The Four Coasts Project

The US Army Corps of Engineers is responsible for the bulk of the nation’s water resources infrastructure. USACE’s Engineering With Nature program works to align that infrastructure with natural processes and support a broader range of benefits to the nation’s economy, local communities, and ecosystems. Four Coasts is a three-year effort by landscape architects and engineers working with EWN Proving Ground districts to identify and advance nature-based coastal infrastructure projects. This has produced a proposal-based planning framework—now publicly available as a set of four reports—that serves as guidance for USACE districts and as an example of how landscape architecture can productively contribute to large-scale coastal management.

Driven by sea level rise, habitat loss, generations of environmental injustice, post-industrial decline, and the continued growth of urban centers near the coasts, there is a growing need for new types of coastal infrastructure that work more effectively with natural forms and processes. Important pilot projects and innovations have occurred in recent decades, some even led by landscape architecture practices, but the need still greatly outweighs what has been produced so far. Due to the statutory role and widespread influence of the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE)in coastal infrastructure design, engaging with USACE at the district-level in a systematic way can be a highly influential way for landscape architecture to shape coastal infrastructure design in the United States.

Four Coasts has been a three-year effort to pair landscape architecture and engineering through the USACE Engineering With Nature (EWN)program, and develop coastal infrastructure projects that deliver better outcomes for risk reduction, human use, and ecological health over time. Working with one EWN “Proving Ground” District as a partner on each coast of the lower 48 states—Gulf, Atlantic, Pacific, and Great Lakes—we identified project collections that offered the opportunity to significantly advance natural infrastructure design.

In identifying projects, we aimed for breadth of scale, design goals, issues being addressed, future stressors, and local stakeholders involved. We included both projects already underway within the districts and new opportunities for the districts to expand their use of nature-based methods.As a diverse collection of examples with transferable qualities, the projects formed a framework intended to inform decision-making within USACE and beyond. This complexity required a great deal of coordination and communication, but was essential to the systematic impact that is the goal of Four Coasts. The intent is to represent and address a wide swath of needs, values, histories, and scales, and begin to test the limits of natural infrastructure. Within the projects selected for each district, we identified a focus project to develop in more depth, and those are the projects featured in this submission. They were chosen for the reasons listed above, but also because of their potential for implementation within the district and widespread adoption elsewhere.

Our three-year planning study resulted in four reports that detail innovative infrastructure proposals in each coastal district, as well as a handbook to be used by coastal design practitioners, policy and planning professionals, and decision-makers from local to national levels. The products are publicly available and are being used by the partner districts to develop and implement natural infrastructure projects in the communities they serve. Materials from this effort are also used to communicate issues and potential responses to congressional members and their staffers who manage the federal budget allocations for coastal projects. As a multi-pronged planning effort, Four Coasts developed a project set that sought to mitigate coast-wide concerns through a focus on specific places that are representative of general issues. Four Coasts also serves as a strong example of how landscape design thinking can be incorporated into federal planning efforts in an impactful way.