LunchUP: Manuela Powidayko Alberici Souza, "Building a Resilient New York City: Zoning for Flood Resilience"

LunchUP: Manuela Powidayko Alberici Souza, “Building a Resilient New York City: Zoning for Flood Resilience”

Manuela Powidayko Alberici Souza
Urban Designer – NYC Department of City Planning

Manuela Powidayko Alberici Souza is an Urban Designer at the New York City Department of City Planning (DCP).  Powidayko leads the department’s effort to encourage the adoption of building-scale resiliency measures amongst home and building owners within the City’s floodplain.

Over the past three years, Powidayko and her team have facilitated a series of collaborative public workshops, designed to empower residents to understand the process required to retrofit or build to resilient standards. In partnership with local organizations and other agencies, the team has met with over 2,500 New Yorkers at more than 110 public meetings, collecting feedback on zoning approaches to enable resilient buildings while maintaining design strategies that complement neighborhood character. Powidayko is incorporating this feedback into the City’s Flood Resilience Zoning Text Amendment.

In her lecture, Manuela will highlight the interdisciplinary nature of the “Flood Text” initiative, and how she draws upon her training as a planner, designer, and architect in her work at DCP.

We welcome and encourage students across Taubman College to attend this exciting interdisciplinary lecture.

These sessions are a response to requests from faculty and students to learn more about what’s going on in the field in an informal environment. We hope this can inspire emergent thoughts and connections that will inform our scholarship. 

Lunch is included, please bring a drink.