Document Type

Conference Paper

Publication Date

2025

DOI

10.18260/1-2--56348

Publication Title

2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Pages

15 pp.

Conference Name

2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, June 22-25, 2025, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

Abstract

Many communities are already experiencing the impacts of climate change that disrupt their daily lives. In Coastal Virginia, these impacts take the form of nuisance and stormwater flooding caused by sea level rise and changes in precipitation. Coastal Virginia has one of the highest relative sea level rise rates on the Atlantic Coast and the regional planning district commission recommends that Atlas 14 rainfall intensity, duration, and frequency curves be increased by 20% to account for changes in rainfall. The Coastal Community Design Collaborative (CCDC), a partnership between Hampton University Architecture and Old Dominion University Engineering & Technology, has had multidisciplinary student design teams working in local communities for more than ten years to develop place-based solutions to mitigate nuisance flooding impacts. The CCDC partners with communities and their localities to understand the community’s climate change challenges and preferences for solutions to develop preliminary designs solutions. Preliminary design solutions are focused on natural and nature-based solutions (NNBS), however existing gray infrastructure is also evaluated to determine if modifications are required. The CCDC methodology facilitates learning through hands-on engagement with community members, multi-disciplinary collaboration, and place-based design. The CCDC partners with community civic leagues to enable students to engage with community members, tour the community and develop an understanding of the challenges in the community. Student design solutions are focused on solving community challenges and shared with community members for future implementation. Partnering communities have been awarded over $132 million in funding for project implementations based on the CCDC student designs and an additional $20 million in community implementation grant applications are pending. Old Dominion University received $700,000 in grant funding to collaborate with the Southside Community, located in Coastal Virginia. The CCDC is currently working in that community. The Southside Community required extensive partnership development, which was initiated by faculty, to support project design and execution. The project design and implementation have been divided into two phases to be completed over two academic years. The processes used in community engagement and project design and execution are transferable and provide opportunities for integrating community-based design problems in multi-disciplinary educational collaborations.

Rights

© 2025 American Society for Engineering Education.

ASEE holds the copyright on this document. It may be read by the public free of charge. Authors may archive their work on personal websites or in institutional repositories with the following citation: © 2025 American Society for Engineering Education. Other scholars may excerpt or quote from these materials with the same citation. When excerpting or quoting from Conference Proceedings, authors should, in addition to noting the ASEE copyright, list all the original authors and their institutions and name the host city of the conference.

Original Publication Citation

Considine, C. L., Erten-Unal, M., Ismael, D., Hamel-Serenity, L. A., & Soflaei, F. (2025). Engagement in practice: Partnering with communities to address nuisance flooding challenges [Paper presentation]. 2025 ASEE Annual Conference and Exposition, Montreal, Quebec, Canada. https://peer.asee.org/56348

ORCID

0000-0002-8269-3626 (Considine), 0009-0003-7410-3045 (Ismael)

Download

Share

COinS