Adaptation in a Landscape of Retreat

After a major storm event in December 2010 numerous residential lots along the shoreline transferred to municipal jurisdiction when landowners took initiative to retreat to higher ground. These lots are divided from the escarpment by Route 132, Québec’s longest highway, and a critical access route for a largely rural community. The project established a series of shoreline gardens entitled ‘Les Jardins de Bord de Mer’, transforming the formerly private spaces into connected public parks. The experience led to a series of workshops, funded entirely by grants and donations. It also informed next steps with regard to scientific research, municipal experience, and landscape architecture. The result, ‘How to Grow a Shoreline’ is a publicly accessible document emphasizing stewardship and intergenerational care, shifting away from hard, costly, engineering approaches, and making space for communication, collaboration, and co-design.

COMMUNITY-LED DESIGN

Co-design is a process that occurs over time, unfolding through everyday acts. Installation is catalyzed by a grading plan developed to help attenuate waves and reduce erosion. Next, hundreds of tons of beach pebbles, formerly removed to a quarry to make way for residential development, are rewilded to the lots. The stones are not only repatriated, but positioned in drifts to reinforce erosion control. Thousands of plugs are donated by nearby gardens and nurseries, with an emphasis on salt-tolerant grasses, while woody plants are transplanted from other shoreline thickets. Co-design plays out in the field as community members, high school students and other volunteers decide where and how to place stones, plants and paths. Ongoing upkeep throughout the seasons fortifies community investment for future generations.

HANDBOOK

‘How to Grow a Shoreline’ Handbook is both the guide for and result of the design process. It is free and available online and as a printed resource available at the mayor’s office. There are three intended audiences: 1) First Nations members, and private landowners who live with shoreline erosion as a historical process and an ongoing reality. 2) Summer residents who come to the region for the natural beauty and recreational opportunities that fuel the local economy. 3) Communities along the entire length of the south shore of the St. Lawrence River who share the same concerns and seek ecological responses to shoreline erosion.

DESIGN PRINICIPLES

Design with Disturbance: Embrace inevitably changing conditions and exploit intense storm events to cultivate shifting materials, robust roots and rhizomes, and diverse shore life.

Plants as Partners: Value the behavior of regionally specific woody plants that are adapted to the windy, changeable shore by transplanting and thinning existing thickets of sprouting plants. These persist and even thrive when subjected to tidal action, floods, or windstorms and represent an alternative to short-term, concrete structural components.

Repurpose Material Culture: Use existing or donated material in the design, installation, and long-term care of the project to enhance local economies. Material reuse saves money and reduces the project’s carbon footprint.

‘How to Grow a Shoreline’ bridges climate adaptation and land conservation, establishing an actionable approach to adjust to change. Co-design expands the public realm, encourages engagement with the shoreline at the residential to regional scale, and uses design to bring communities together.

Project Data

Landscape architecture: Practice Landscape
Project location: Quebec, Canada
Year completed: 2022
Photo credits: Practice Landscape, Catherine Auger, “Landscapes of Retreat” by Rosetta S. Elkin, Alexander Reford of Jardins de Métis / Reford Gardens