Brian Smith curated the Envision Resilience exhibit currently at the Portland Public Library on Wednesday. Students from various colleges, including the University of Maine Augusta, were asked to develop ideas on how Portland in the future might adapt to climate change and sea level rise. Gregory Rec/Portland Press Herald

Floating communities, breakwaters and parks. New water taxi services, replanted eelgrass beds and sauna-based tourism. Reclaimed tank farms turned into ponds, marshes or parks. Covering shoreline bluffs with native plants that draw pollinators and prevent erosion.

These are some of the imaginative ideas that architecture, engineering, environmental studies and urban planning students from schools like Harvard, Yale and Cornell developed as part of a design studio to help Portland and South Portland prepare for climate change.

“The student proposals range from the very practical to the very innovative, from ideas that could be put into effect tomorrow to concepts that really shoot for the stars,” said local sculptor Brian Smith, who helped curate the traveling public exhibition of student designs. “It gives me a lot of hope.”

As someone whose own work focuses on the warmer, wetter climate of the future, Smith understands the need to balance the catastrophic results of unchecked climate change with the inspiration drawn from student proposals to mitigate and adapt to rising sea levels and hotter temperatures.

“I don’t want to downplay the doom and gloom because I know that’s a very real possibility,” Smith said. “But the student proposals are exciting and creative. They’re thoughtful, well researched and based on what is important to local residents. It makes a future that could be pretty dark look brighter.”

Student designs are on display in the community gallery at the Portland Public Library through March 15. The work will move to the South Portland Public Library on March 21 and, along with additional art work, to the SPACE Gallery in Portland on April 4.

The Envision Resilience Challenge has deployed 22 teams of 346 undergraduate and graduate students from 13 universities to spend semesters tackling climate-related challenges in Narragansett Bay, Rhode Island; and Nantucket, New Bedford and Fairhaven, Massachusetts.

Last fall, eight universities — Buffalo, Cornell, Harvard, Maine at Augusta, Michigan, Toronto, Virginia and Yale — sent 100 architecture, engineering, environmental studies and urban planning students to the Casco Bay region to meet with community leaders to discuss their climate-related challenges.

In Portland, the teams studied how to help the city to grow sustainably, protect its aged working waterfront from rising seas and storms, reimagine the B+M baked bean site, renovate its aging housing stock and overhaul its parks.

A floating maritime center and co-op, an education center and seafood co-op sited in the waters off Portland, envisioned by University of Maine Augusta student Nolan Cartwright. Rendering courtesy of Nolan Cartwright, University of Maine Augusta, Professor Patrick Hansford

In South Portland, the teams considered adaptive designs for the waterfront, possible reuse of former industrial sites, protections for a petroleum infrastructure threatened by the rising sea and neighborhood studies in areas like Mill Creek.

“This isn’t meant to be prescriptive,” said Claire Martin, executive director of Envision Resilience. “Our students aren’t coming in to tell you what to do or provide shovel-ready projects. Our student designs are meant to be a catalyst to imagining different futures.”

Ideas ranged from Cornell University’s proposal to replant eelgrass meadows lost off of Portland’s East End Beach to protect the shoreline and feed and shelter marine life to University of Buffalo’s proposal to integrate a poolhouse, sauna and cold-plunge pools into the East End shoreline.

“Wellness on the Water explores the East End shoreline as a space of dynamic transformation, where fragmented and disconnected uses — from kayak companies to island trash barges — are reimagined into an integrated center for holistic health,” wrote UBuffalo students Ana Ines Pereira and Ian Simmons.

EMBRACING THE CHANGE

Brennan Loewen and Suzie Felix from University of Maine Augusta proposed building a floating community off House Island and Fort Scammel in Casco Bay. It would include short-term rentals, a roof terrace and a restaurant to demonstrate this floating technology to the masses.

A bicycle path running over the water from Fort Preble to Bug Light Park in South Portland, envisioned by University of Michigan students Alexa Garnet, Ren Hoff-Miyazaki, Myles Makrkey and Kammer Offenhauser. Rendering courtesy of students and Professors Lisa DuRussel and Mark Lindquist

“The main focus of designing the floating island is that it displays the floating technology to influence future projects in the waterfront location,” the team wrote. “Rental units prove that small projects on the water are affordable, and the restaurant proves that large businesses can also use that technology.”

Similar projects include a SeaSteading Institute residential project in Miami that would float on small pontoons, a Norway restaurant that floats because it was built in a stainless-steel egg that is waterproof, and an office in the Netherlands that sits atop three concrete pontoons.

Allyson Gibson, a University of Virginia architecture graduate student, proposes using a German gardening technique to create a new raised shoreline park along Portland’s Back Cove. Covered with native plants, the newly created bluffs would capture stormwater runoff and buffer storm surge.

The city would install the plantings, but residents would maintain them and add their own unique touches to the swales in front of their own homes. “Plant hero” cards would be used to encourage complementary native plantings throughout the neighborhood.

A floating community envisioned by University of Maine Augusta students Brennan Loewen and Suzie Felix, which would be located off House Island in Casco Bay would include short-term rental units, an education center and a restaurant. Rendering courtesy of Brennan Loewen and Suzi Felix, University of Maine Augusta, Professor Patrick Hansford

By 2100, Casco Bay will have risen between 4 and 9 feet, depending on greenhouse gas emissions, according to a state scientific assessment. That will reshape not just the coast, but inland, where flooding also occurs. The University of Michigan team proposed a radical notion: “rather than fight it, what if we softened and welcomed it?”

The team suggested terraced water parks, repurposed fuel tanks and raised residential living. An overwater bike and pedestrian bridge, the Blueway, would connect Southern Maine Community College with Bug Light. Plantings at the base of the bridge pillars would help break storm waves.

They propose using floating breakwaters that rise and fall with the water line to dissipate waves and protect housing, habitat and beaches. Some would be moored, with plantings on top and seaweed below, and linked by walkways. Others could be deployed to protect infrastructure during storms.