Designed Managed Retreat: Coastal Communities in the Green Transition 

For this project POoR worked with the Royal College of Art to develop a new toolkit to help local communities deal with net zero design challenges arising from a managed retreat from coastal areas affected by long-term climate change impacts and sea-level rise. As part of the project POoR delivered a workshop with local people from Hull asking them to share their experiences with flooding in their area.

By 2050, the current protection of around a third of England’s shoreline is expected to be financially unviable or unsustainable due to climate change accelerating sea-level rise and coastal erosion. 

This project engages with the question of loss and damage from a social and cultural perspective related to the protection, relocation and preservation of spaces of social and historical significance. Specifically, it deals with the question of how forced transformational change creates not just a loss but also new opportunities for design to preserve, rethink and create new tangible community assets. 

Client: Design Museum 
Location: Hull
Status: Complete 
Sector: Programme
Procurement: Public
Team: Royal College of Art, Benjamin Mehigan, Adrian Lahoud, Sam Jacobs