Design for Storm Surge Flooding Adaptation: Facilitating Emergency Evacuation with Adaptive Landscape Form-Based Codes

Abstract

Lack of consensus and funding led to a focus on building retrofits after storm surge flooding and collective inaction for undertaking cross-jurisdictional adaptation pathways planning. Using Seabrook, TX, United States, as a test case, this paper demonstrates the feasibility of using design games (participatory community visioning and design processes) to develop consensus-based, performance-driven, form-based codes from an adaptive landscape framework to facilitate emergency evacuation during storm surge flooding. The framework provides bottom-up mechanisms to enhance the sizes, coverages, quantities, and connectivity of multi-scalar engineered structural and nature-based solutions as a complex adaptive system to increase evacuation time and decrease flood-prone population.