makes them interesting ground on which to ask about sea level rise: there is no pristine condition to restore, only a heavily worked landscape deciding what it becomes next as the water comes up.

This project proposes adaptation that works with the marsh's own means of keeping up with the sea — accretion, migration inland, the tolerance of Phragmites and Spartina for conditions that kill other things — rather than against them with a wall.

A conceptual student project, kept here because the question it was asking has not aged.