The Courts of Sheepshead Bay: Community Recovery

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