The Sunday Read: ‘What Does It Mean to Save a Neighborhood?’

Nearly a decade after the devastation of Hurricane Sandy, which destroyed piers and damaged riverside social housing projects, residents of Lower Manhattan are still vulnerable to floods. Michael Kimmelman, The Times’s architecture critic, explores the nine-year effort to redesign Lower Manhattan in the wake of the hurricane, and the design and planning challenges that have made progress incremental. He goes inside a fight over how to protect the neighborhood in the future — revealing why renewal in the face of climate disaster is so complicated. The Headway initiative is funded through grants from the Ford Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF), with Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors serving as a fiscal sponsor. The Woodcock Foundation is a funder of Headway’s public square.For more information, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. This storywas narrated by Michael Kimmelman. To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.