Project by Jennie J. Zhou, Yuchen Zhang, Atharv Bhole, Tianyi Dai
Seaside Heights is a popular coastal destination known both for its vibrant boardwalk and its nightlife scene as documented in MTV’s iconic reality show, Jersey Shore. Yet beneath this familiar image lies a region increasingly defined by vulnerability, from rising seas to intensifying storms. Together with Toms River, the neighboring township across the Barnegat Bay, the two form a landscape shaped by intersecting forces: seasonal tourism, party, suburban expansion, and coastal flood risks.
The Search for Joy investigates how joy, play, and resilience can coexist across Seaside Heights and Toms River, creating a new landscape of joy where it is found interstitially and throughout the region. By viewing the region as a landscape of joy, the project reimagines how urban design and placemaking can utilize our desires for fun to advance ecological resiliency and revive suburban towns. The final design creates a distributed geography of playspaces that relieves tourism pressure on Seaside Heights by dispersing pockets of joy, while still honoring the party culture that the region embodies. From a multi-use tunnel of transportation and partying that runs across the re-naturalized barrier island, a continuous riverside park that forms a soft edge between land and water, a new vibrant commercial and transit corridor along the Route 37 highway, and a town center where a daylighted creek intersects with the bustling street—the goal is to not let fear or climate doomerism steal our places for play, but to reimagine how joy and resiliency can be weaved together through design.
