Climate Resilient Infrastructure Design Studio

For our design studio in Climate Resilient Infrastructure, our team developed a watershed-scale 2050 plan for Nosara, Costa Rica — a coastal town facing intensifying wet-season floods, dry-season water stress, and rapid unplanned growth along a fragile estuarine system. The brief asked us to design infrastructure interventions that hold up not just at delivery but across the decades over which climate impacts will compound.

The plan integrates four layers across the watershed: green stormwater infrastructure to slow and infiltrate flood flows, flood mitigation work focused on the river corridors that already overtop during major storms, an electrified mobility network to reduce car dependence and the heat- and runoff-intensifying effects of expanded roadways, and a growth-management framework that channels future development toward higher ground while protecting affordable housing for the existing community.

This was a design-heavy deliverable — most of the work lives in maps, sections, and phasing diagrams rather than in narrative text. The studio reinforced for me that climate-resilient infrastructure rarely fails on the technical side; it fails on the integration between physical systems, governance, and equity, and on whether the politically survivable next decade actually leads to the right end state in 2050.