How can small coastal cities turn climate uncertainty into locally grounded plans for water, growth, and community life?  

Planning for Water, Growth, and Place  

Georgia’s 100-mile coastline links salt marshes, estuaries, barrier islands, and working waterfronts with communities facing higher tides, recurrent flooding, development pressure, and limited planning capacity. Supported by an LS3P Foundation grant, Georgia Conservancy and Georgia Tech launched the 2024 Retreat. Adapt. Defend. Blueprints studio to pair research and design with the lived knowledge of Darien and St. Marys.  

“Lasting coastal strategies begin where environmental insight, civic priorities, and everyday experience meet.”  

A Shared Framework for Action  

Georgia Conservancy staff, Georgia Tech faculty, graduate researchers, and local stakeholders worked across a fall 2024 independent study and a spring 2025 urban design studio. Core contributors included Georgia Conservancy team members Katherine Moore; Luben Raytchev, AICP; and Michaela Master, AICP; Georgia Tech faculty Marco Ancheita and Patrick Kastner, PhD; graduate student researcher Mrudhulaa Rangantah; and a spring studio cohort of 17 graduate students. Local city officials, development authorities, residents, and regional partners helped ground the work in community priorities 

Students combined precedent research, environmental analysis, site investigation, and community dialogue to develop options at multiple scales, including living shorelines, wetlands, floodable public spaces, and downtown improvements.  

The effort connected two coastal communities through four in-person stakeholder meetings, additional virtual sessions, and public design presentations. Rather than prescribing one master plan, the team assembled a resource kit of water-management approaches, design concepts, and implementation guidance. The work is informing a Downtown Master Plan for Darien and continued collaboration with St. Marys and regional partners, while offering a replicable way for smaller towns to align ecological stewardship, local identity, and economic vitality.