Fight or Flight? Designers and planners grapple with whether to fight the effects of climate change, or accept the inevitability of mass migration

To quote Margaret Atwood, climate change isn’t just about the climate, it’s “everything change,” and it is transforming coastal regions in the United States at an unprecedented rate. In their studios at Harvard Graduate School of Design, Rosetta S. Elkin, Eric Höweler and Gary H. Hilderbrand are grappling with whether to “build back better” in areas affected by flooding, drought, multi-species migration, and increasingly destructive natural disasters, or move to higher ground. Here, they discuss design interventions and land-use strategies for the country’s most vulnerable areas.