Eric Klinenberg “Can Sponge Cities Save Us from the Coming Floods?” | The New Yorker

On April 6th, 2026, Eric Klinenberg, Director of the Institute for Public Knowledge, penned a piece for The New Yorker titled “Can Sponge Cities Save Us from the Coming Floods?” Read the excerpt below, then click for the full article.

Since the nineties, New York City has experienced eight storms with hourly rainfalls above 1.75 inches, and climate scientists expect that more extreme rain events are coming. New York is built over marshes and creeks and glacial moraines that announce themselves in a storm. Mossel’s data indicate that several of the city’s most intense hourly downpours on record have taken place in the past five years. Radell told me that Hurricane Ida, in 2021, was “the real turning point” for the National Weather Service in New York. It delivered 3.15 inches in an hour in Manhattan, prompted the city’s first flash-flood emergency, and killed thirteen New Yorkers. Four other recent storms have broken hourly and daily records as well, but those were predicted by forecasters. October 30, 2025, was in some ways more concerning—a routine low-pressure system with a water bomb concealed in its clouds.

As storms that meteorologists once treated as thousand-year events appear more frequently, cities are hunting for workable defenses. One answer is the “modernist” approach: tear up the old tunnels, pipes, and pumps built for a twentieth-century climate and replace them with larger subterranean systems. In practice, some version of this approach remains a staple of urban planning, because certain assets always have to be rebuilt. But in most cities wholesale replacement is logistically impossible. Big metropolitan areas contain hundreds of miles of streets and hundreds of thousands of buildings, all tied into a network that cannot be taken off-line for long. Imagine the time and money that would be required to rip up every block of Beijing, Boston, or Buenos Aires. Most cities cannot excavate their way to safety fast enough. As a result, the ambition is shifting from replacement to redesign.

Read the full article here.

Photo illustration: Javier Jaén/The New Yorker