Flood Back Love: Engaging Grief, Hope, and Memory in Post-Disaster Recovery Co-Designing

This thesis aims to redesign the process by which architecture professionals approach the co-designing process in the context of a Post-Disaster Recovery. Contemporary research on the subject suggests there is “a need to work with a dynamic understanding of community formation that is particularly relevant when people experience unforeseen challenges and traumatic experiences” (Marsh et. al). This project aims to do exactly that by understanding that individual communities have a unique and complex set of relationships, memories, grief, hope, history, and shared values. To navigate this dynamic and specific set of conditions, we cannot rely on a standardized form of engagement, but we must shift to a set of practices that truly combine the expertise, morals, and ethics of both the designer and grassroots community groups. This pairing of decision making, with both parties having equal weight, makes for a true co-designing process. It is not within the outcome that this project makes its point, but rather in the methodology and the mode of engagement which is something that can be reproduced in complex and amplified conditions.

This project engages the River Arts District Artists (RADA) in Asheville, NC, to explore the intersection of art and resilience after Hurricane Helene’s flooding. Through a community design charrette and ongoing engagement, eight proposals were developed—four for city-level advocacy and four for potential construction to mark the one-year anniversary of the flood.