Your Community, Your Home Court!

Our Coastal Communities Initiative aims to establish collaborative community partnerships with community-specific coastal communities to deliver and promote well-researched, planned, designs, engineering, and public, in-community training for disaster, emergency, and climate change preparedness. This will help create organized local assistance for early childhood-to-seniors pre-event, during, and post-emergency survival and sustainability using an all-hands-on-deck, excuse-removal approach.

We have increasingly culturally diverse coastal communities that bring new and untapped cultural exchange opportunities that can enable robust ongoing relationships between small and micro-businesses with the coastal communities they serve. And go beyond the primary transactional relationship level.

However, whatever your cultural, political, ideology, etc. views might be, we see that current disaster events including earthquakes, hurricanes, major flooding, fire pandemics, etc. do not discriminate on an ideological/cultural/geographical, etc. basis. We have not kept pace with the realities of our public-built environments, particularly in our coastal and adjacent communities worldwide.

I reflect on the need to redesign public spaces to serve as multifunctional community hubs that is integrated with evacuation and emergency preparedness plans, especially in high-risk, underserved coastal areas. While progress has been made in identifying major evacuation routes and emergency plans, nevertheless, there is a significant gap in pre-event planning for essential life support systems like clean water, electricity, and food sources before and after disasters, public emergencies and climate change events.

Our Studio promote “our past is not our future,” development thinking for the implementation of healthy, environmentally-friendly, sustainable communities with a focus on the development of Sustainable Urban Villages (SUVs) and Enclaves that will enable the immediate implementation of low-cost, portable, multi-use, disaster-resistant spaces for public emergencies, disasters, and climate events. Specifically in coastal and adjacent communities. This includes focusing on small, micro-businesses, and entrepreneurial training programs that collaborate with local entities to promote sustainable economic initiatives in areas of shared interest.

Strengthening local communities with user-friendly technologies is essential for daily use and for maintaining health and wellness resources. A portable, in-community, community-specific, and low-cost approach is needed to develop robust disaster and sustainability strategies tailored to at-risk coastal communities worldwide. This involves reimagining the use of public spaces for various events and integrating advanced research, training, sustainable technologies, and cultural exchange initiatives to create environmentally friendly and sustainable communities that go beyond traditional development methods.

Over the last eight plus years we conducted extensive research on six sites inclusive of the COVID 19 pandemic, referred to as Space 6 Studios, to analyze and align with our proposed business model for addressing specific needs. Some of these sites are moving forward to become designated prototype Sustainable Urban Villages/(SUVs)/Enclave to support our Coastal Communities Initiative at designated sites.

Thomas Marable