By Arnold Robinson, AICP, Associate | Regional Planning Director

As featured here (https://www.ecori.org/climate-change/2020/2/21/community-effort-to-make-barrington-more-climate-resilient), Fuss & O’Neill is supporting the Town of Barrington, RI in its efforts to make the community more resilient to climate change impacts through the creation of a community-based, neighborhood-level collaboration. Barrington, like many New England communities, is seeing increased impacts from climate change, including severe weather events, increased precipitation, and coastal sea level rise. To prepare Barrington and the Bay Spring neighborhood to become more resilient to these impacts, the goals of this project are to:

• Build awareness of the climate change impacts and related threats and opportunities.
• Provide a forum for robust public participation in neighborhood planning for resilience.
• Identify specific projects and actions that can increase neighborhood resilience.
• Provide a completed plan for actions that the Town can use to seek funding and implement projects and actions over the coming months.

Key methods that Fuss & O’Neill are deploying in this rapid project (total duration of six weeks from initiation to deliverables) are: peer-led neighborhood fact-finding tours, interactive public workshops with brainstorming and design, and a robust web-platform for broad involvement (https://bit.ly/resilientbayspring). The methods and tools Fuss & O’Neill has developed are transferrable to many neighborhoods and building complexes across the northeast.

About the Author

Arnold Robinson, AICP

Arnold Robinson, AICP has been practicing in the fields of community planning, historic preservation and rehabilitation, education, and urban design for more than 30 years. His expertise includes work in the public, private, and not-for-profit sectors as project manager, executive director, and designer. His diverse career has included master planning, feasibility analysis, multidisciplinary project collaboration, site design, public process facilitation, regulatory permitting, historic rehabilitation project design, bidding, and construction administration.