The Courts of Sheepshead Bay: Community Recovery

By Deborah Gans

Spring 2013

Arch 565, Interdepartmental Seminar

Undergraduate Architecture/GCPE

Post-Disaster Community Support and Visioning for a Resilient Future

Working with Pratt Center, we engaged a severely damaged neighborhood in Sheepshead Bay offering first short-term recovery support and then engaging in a visioning process that extended for two years and ultimately produced, 6 years later, the reconstruction of several blocks with new resilient infrastructure and houses. Both architecture and planning students from the seminar continued to work on the project- one for its entire duration- as part of Gans & Company. The project required working across disciplines of planning, environmental management urban design and architecture. It required the coordination among the Department of Environmental Protection, the Department of transportation , the Housing Recovery Office and even City Planning to implement this prototype for community resilience t the scale of a city block.

Client Partner: Pratt Center and MAHNY Sheepshead Bay Courts Resident Representatives

Professor: Professor Deborah Gans

Students: Rosamund Palmer, Sean Gold