Deerfield Valley Rise – Resilience in Shifting Environments
Planning for flooding on a town-by-town basis is a challenge, especially since waterways do not stop at town boundaries. The WRC, building on a 4-town housing and flood adaptation project from 2024 in the northwest corner of the region, continued its experiment with bringing in faculty and students with the UMass-Amherst Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning (LARP) program, and volunteers through the Architects Foundation Communities by Design (CBD) program, to work with towns in the Deerfield Valley to explore flood adaptation options. The goal was to work with towns individually and as a group to explore how they might evolve up and away from flood hazards.
The result is the Deerfield River Valley RISE (Resilience in Shifting Environments) project. A graduate scenario planning studio in the LARP program engaged with the planning commissions, selectboard members, and the public in Dover, Readsboro, Whitingham and Wilmington to produce policy recommendations, a community floodproofing toolkit, a municipal and regional capacity toolkit, a resilient funding guide, and a very innovative flood adaptation board game that walks the players through different scenarios, decisions, and trade-offs. The CBD produced a report called Evolving Together: Dover, Readsboro, Whitingham, and Wilmington which explores policy and design options through a rapid charrette process. While these resources were developed using these four Deerfield Valley towns as a focus, the recommendations are applicable throughout the region and beyond.