The Impact of the Public Process in Rebuild by Design

From June 2013 to April 2014, the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development sponsored an interdisciplinary design competition, Rebuild by Design, to cultivate innovative proposals for Hurricane Sandy recovery and to increase the region’s long-term resilience. Ten teams worked with specific municipalities in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. This thesis examines the competition process, and asks what impacts the stakeholder engagement process had on the design proposals. Using a comparison of the proposals before and after the engagement phase, as well as observation at public events and interviews with team members, I found that the public process shaped the proposals in distinct ways for each of the teams, and at the same time, the competition attracted and sustained the attention of members of the affected communities. The public process did not generally yield new ideas, but refined those already extant in the early-stage proposals. These findings have implications for future public design competitions, participatory planning processes, and disaster recovery efforts.