By Melissa Alonso | April 23, 2026

Editor's note: This article is the first in a three-part series covering the Urban Resilience Leadership Symposium, which happened on Tuesday, April 21, 2026.

On Earth Day, conversations about climate often center on awareness. At Georgia Tech, the work is already underway. At the Center for Urban Resilience and Analytics (CURA) Urban Resilience Leadership Symposium, leading researchers and practitioners from across the U.S. and Europe came together to focus on a more difficult question: not whether cities will face climate pressures, but how they will adapt to them—over time, under uncertainty, and at scale. 

For Matthijs Bouw—a Dutch architect and founder of One Architecture and Urbanism whose work spans New York, the Netherlands, and global climate resilience projects—the shift is already underway. “We are not just designing projects—we are organizing processes of adaptation over time.” That idea framed the day. This is no longer about isolated solutions. It’s about building systems that can evolve.

Across the symposium, speakers returned to the same challenge: cities are no longer operating under stable conditions. Sea levels are rising, but not predictably. Storms are intensifying. Infrastructure built for the past is being tested in real time. And in many places, the problem is already here. 

Katherine Anarde, an assistant professor at North Carolina State University whose research focuses on coastal flooding, made that clear in her opening presentation. “Flooding is happening a lot, and way more than tide gauges suggest.” Her work shows that flooding is not driven by a single cause, but by a combination of factors—sea level rise, rainfall, wind, groundwater, and local infrastructure. 

These forces interact differently across short distances, creating highly localized flooding that traditional monitoring systems often miss. That gap between what is measured and what people actually experience is forcing a shift in how risk is understood—and how cities respond.

For Matthijs Bouw, whose firm has worked on major coastal protection projects including Manhattan’s East Side Coastal Resiliency (ESCR) project, the answer is not a single solution, but a layered approach. Different parts of the same city require different strategies. In New York, that has taken shape through a series of distinct interventions—elevated parks that double as flood protection, deployable systems like flip-up barriers, and long-term plans to extend the coastline in lower Manhattan to account for future sea level rise.

Some systems are permanent, others deployable. Some are designed for decades, others for a century or more. In many cases, infrastructure is intentionally designed to evolve—built with the capacity to be raised, expanded, or reconfigured as conditions change. That flexibility is essential in a world where future conditions remain uncertain. At the same time, researchers emphasized that adaptation will not come from one breakthrough idea.

As Anarde put it, “There’s really no silver bullet… it’s more like a silver buckshot.” Resilience, in practice, is incremental. It comes from multiple interventions, layered over time, each addressing a different piece of a complex and evolving problem.

While coastal flooding dominated part of the conversation, Courtney Crosson, an associate professor at the University of Arizona, brought a different but equally urgent perspective: water scarcity. Her work focuses on decentralized water systems and the concept of “net zero urban water”—where cities rely on local, sustainable water sources rather than distant imports.

In the American Southwest, where cities depend heavily on water transported hundreds of miles, that model is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain. 

At the same time, those same cities often receive enough rainfall—at least in total volume—to meet much of their demand. The challenge is not just supply. It’s how systems are designed. Crosson emphasized that cities must move beyond centralized infrastructure toward hybrid systems that combine large-scale networks with localized solutions like rainwater harvesting, reuse, and distributed storage. 

Just as important, she noted, is a shift in mindset from designing for average conditions to designing for extremes. That means planning for variability, not stability and building systems that can adapt as both climate and demand change.

As the host of the symposium, CURA is helping connect these ideas across disciplines and scales. In addition, CURA's research on near-real-time flood monitoring was highlighted by Executive Director Dr. Subhro Guhathakurta during the final session. The center brings together expertise in planning, design, engineering, and data science to address the complex challenges facing cities today. Within the Georgia Tech College of Design, this work reflects a broader effort to move beyond theory - toward applied research that informs real-world decisions.

By convening experts like Bouw, Anarde, and Crosson alongside faculty and students, the symposium creates a space where ideas are not only shared, but tested, challenged, and refined.

What emerged from this year’s symposium is not a single vision for the future of cities, but a shared understanding of the challenge ahead. Cities are already under pressure. The systems that support them are being tested. And the solutions will not come from one project, one discipline, or one moment in time. 

They will come from ongoing adaptation. As Bouw suggested, the work is not about delivering a final answer, but about setting up systems that can continue to respond as conditions change. 

As we celebrate another Earth Day, that work can feel urgent. At CURA, it is also continuous. Because resilience isn’t something that can be built once and left in place. It must be revisited, adjusted, and reimagined—again and again—as cities move into an uncertain future.