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Coastal Community Resilience Studio

The Coastal Community Resilience Studio is a collaborative effort between researchers, faculty, and students from across the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. The School of Architecture and Design (SOAD); School of Geosciences; Department of Sociology; Anthropology, & Child and Family Studies; the Institute for Coastal Ecology and Engineering; and the Regional Application Center all contribute to the productivity of the group. The Resilience Studio addresses the complexities of restoration and preservation along the Louisiana coast. Since the summer of 2012, the program has been creating a new framework that is transdisciplinary and systems-oriented to link disturbances, land use transformations, and climate change to natural processes and human system adaptation, with special emphasis on the Chenier Plain in southern Louisiana.

 Working through a trans-disciplinary approach, the Resilience Studio is a collaboration of the Institute for Coastal Ecology and Engineering (ICEE); the School of Architecture and Design; School of Geosciences; the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Child & Family Studies; the Department of Civil Engineering; and the UL Lafayette/NASA Regional Application Center.

The Resilience Studio proposes to lead faculty and students toward the following objectives:

  • To provide an integrated academic home for the emerging programmatic needs of systems design in the Louisiana Coastal Zone (e.g. ecosystem restoration, regional planning, and water resource management);
  • To facilitate an integrated multidisciplinary educational model that integrates undergraduate and graduate education from multiple colleges;
  • To develop student-driven collaborative research projects involving at least three of the following fields of study: coastal science, environmental science, landscape architecture, architecture, civil engineering, systems engineering, environmental engineering, sociology, anthropology, political science, economics, and geographic information science.

The Resilience Studio offered a for-credit, trans-disciplinary, special projects course in Fall 2012 and Spring 2013 semesters. It also runs a professional office that supports two graduate assistants, one undergraduate assistant, three faculty-researchers, the associate director, and the director.