-C.S.

What is Seeing Green and how did it come about?
Erik Facteau: Seeing Green is a research project that studies specific urban agricultural sites in the New York City area in order to demonstrate how urban agriculture should be considered as a viable and important component of a city’s green infrastructure. One of the sites we’re currently looking at is Brooklyn Grange, a rooftop farm in Long Island City; another that we will be looking at is Added Value, a raised bed farm in Red Hook. We’re also looking at the rooftop farm atop the Parks Department’s Five Borough Administrative Building on Randall’s Island.

By measuring evaporation and evapotranspiration rates, we are looking to create metrics to calculate how much water urban farms are managing, through both detention (meaning the temporary storage of excess stormwater) and retention (the indefinite storage of excess stormwater). This will tell us how much water urban farms keep from entering the sewer system, therefore reducing combined sewer overflows.

When you start to get these numbers, you can begin to extrapolate over larger areas of land – whether it’s exisiting farms or underutilized land with farming potential – to determine how much water can be managed and what the best practices are for doing so. Right now, we are looking at a couple different sites as a base line and moving forward from there.

Testing the water at the Brooklyn Grange rooftop farm | photo courtesy of Seeing Green

Tyler Caruso: This project began as a graduate research project and as it has evolved to include a series of interesting collaborations; and the sponsorship of the Open Space Institute has helped us pursue these partnerships. In one project, called “Farming Up,” Alec Baxt and Lise Serrell look at nutrient quality of crops growing in urban environment compared to rural environments. “Don’t Flush Me” is a project that puts sensors in sewage outflow points and notifies individuals about how much wastewater they produce during and immediately after those weather events that cause sewage to overflow into the harbor. Another one is called “Farming Concrete,” for which Mara Gittleman has been calculating the area, weight and monetary value of food grown in community gardens in New York City.

Facteau: Another project we’ve been involved in has been to set up a demonstration project on the roof of the Association for Energy Affordability‘s headquarters in the Bronx. We emulated the green roof condition on part of the roof and installed a container underneath so we could measure the amount of water running through the green roof and then compare that to the amount of water rushing off the impervious surface of the regular rooftop.

Caruso: If you take all of these metrics and you collapse them – you look at the nutrient level of both the soil and the crop, you look at the stormwater management potential, the energy rate reduction, the food production potential — the combined analysis is much more powerful. The guiding idea is this: if you can first define the benefits and know what they are and research them, then you can quantify them, and then you can monetize the benefits — and that’s when it really becomes valuable to private property owners and cities. At that point, the research can begin informing policy. And it can begin informing the development of best management practices around the design of farms. For example, if we observe nutrient run-off, we can help design small wetlands around the drain. If we know how much water an urban farm can manage at a particular soil depth, and how much productivity and costs would be affected by increasing its depth, then we can inform building owners about the best investment to reach the desired productivity and the desired environmental outcomes. It’s a necessary step if we want to see urban agriculture grow in New York City.

Soy Plant tested for Farming Up | Photo: Catherine Yrisarri

How did you both get involved in this topic?
Facteau: My background is in microbiology and mycology, working mostly on plant restoration projects and the symbiotic relationship between fungi and plants. I studied environmental science and forestry in college. And I met Tyler while in the graduate program in environmental systems management at the Pratt Institute.

Caruso: Before this, I was working on landscape design and urban agriculture projects and designing and installing grey water systems in San Francisco. When Erik and I started the discussions that eventually led to Seeing Green, we were looking for a thesis project and decided to work together. At the time, there were lots of projects around that dealt with urban agriculture, and most of them were primarily concerned with the economic or social benefits. They might mention the environmental benefits of farming in the city, but not in great depth. The potential of urban agriculture as green infrastructure was a connection that hadn’t yet been made. In 2010, we started noticing how much City agencies were talking about green infrastructure, and realized that if we wanted our cities to support urban agriculture under the banner of green infrastructure, we would have to quantify the environmental benefits.

Brooklyn Grange | Photo courtesy of Seeing Green

Facteau: The green infrastructure documents from the City that we were looking at all seemed to focus on traditional green roofs. So we started researching how much water these systems could actually handle while simultaneously looking at how rooftop agricultural projects are performing.

Caruso: The grants that Erik is referring to include a green roof tax credit incentive, issued through the Department of Buildings, that specifically prohibits urban farms because of plant selection and because of speculation that irrigation – traditional green roofs don’t require irrigation; agricultural green roofs do – would make rooftop farms less able to retain stormwater than a traditional green roof. That’s a clear example of the city implementing progressive green infrastructure policies that exclude urban agriculture. And in this case, the policy is based on hypotheses that are scientifically untested.

We also find the language of these policies to be more prescriptive than performative. Our methodology for the Seeing Green project looks closely at performativity: how well urban farms and green infrastructure perform over time.

A common criticism of LEED certification system for green buildings is its focus on the design of a building as opposed to looking at how it performs in the long-run, through energy audits or other measurements. With LEED, there is currently no follow up once a building is certified. The next wave in green design – whether it’s buildings, landscapes or infrastructure – is ways to measure performance. That’s what inspired us to develop our thesis project into a larger initiative: to support urban agriculture by defining and quantifying its environmental benefits and seeing how performative it can be.

What kinds of tools or precedents were out there to help you analyze, monetize, to quantify or identify proper metrics?
Caruso: I know everyone says this, but I think social media – Twitter, Facebook, etc. – has really helped empower people with a DIY attitude, has helped citizens’ groups to form, has helped individuals collaborate with a science lab.

Platforms like Kickstarter have created more of a sense of “we’re all in it together,” and that attitude has definitely benefited us.

Facteau: Kickstarter was a huge help in getting this off the ground. We had worked out our methodology as part of our thesis project at Pratt, and when we finished that we asked ourselves, “Where do we go from here?” We knew the equipment that we needed, and we knew that farmers and communities would really value the information we wanted to collect. So we used Kickstarter not only to raise money for equipment but also to raise awareness. Groups from England, from Australia, from the west coast contacted us because of their interest in the research.

Caruso: I just spoke to someone preparing a research report on the potential for urban agriculture in San Francisco. Another group in Minneapolis recently requested our collaboration on a large-scale urban agriculture initiative out there. Around the country, and the world, it’s a really supportive community. There are also some big research initiatives right here in New York….

Like “Five Borough Farm,” which Urban Omnibus featured last year. That effort is also trying to push the idea of metrics.
Caruso: Exactly. I think one of Five Borough Farm’s contributions to the field is its focus on the public health perspective. There’s also the work Kubi Ackerman is doing at Columbia’s Urban Design Lab to evaluate New York’s capacity for urban agriculture. We’ve used some of his preliminary numbers to help us make the case that if we have x amount of stormwater, and if we extrapolate from the knowledge of how many vacant lots or rooftops could be used to scale up urban agriculture, then we can start to talk about how to address the combined sewage overflow problem. If we know that we could manage this many gallons through urban farms, and how much money the city spends per gallon on treating stormwater and wastewater, then we can calculate how much money the city could save if urban agriculture were considered one of many pieces of the green infrastructure puzzle. When you compare that to the cost of retrofitting or constructing new sewage treatment plants, and factor in the amount of energy that goes into treating wastewater, the savings become astronomical. Plus, there are all the benefits that urban agriculture advocates have made well known: vacant land is being re-utilized by communities, increasing property values, supporting economic micro-enterprises, contributing to healthy living, decreasing public health costs. Once you start layering all those factors, the potential of these farms or community gardens is phenomenal. 

Brooklyn Grange rooftop farm | photo courtesy of Seeing Green

Speaking of that kind of layering, and the multiple ways to discuss the benefits of farms and community gardens in the city, how did you decide to focus specifically on the intersection between stormwater management and urban agriculture?
Caruso: Our primary goal was to support urban agriculture in whatever way we could. We started by talking to farmers and asking them what would help their efforts. What we heard from people was the need to preserve existing urban farms and expand the agricultural capacity of the city. To do that, we wanted to make a quantitative case for the benefits. Our initial plan was to look at more metrics beyond stormwater.

Facteau: We also wanted to look at carbon capture as a way to show farms as potential carbon sinks and look at temperature differences in order to see urban agriculture’s role in mitigating urban heat island effect. Existing equipment for measuring carbon capture are suited for huge plots of land much more than an acre-size roof. There is definitely potential to look into that more in the future.

Stormwater emerged for us as a focus because of the rooftop tax credit issue we mentioned earlier – that it’s unfounded to exclude urban agriculture from green roof incentives without considering the numbers. We thought this was a good opportunity to initiate a policy change.

But of course we are very interested in some of the other environmental factors. For example, comparing different soil mediums  — what is used on rooftops is not technically soil, because dirt would be too heavy for most building capacities, but an engineered alternative – in terms of drainage, nutrient leaching, nutrient run-off, the remediation quality of the engineered growing medium and of the plants themselves, temperature fluctuations, etc. Those are some of the things we want to look at down the road. I think the more metrics you can get together, the more powerful a statement you can make. The social benefits – from filling in gaps in the foodshed to bringing people together in a shared community project – are well known. The environmental issues, particularly related to roofs, require more research.

Weighing produce at Two Coves, Queens | photo courtesy of Stephanos Koullias via farmingconcrete.org

You have discussed the potential for this research to affect policy and to help building owners understand their options. What are some other lessons to be learned from this research? What else do you hope will be done with your findings?
Caruso: The green roof tax credit is being amended. And the hope is that other plans put out by city agencies or reports by national organizations will factor some of this into their thinking. The American Planning Association, for example, puts out a guide for agriculture; if city planning institutions start to consider urban agriculture as a viable step for cities to strengthen local economies, expand regional foodsheds and isolate and address environmental challenges, that would be great.

The US Green Building Council’s recent announcement that the retrofitting of existing buildings is eligible for an innovation credit is an interesting tactic and a change in the right direction. I think as LEED begins to move more towards performativity and long-term monitoring, we’d like to see services such as Seeing Green becoming inextricable parts of measuring performance.

Some city agencies have legitimate concerns about scaling up rooftop gardens. The Fire Department is worried about the height of plants allowed and how that affects fire safety. The Buildings Department is worried about buildings’ structural load capacity. But hopefully the Parks Department will be a leader in this effort; working with them has been a great partnership for us. Their experimental roof garden on Randall’s Island is intended specifically to inform what kind of green roof systems they should be implementing on their buildings. If other City agencies did the same thing and committed to doing pilot projects on City-owned property, it would have a huge impact.

Recently, some have voiced skepticism about the viability of urban agriculture, dismissing it as a phenomenon only relevant to small portions of the population. What’s your response to those voices?
Caruso: I think when people hear the term urban agriculture, they make the mistake of thinking that its advocates are postulating that a city the size of New York or San Francisco or Chicago could grow all its food within its borders. Most farmers would laugh at that, given the amount of effort it takes to productively and intensively grow on even an acre of land. But I think it’s incredibly important that urban agriculture is part of a regional foodshed, is part of supporting local, decentralized economies and healthy, active and safe communities.

Once again, I think layering the environmental benefits, the social benefits and the economic benefits is really important to counter skepticism about urban agriculture’s viability.

AEA roof demonstration project | Photo courtesy of Seeing Green

Tyler Caruso works as an Environmental Planning consultant and researcher for such companies as Great Ecology and Environments, Roy Co. Architecture, thread collective, Gowanus CDC, and Advancement for Rural Kids, Inc. His area of focus is urban agriculture and ecological sanitation programs, designing closed loop systems using composting toilets, agriculture and greywater and rainwater harvesting systems. He has a Master’s of Science from the Environmental Systems Management Program (ESM) at Pratt. Tyler is now a Visiting Assistant Professor at Pratt Institute in ESM Masters program. This summer he is co-teaching a design/build urban agriculture course that he helped to develop. He also co-founded and runs New York City’s Youth Food Council.

Erik Facteau is a biologist, with a Master’s of Science in Environmental Systems Management from Pratt Institute. He has a strong interest in the creation of local food systems and has worked at the NYC Greenmarkets for the last 5 years. Previously, Erik worked in a microbiology laboratory as an environmental air quality analyst. As an undergraduate, at SUNY Environmental Science and Forestry, Erik Facteau studied Biology with a focus on Microbiology and Mycology. While at SUNY ESF, Erik conducted lab and field research on two ongoing plant restoration projects (The American Chestnut-Castanea dentata and The Pinedrop-Pterospora andromedea).

Landscape designer, teacher and writer David Seiter has been researching the city’s underappreciated plant life and finding ways to highlight its value. Seiter is the founding principal of Future Green Studio, a firm that works “to reveal the nuances of our urban landscape in subtle, poetic ways that provide clues to the complex ecology of cities.” Here, he presents “Profiles of Spontaneous Urban Plants,” an effort to champion the ecological and aesthetic benefits of informal vegetation, and shares the Studio’s beautiful and charming series of illustrations, based on traditional botanical classification drawings, of the wild urban plants found surrounding their Gowanus office. (Click on any of the images to launch a slideshow.)

- V.S.

Dandelion, highlighted | 3rd Street, Brooklyn

Although we tend to think of our cities as concrete jungles, our post-new urban environment is awash in plant life. This becomes especially apparent when you begin recognizing all the wild urban plants that have taken root along roadsides and chain-link fences, between cracks of pavement, and within vacant lots, rubble dumps and highway medians. Spontaneously propagating, these resilient plants find distinctive niches to thrive in and inhabit our most derelict landscapes. The environmental benefits of these “weeds” go widely unrecognized when, in fact, this often invisible urban ecology can offer a fresh perspective on how cities perform.

With that in mind, we staged an intervention to reveal the overlooked nature of urban weeds to the passerby: we painted rough, bright geometries onto the sidewalk along 3rd Street in Brooklyn, outlining spots where spontaneous urban plants have made a home. Using a typical street paint yellow, we drew circles around particularly important weeds that have emerged up through our sidewalks and tree pits – essentially taking a highlighter to the streetscape. Most people walk by unaware, only to stop for a brief second to consider why someone would be drawing attention to the weeds in the sidewalk. Sometimes, observant urban wayfarers linger long enough to glimpse the inconspicuous museum placard identifying the plants name, origin and characteristics.

“Profiles of Spontaneous Urban Plants” is a project conceived by Future Green Studio, our landscape urbanism firm based in Gowanus, Brooklyn. Our studio seeks to make urban interventions that reveal the nuances of our urban landscape in subtle, poetic ways that provide clues to the complex ecology of cities. Working out of a post-industrial neighborhood replete with sidewalk cracks, remnant gravel vestiges and dead end streets, overgrown urban weeds are ubiquitous in our daily experience.

Commelina Communis (Asiatic Dayflower)

Eragrostis Pectinacea (Tufted Lovegrass)

In colloquial terms, of course, these plants are most commonly referred to as “weeds,” but are also known as “invasive,” “alien” and “exotic.” Culturally, the prevailing usage of “weeds” relegates these urban plants to an inferior botanical category because humans did not intentionally cultivate them at the particular site in which they have appeared. It is an understandable human reaction, as we have been taught, generally, that things which require little to no effort to grow, create, or maintain are worth less. But competing perceptions of certain plants reflect the need to think differently about the stigma we attach to these weeds. For example, Dandelion is perceived by suburban homeowners as an omnipresent lawn invader. But by children Dandelions are seen as a thing to play with, and by urban foragers they’re understood as food.

The term “invasive” denotes the biologically aggressive and exceptionally hardy characteristics of a plant, habitually denounced for taking over natural areas and stifling biodiversity. In non-urban conditions, these plants can at times be destructive on rural ecosystems. Monocultures of Tree of Heaven (Ailanthus altissima) or Common Reed (Phragmites australis) have been known to alter radically existing landscapes and wildlife habitats. With many invasive plants dispersing seeds multiple times throughout a season and with seed counts in the thousands per plant annually, the potential for a quick colonization of rural and suburban sites is a major concern.

The prolific nature of these plants, which makes them so dangerous in certain areas, also makes them incredibility successful in our urban ecology. As such, there is a movement to categorize these plants not as weeds but as spontaneous urban plants, and to recognize their importance as a sort of renegade green infrastructure, thriving in places no native plant would grow and providing substantive ecological benefits.

Future Green Studio's intervention on 3rd Street, Brooklyn

Our contemporary urban streetscapes and post-industrial vacant lots in no way mimic the Northeast deciduous forests of our past — once suitable growing grounds for native plants. Rather than trying to control our new urban ecology with the assumption that invasive species are degrading our environment, we should instead understand that without extensive maintenance of intentionally planted landscapes, most urban landscapes would quickly revert to being dominated by spontaneous vegetation. What’s remarkable about all spontaneous urban plants is the fact that they require no human assistance to assert and maintain themselves in extreme, often volatile urban conditions, while providing the same ecologically performative benefits of traditional landscape plants and street trees. Rather than seek to discard and eradicate them, we now have an opportunity to harness their benefits and tell their histories.

In the hard, difficult landscapes of contemporary cities, wild urban plants can provide real ecological benefits, and are the overlooked backbone of an emergent green infrastructure. For whether Daffodil or Dandelion, intentionally-planted or not, all plants contribute to lowering the urban heat island effect and can help address the carbon imbalance in our urban areas. Unlike many traditional landscape plants, spontaneous urban plants can also colonize disturbed bare ground, help with erosion control and slope stabilization, and be used as food and habitat for wildlife. In addition, Mugwort (Artemesia vulgaris) or Lambsquarters (Chenopodium album), for example, have phytoremediation properties and can be used strategically on brownfield sites to absorb pollutants from the soil. Spontaneous urban plants are also being rediscovered as part of our edible lexicon. Both Dandelion (Taraxacum officinale) and Common Purslane (Portulaca oleracea) are edible and highly sought after, finding their way onto plates at trendy restaurants.

Chenopodium album (Common Lambsquarters)

Ambrosia artemisiifolia (Common Ragweed)

In New York City, as with most major urban areas, stormwater retention is a particularly hot-button issue. Our storm sewer system here in New York City is completely overwhelmed, with raw sewage being released into our local waterways nearly half of the times it rains. Wild urban plants play an important role in slowing down the first flush of stormwater and reducing the cumulative impact of major storm events.

Another concept currently being explored that could utilize wild urban plants is the idea of brown roofs. Brown roofs are essentially paired down green roofs without the highly engineered soil and specialty plantings. With a much higher drainage profile, a brown roof is much simpler than a green roof, and can use the existing soil from the site – degraded or not. Although there are issues of fire safety that need to be addressed through seasonal maintenance, brown roofs include less upfront cost, minimal upkeep and a lighter weight load than green roofs. This strategy could radically transform our urban rooftops – providing all the benefits of a green roof at a fraction of the cost.

Conyza canadensis (Horseweed)

Hieracium sabaudum (New England Hawkweed)

As an extension of the street intervention, we catalogued twenty wild urban plants we found growing on our street and in our garden. Individually set on a white background, each plant was photographed as a bare-rooted, singular specimen. Heavy shadows and sharp contrast play up the sense of plant specimen as object. Detail enlargements of the flowers or seeds are inset in each illustration and are accompanied by the plants’ place of origin, habitat preference, ecological function and cultural significance.

We applied traditional modes of botanical representation to these plants, which are not usually seen as “pretty” or “desirable,” and attempted to elevate them to the status of romantic illustrations of plants like lavender or thyme you might find hanging on someone’s kitchen wall. Using this whimsical approach, we intended to recontextualize these plants while at the same time revealing their cultural history, development and usage. For our work, Peter Del Tredici’s Wild Urban Plants of the Northeast: A Field Guide was an invaluable resource and has helped set the tone for recognizing this group of plants as an important part of our contemporary urban ecology.

As our cities grow in density, population and number, our urban landscapes must be both aesthetically pleasing and ecologically productive. By utilizing wild urban plants, we can design with a palette of greenery adapted to existing urban soils, widely available and attractive to pollinators and other wildlife. An informed combination of these factors can help create a pleasant urban meadow. As much as the upfront plant selection needs to play an important role, some designing will come through the process of subtraction. By removing diseased plants, those planted too close together or even the plants that are particularly unsightly or cause allergic reaction like Ragweed (Ambrosia artemisiifolia), designers can help to make the wild urban meadow tidy and kempt – and more appealing.

Smooth Crabgrass, highlighted | 3rd Street, Brooklyn

Additional research and reporting by Patra Jongjitirat.

David Seiter is founding principal of Future Green Studio. His portfolio includes international, high-profile, large-scale urban parks and waterfronts, high-end residential garden and estate planning for celebrity clients, and green roof design and implementation. He manages a small working garden on a post-industrial site near the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn which includes green walls, green roofs, raised beds for food crops, composting and a rainwater catchment system. In addition to designing and building, David also teaches and writes about emergent trends in landscape architecture. Most recently, David taught “An Introduction to Green Roofs & Living Walls” at the City University of New York. He’s also teaching a theory course on “Productive + Performative Landscapes” in the graduate program at Pratt Institute. Currently in the works is a book about sustainable urban landscape interventions. Prior to gaining a Masters in Landscape Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania, David spent two years in Japan, where he apprenticed with a prominent garden designer in Kyoto.

Patra Jongjitirat is a research intern at Future Green Studio, helping draft its upcoming book publication Emergent Trends in Landscape Architecture. She is also devoted to the public arts organization No Longer Empty, looking at how interim uses and small-scale interventions can catalyze the revitalization of urban spaces. She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Architectural Studies from Brown University.

The views expressed here are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

Photo by Iwan Baan | via thehighline.org

HIGH LINE PHASE 3
On November 1st, Mayor Bloomberg announced that all of the major stakeholders in the West Side Rail Yards have agreed to preserve the final section of the High Line for use as public space. CSX Transportation, a private freight rail company that still owns the undeveloped stretch of the elevated tracks, has committed to donating the remaining portion of the structure to the City; and the City, State and site developer Related Companies have all agreed to retain the structure and turn it into parkland. Meanwhile Friends of the High Line have been working hard to secure funding for phase three, helped by a recent $20 million donation from the Diller-Von Furstenberg Foundation. In his press statement, Mayor Bloomberg made it clear that this project was part of a collaboration between the City of New York and Related Companies to revitalize the West side of Manhattan in order to encourage commercial activity and in turn to promote the creation of jobs. Legal details and final negotiations are still in process, but confidence is high that a complete High Line, from Gansevoort to 34th Street, is in New York’s future. For more information, check out the Friends of the High Line website.

City Lights | photo via tphifer.com

SLEEK CITY LIGHTS
Head down to Church and Warren Streets to see the latest addition to New York City’s streetscape design. In 2004, a team led by Thomas Phifer and Partners won City Lights, a juried design competition led by the Department of Design and Construction and the Department of Transportation to conceive of a new streetlight for New York. Now, thanks to a reduction in cost of energy efficient LEDs over the past seven years, these sleek new lights are starting to appear on the city’s streets. For more pictures, check out The Architect’s Newspaper Blog and Thomas Phifer’s website.

TOKYO’S BACK-UP CITY
A consortium of Japanese political officials have proposed building a “back-up city” for Tokyo. — Wait, what? — After the devastating 9.0-magnitude earthquake and tsunami that hit northeast Japan in March, and with seismologists warning that Tokyo itself is long overdue for a major quake, people are looking for a contingency plan. The Integrated Resort, Tourism, Business and Backup City, or IRTBBC, would house 50,000 residents and a working population of 200,000 (a far cry from the 13 million that currently live in Tokyo), and would serve to take over the major functions of the capital city in the case of a crippling disaster. The plan suggests using the site of the outdated Itami Airport outside of Osaka, 300 miles away. ”The idea is being able to have a back-up, a spare battery for the functions of the nation,” said Hajime Ishii of Japan’s Democratic Party. For more coverage, check out The Telegraph.

via theatlanticcities.com

SELLING HOUSING
The Atlantic Cities has a a delightful collection of vintage posters that tell the story of how New York City originally sold the idea of public housing to the pubic. The New York City Housing Authority was the first of its kind in the United States. While strategies for redevelopment of housing have evolved past in the past eighty years, the posters reflect the fundamental motivations behind the founding of NYCHA in 1934, to provide safe and secure housing for low-income city residents. Check out the series of posters advertising the new program and buildings here, courtesy of the Library of Congress.

EVENTS and TO DOs

Making Room Symposium: Tickets are still available for Monday’s Making Room symposium, where teams of architects commissioned by the Citizens Housing & Planning Council and the Architectural League present innovative ideas for new types of housing that might better match the contemporary demographic make-up of New York and how New Yorkers choose to live now. For an introduction to Making Room, click here. For more information about the symposium, click here.

Performa 11, the fourth edition of the visual art performance biennial, is now in progress. Performa brings together dozens of arts institutions and curators to present discipline-meshing performances that explore visual art, music, dance, poetry, fashion, architecture, graphic design and the culinary arts, in public and private spaces throughout the city. There’s also a Performa magazine, online TV show, radio program, film screenings, bookshop and lounge. For a complete list of events, running now through November 21, visit the Performa 11 website.

Poem Forest: This weekend, the Poetry Society of America is hosting Poem Forest, a walk along Thain Forest’s Sweetgum Trail designed by Jon Cotner (who recently took us on a walk through Fort Greene Park). Weaving together poetry and space, the self-guided tour relates lines of poetry from all different eras and regions with fifteen specific spots chosen along the trail.

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The Roundup keeps you up to date with topics we’ve featured and other things we think are worth knowing about.

Frustrated by the lack of a cohesive vision for the neighborhood and concerned by a failure to connect development plans with broader issues of community services, infrastructure and sustainability, architects and Brooklyn residents David Briggs and Anthony Deen founded the advocacy group Gowanus by Design in 2009. Briggs and Deen wanted to encourage new clean-up and development strategies based on community input and the needs and opinions of those who work and live along the Gowanus. They soon realized that what they saw as the primary challenges for the site could be addressed through a series of design competitions, which would serve to provoke conversation, encourage community engagement and, hopefully, steer future development of the area. The first of these competitions, Gowanus Lowline: Connections, invited designers across disciplines to explore the potential for pedestrian-oriented development that engages with the canal and the surrounding watershed. Here, Briggs and Deen tell us more about the motivations behind and future plans for Gowanus by Design, and share the winning designs from Connections. —C.B.

The Gowanus is a canal and neighborhood under constant assault. For every contamination clean up there is an illegal dumping; for every marine species that returns to the canal there is a toxic overflow from the local CSOs. The nearby areas of Carroll Gardens, Cobble Hill and Boerum Hill are neighborhoods of four and five story buildings, but the City has approved 12-story buildings for two separate major development projects in Gowanus. The fact is, the area suffers because there is no master plan. When the Gowanus Canal was listed on the EPA’s Superfund National Priorities List in early 2010, it was a welcome pause to what was becoming a rapid development process that did not address vital urban issues, such as contextual zoning, mass transit, community services or infrastructure.

The pending development of the Gowanus can also be seen as a local case study of a global trend. As more of our population move to cities — if current trends continue, 70% of the global population will live in urban environments by mid-century — pressure will increase to develop brownfield sites and other contaminated urban areas that were previously considered off-limits due to the extensive remediation they require.

In 2009, we founded Gowanus by Design as a community-based urban design advocacy group in response to these global shifts, our concerns about the trajectory of the proposed development and our desire to help remake our corner of the city. Our mission is to promote sustainable development that enhances the Gowanus Canal community without replacing the historic character and working class origins of the neighborhood, while responding intelligently to the environmental damage wrought by local industry over the past 150 years. Our members are local residents and industry professionals — architects, planners, cartographers and transportation experts. Our aim is to propose and advocate for new strategies for the development of the Gowanus area and to explore the larger urban planning challenges that the world will face as the global population migrates to the world’s cities.

After the Gowanus Canal was designated a Superfund site, our focus shifted towards documenting the cleanup process and taking a step back to consider long-term planning challenges. When discussing how to effectively move forward, we realized that we had to sort through the myriad complex issues being raised in a comprehensive, yet understandable way. By identifying a series of broad questions about the latent problems at the canal, and connecting them to the future of transportation, education, sustainability, infrastructure and community services, we hoped that we could spark conversations that would lead to more research and community input. As our list of questions developed, we decided that each one could form the basis of a design competition, the results of which could create a mappable, online database that would serve to inspire new thinking on urban development.

The Gowanus Lowline jury

This year we launched our inaugural competition, Gowanus Lowline: Connections, as an ideas competition open to the international community. We invited speculation on the value of urban development of post-industrial lands, and the possibility of dynamic, pedestrian-oriented architecture that either passively or actively engaged with the canal and the surrounding watershed. We ended up with 188 submissions, from 14 US States (26 entries came from right here in Brooklyn) and from 14 countries around the world, including Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, England, Finland, France, Germany, India, Italy, Korea, Lithuania and the Netherlands.

On a Friday afternoon in June, the jury convened at the SET Gallery in Brooklyn, located just one block from the canal, for several hours of review and discussion. Comprised of leaders in the design community Julie Bargmann (landscape designer and founding principal of D.I.R.T. Studio), David Lewis (architect and partner of LTL Architects), Gregg Pasquarelli (architect and founding principal of SHoP Architects), Richard Plunz (urban planner and professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation), Andrew Simons (designer and chair of Gowanus Canal Conservancy) and Joel Towers (architect and the Dean of Parsons School of Design), the jury focused on thoughtful and rigorous solutions to the problems of urban brownfield sites in general, and the canal area specifically. After much deliberation, they selected first and second prizewinners and four honorable mention winners.

FIRST PLACE
Gowanus Flowlands
Tyler Caine, Luke Carnahan, Ryan Doyle, Brandon Specketer
New York, New York

Click thumbnails to see images from Gowanus Flowlands. Click here for a PDF of the complete entry.

The first prize winner, “Gowanus Flowlands,” was submitted by Tyler Caine, Luke Carnahan, Ryan Doyle and Brandon Specketer of New York, NY. The jury appreciated the team’s understanding of density and environmental remediation as part of a broader sustainable urban strategy. The proposal creates a compelling urban condition through a series of residential and academic buildings that extend above a commercial zone and hover over a series of filtering wetlands. Gowanus Flowlands creatively demonstrates how the area could be inhabited while living with remediation.

SECOND PLACE
[f]lowline
Aptum/Landscape Intelligence: Gale Fulton, Roger Hubeli, Julie Larsen
Urbana, Illinois

Click thumbnails to see images from [f]lowline. Click here for a PDF of the complete entry.

“[F]lowline,” submitted by Aptum/Landscape Intelligence (team members Gale Fulton, Roger Hubeli, Julie Larsen of Urbana, Illinois), was awarded second prize for its clever adaptation and response to changing environmental and urban conditions. As with “Flowlands,” “[f]lowline” proposed living with remediation through a series of insertions, such as pooling parks and floating forest barges, and by doing so, offered a vision of a possible hybrid urban condition.

HONORABLE MENTION
Domestic Laundry: Flush Basin Curtain Mattress Pillow
Agergroup: Jessica Leete, Claire Ji Kim, Shan Shan Lu, Winnie Lai and Albert Chung
Boston, Massachusetts

Click thumbnails to see images from Domestic Laundry. Click here for a PDF of the complete entry.

HONORABLE MENTION
Gowanus Canal Filter District
burkholder|salmons: Sean Burkholder, Dylan Salmons
University Park, Pennsylvania

Click thumbnails to see images from Filter District. Click here for a PDF of the complete entry.

Originally, the competition brief indicated that there would be three honorable mentions. But as the deliberations proceeded through the afternoon, the jury focused on four entries that formed two pairings: “Gowanus Canal Filter District” and “Domestic Laundry: Flush Basin Curtain Mattress Pillow”; and “Made in Brooklyn: Bridges For Local Artisans & Industry” and “B.Y.O.B. (Build Your Own Bridge).”

“Filter District” and “Domestic Laundry” both accepted the existing conditions as a starting point, yet offered different solutions: “Filter District” proposed that three areas south of 3rd Street on both sides of the canal be depressed to promote tidal flushing and create a node point for peripheral development. “Domestic Laundry” offered a range of solutions along both sides of the canal, suggesting a phased, realistic approach that embraced the myriad technologies that the canal cleanup would require.

HONORABLE MENTION
Made in Brooklyn: Bridges For Local Artisans & Industry
Nathan Rich and Miriam Peterson
Brooklyn, New York

Click thumbnails to see images from Made in Brooklyn. Click here for a PDF of the complete entry.

HONORABLE MENTION
B.Y.O.B. (Build Your Own Bridge)
Austin+Mergold LLC: Jason Austin, Alex Mergold, Jessica Brown, Sally Reynolds
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Click thumbnails to see images from B.Y.O.B. Click here for a PDF of the complete entry.

Both “Made in Brooklyn” and “B.Y.O.B.” relied on a more traditional typology to link the neighborhoods on both sides of the canal: the bridge. However, each team was careful to expand on the structure’s conventional use. “Made in Brooklyn” proposed the bridge as a catalyst for growth on either side of the canal by creating a commercial spine on the crossings that would nurture current interest (and pride) in Brooklyn industry. “B.Y.O.B.” proposed various bridge prototypes, designed by local stakeholders, that reflect the existing neighborhood character while connecting current and proposed adjacencies.

After deliberations concluded, we asked the jurors to reflect on Gowanus Lowline and comment on what they’d like to see in future competitions. Several of them noted that more emphasis should be placed on understanding Brooklyn, its character, the local climatic conditions, and, in this particular case, the topography around the canal. Additionally, since the science required to properly remediate the area is truly complex, they suggested that future competitions be designed around some of the specific remediation solutions currently being developed by the EPA as part of the Superfund cleanup process.

As we move forward, our competitions will take the ideas and feedback generated from Gowanus Lowline and continue to explore the broad questions that we think will help people better understand the changes taking place at the canal and in the surrounding neighborhood. We will advocate for new strategies and a sustainable approach to urban development and plan to share our work with local groups, other like-minded professionals, and New York City’s Department of City Planning.

These winning entries from Gowanus Lowline: Connections, along with approximately twenty other thought-provoking entries selected by the committee, and three projects from the seventh grade class of the Brooklyn School for Collaborative Studies, a local middle school, will be on display at the SET Gallery, 287 Third Avenue, Brooklyn for two weeks in September. The show will open on Thursday, September 15, from 6—9pm. For more information, click here.

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After graduating from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, David Briggs worked in upstate New York and for William McDonough in New York City. He opened his own office in 1993 and began working on residential, commercial, and restoration projects that addressed sustainable design issues. In 1997 Mr. Briggs was awarded the AIA New York City Chapter Stewardson Keefe LeBrun Travel Grant. He has also served as a Visiting Critic for the Weimar Bauhaus-Universitat “Summer Academy in Rome” as well as the University of Pennsylvania and taught as an adjunct professor at Philadelphia University. Since 2002, he has served on the Board of Trustees for the Amber Charter School in Harlem where he chairs the Facilities Committee and has been Board Secretary for the past four years. Mr. Briggs is a LEED Accredited Professional and is licensed to practice architecture in New York, New Jersey, Louisiana, and Washington DC. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and two sons.

Anthony Deen is a co-founder of Gowanus by Design, and owner of deenstudio. His projects include work for jetBlue, British Airways and Chelsea Market in New York. Prior to starting deenstudio, Anthony was the Senior Design Director at The Phillips Group, and served as Vice President of Design and Development for the Virgin Megastores in North America. Anthony was also a senior architect with the Rockwell Group where he helped found the Interaction Lab, developing digital media for built environments. Anthony began his career with Samuel Anderson, Winka Dubbeldam and James Garrison, where he won an AIA-NY Project Award. Anthony earned his undergraduate degree at the Cooper Union, graduate degree from Parsons School of Design and did additional study in urban design at the City College of New York. Anthony teaches design studio in the School of Art, Media and Technology at Parsons School of Design where he was the founding director of Parsons’ Design + Technology department. Anthony is also a member of the EPA’s Gowanus Community Advisory Group and lives in Carroll Gardens with his family.

The views expressed here are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

Stargazing in Times Square | Courtesy of Ian Cheney

When artificial light shines upward, it bounces off particulates in the air, causing a haze — some have described it as a “luminous fog” — that prevents us from seeing the stars and skies above. As our powerfully-lit built environment expands across the planet, so does this dome of light. Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson contends that a connection to the night sky offers us a sense of “cosmic perspective” that, when denied, causes us “to not live to the full extent of what it is to be human.” The stars have inspired mythology, poetry, curiosity, inquiry and exploration throughout history. So, what happens when we lose the night sky? That question is at the heart of The City Dark, a new documentary film by Ian Cheney that explores the effects of light pollution on our environment, our society, our bodies and our psyches. (See the trailer here.)

The most obvious implications of light pollution are to astronomers. The stronger the light pollution, the harder it is to see the universe beyond. But, as Cheney explores in the film, the consequences of our pervasive use of artificial light reach much further. Biologists who study habitat disruption are tracking how city lights disorient, and ultimately cause the death of, hatching sea turtles and migrating birds. Epidemiologists are investigating the hypothesis that night shift work, and the disruptions to circadian rhythms and melatonin production that come with it, is a carcinogen.

But light activates space, improves public safety and facilitates social interaction. Light is used as art, as celebration, as tribute. We equate light with progress and achievement. So what do we do when, as Cheney says, “though we might love light, we might need the dark”? That’s where lighting designers, architects and planners can help. A darker city can come from, not just less light, but less wasteful light. Careful, thoughtful lighting design is economically and environmentally beneficial, and can help reconnect us to the majestic skies above.

Tonight, Wednesday, August 17, The City Dark is being screened at the BMW Guggenheim Lab in New York City. In anticipation of the event, we sat down with Ian Cheney to learn more about light pollution, the disappearance of the night sky and what we can do to get it back. —V.S.

Sky Village, Arizona | Courtesy of Ian Cheney

Tell us about The City Dark.
The City Dark is a documentary about light pollution — which ought to be called night pollution, if you think about it. Air pollution is pollution of the air, water pollution is pollution of the water and what we are really talking about is pollution of the night by light.

I have found that light pollution as an urban and environmental concern isn’t a topic on everybody’s radar screen. But once one mentions the disappearance of the night sky, people instantly connect. There’s something so fundamental and present to all of us about that.

Throughout the film, evocations about the poetry and mythology of the night sky interweave with scientific inquiry into the effects of artificial light on ourselves and our environment. Though a complete telling of the story seems to demand both poetry and science, did you come to the subject matter from one side or the other?
The film began much more with the intangible questions and what I might categorize as the more philosophical or spiritual question about what we lose when we can’t connect with the night sky. I knew next to nothing about most of the ecological or human health issues related to light pollution. But I knew that astronomers, of course, were worried about the loss of the stars. So it was with them that we started the film. The astronomers were the ones to point out that this topic touches a much broader range of people. But even as the film snowballed into explorations of the scientific issues, there was no way to tell the story without the intangible aspects. What we lose as individuals, as a culture, when we lose the night sky is what underpinned the whole project for me.

Is that what you hope people with take away from the film?
I’d be happy if people took different ideas away from the film. One person might be energized by the idea of writing a new lighting ordinance for their town and introducing legislation that helps preserve the night sky, whereas another might be reminded to step outside and look up from time to time, to take his kids outside the city to find darkness, or to think differently about how to design lights on a building.

We are setting up a lot of screenings this fall with a whole range of people, from astronomers to ecologists to wildlife groups, but also with lighting designers and architects who are very much engaged in rethinking the way we light our cities.

The High Line, New York | screen capture from The City Dark

Speaking of which, in the film you say “a darker city is a matter of design.” You also spend some time with Hervé Descottes, the lighting designer of the High Line. Talk a little bit about the design of a darker city, and the role that architects and designers can play in preventing light pollution.
The way we have come to light our cities, perhaps unintentionally, is extremely wasteful, haphazard and careless. The idea that light can trespass, can pollute, can be damaging, is relatively new. Maybe because you can’t hold light in your hand like you can water or garbage — if someone were spewing garbage into your window, you would object.

There’s a fair bit of generalizing and mudslinging directed towards architects and lighting designers by people who think they all just love to blast light up their buildings. Some do, and you see that walking around the city, but there are an increasing number of lighting designers that are trying to do things differently.

It’s not that advocates of “re-darkening” the city want to turn off all the lights. Hervé Descottes is one of, hopefully, a growing number of designers who are thinking about light in a more sophisticated way than we may have in the past, when we were responding to a centuries-long legacy of having too much darkness and seeing more light as better. His approach to lighting design is as much about celebrating the darkness and the shadow spaces as it is about the beauty of light. Whether that comes from a respect for the beauty of the night sky, a regard for people’s melatonin levels or aesthetic choice, I think it’s a profound and interesting shift in the way we think about lighting cities. It may seem ironic that a lighting designer would be talking about the need to use less light, but fortunately lighting designers aren’t paid by how many lumens of light they use in a design.

The International Dark-Sky Association has done a lot of wonderful work in helping people rethink the way we light our spaces, from introducing and modeling lighting ordinances to conducting nuts-and-bolts research on fixture design and how light affects space. There are so many strategies and technologies available to people that I think suggest a promising future. It’s similar to the way we talk about green design — in fact, smarter nighttime lighting is a LEED green building point, which is a sign that people are recognizing that lighting our environment means more than just the loss of the stars. We can use better lighting as a way to create different and, in the end, more livable spaces, where people will be able to sleep better, birds can find their way and we can connect to the stars.

Trespassing Light | Courtesy of Ian Cheney

You spend some time in the film talking about the enormous cultural impact of light. Light is used as art, as celebration, as tribute. Light is equated with safety, with social activity, with progress, with development. With light so often linked to positive notions, when and how did the idea of light pollution, and the need to “re-darken” the city, take hold? And does the cultural significance of light present obstacles to popular acceptance of light reduction?
It’s fascinating — even though the recent attention to light pollution paid by groups like the Dark-Sky Association is new, the idea that people think their city is over-lit is not. The introduction of new lighting technology has always made people long for the way the city used to be. When arc lighting and electric lighting were introduced in the late-19th century, people were immediately nostalgic for the quiet, orange glow of the gas-lit city. In the film we speak with Bill Sharpe, a historian of the way people wrote and created art about the night in New York City, whose book New York Nocturne documents some of the rich history of that nostalgia effect. But today, people dismiss that nostalgia as overly romantic because it looks back to something none of us have experienced. We’ve had electric lighting for over a century.

As you mentioned, there is an involved relationship between light and safety or crime. People feel safer in well-lit spaces. But when you start getting into the data about whether introducing light alone will consistently make a neighborhood safer or not, there are instances where it does and instances where it doesn’t, where light just moves crime elsewhere or even makes it easier for criminals to operate. But it’s inarguable that people continue to feel safer in the light. I suppose it’s in our genes. We don’t see as well at night — though we can see and navigate through shadowy space better than we think. It’s a complex issue, one that I only touch on briefly in the film.

What are some other ways that people are addressing light pollution through technological advances, legislation or individual action?
The way people are starting to rein in the light runs the gamut. There are volunteer measures, such as In New York City, where some people have signed on to shut off lights in buildings or on bridges at certain times during migration season. Then there are cities like Tucson, Arizona, where you can see the Milky Way from downtown because they have such a robust lighting ordinance.

Many lighting ordinances are designed to be gradual and realistic about what is expected of the community. They don’t require everyone change their lights immediately, which would be quite costly, but any new lights that are introduced have to be cut-off lights, which direct the light downwards, to the ground, where you actually need it, rather than through someone’s windows or up into space. Which is almost a boringly obvious idea, to not waste something.

When you get right down to the nuts and bolts of better lighting, it’s pretty easy to grasp, even if implementing those ideas isn’t always easy. It involves years of wrangling, because there’s money to be made burning fuel to waste light, and there’s an instinctive resistance to reducing the way we light. It often goes back to the question of crime that we discussed earlier. People think that if the city turns off lights, crime will follow. It’s instinctive.

New York City and New York State have seen their fair share of lighting measures introduced and failed time and again. Maybe a city like New York seems like too much of a lost cause, maybe there are other things to worry about, or maybe there’s real pressure coming from people with an interest in maintaining the status quo. But whatever the reason is, those efforts haven’t been able to gain traction as more than volunteer measures.

Brooklyn, New York | Courtesy of Ian Cheney

As you travelled from city to city, region to region, did you see differences in the way more vertical cities were tackling these challenges as compared to more sprawling cities?
This is a bit of a roundabout way to answer your question, but it ties in with how we think and talk about wilderness and the environment. Environmentalists and conservationists are often arguing about where to put our money and energy – should we conserve and preserve fenced-in parks as pure wilderness, where urban residents can visit to enjoy trees, bugs, birds, ponds and stars? Or — and it really shouldn’t be an either/or — should we put our energy into making the spaces where we live every day that much more green and livable? At the end of the day, there are limited resources and one has to figure out where to put one’s efforts.

That same debate applies to light pollution and the disappearance of the night sky. In a city like New York, should we put any effort into restricting lighting given how few stars we can see? Or should we put more energy into the suburbs, where you have at least a fighting chance of seeing the Milky Way? Or should we dedicate ourselves to preserving rural skies, where both urban and suburban residents can escape to see the night sky? Of course, I think all should be done.

But I do think bringing back even one more star to a city sky is worthwhile. Maybe that one star — and I’m paraphrasing a comment by Neil deGrasse Tyson that didn’t make it into the film — will be the star that catches some young scientist-to-be’s eye and enthralls him or her with the idea of becoming an astronomer. Or connects someone with the idea that there’s a larger world, which I think ultimately is the most important thing. The most profound risk we’re taking by losing the night sky is becoming a completely downward-looking species.

There’s something mesmerizing and unparalleled about a truly dark night sky. It’s hard not to get really cheesy, really fast when talking about it. And, just like seeing the Grand Canyon or a great whale, there’s something different about experiencing it yourself than seeing it on a television screen or in a magazine. But Neil deGrasse Tyson’s story of discovering astronomy through the planetarium, because he never saw the stars from his home in the Bronx, is a great example of how, on the one hand, the proxies we create for wilderness experiences, whether it’s Central Park or planetariums, are meaningful and important. Tyson wondered aloud whether, if he’d grown up on a farm, seeing the night sky every night, it would have inspired the same sense of awe that it did for him, having grown up in the Bronx.

As the night sky recedes from view, what do you think it means for our collective imagination, curiosity or inspiration? What happens when we don’t have access to that sense of awe?
It’s an experiment in progress. We’re doing this to ourselves. As a country, and now as a world, as we tip towards being a dominantly urban population, we are mostly growing up without the stars. On some level it remains to be seen what it will do to us. This whole film was in a way my own attempt to engage with some of those questions. I certainly don’t have all the answers.

I think we all gain wonderfully different things from our experiences with the night sky. For me, it has been a profound reminder of our place in space and a perspective on my own moment in the lifetime of the universe. It has made me really value what time I have on the planet, but I think that’s probably not a bad thing to value and to keep in mind, how remarkably unique life on the planet is.

At times the environmentalist community and the astronomy community have been at odds with one another, arguing about whether limited financial resources should be dedicated to cleaning up our mess here on this planet or exploring elsewhere. But I think the more we learn about outer space, our place in space and our relationship to the stars, the more it makes us careful citizens of the planet. That, weirdly, was one of the things I was most interested in exploring in the film – I don’t think it actually comes through very much at all, but so it goes. But I do think that the more we see the stars the more we actually care about our planet.

Haleakala, Maui, Hawaii | Courtesy of Ian Cheney

Are there other topics you wanted to explore further than didn’t make it into the film?
Sleep science. I would love to make a whole film about how we sleep. There weren’t really sleep scientists before the industrial revolution, so we don’t know that much about how we naturally sleep. Experiments have been done where people are locked away for weeks at a time to see how they sleep “on a natural cycle.” The results echo how sleep patterns used to be described in literature — people often sleep in two segments of time, waking up once in the middle of the night.

There is so much about a city that is a shock to the human immune system. Think about what you learn in seventh grade: animals exist in habitats and if you disrupt those habitats, the animals suffer. And yet somehow we don’t turn that same attention to our own habitat.

I realized — and I never used to think of it this way — that we keep exploring this question of disrupted habitat from different perspectives through our films. In King Corn, we looked at the way we eat and how it’s completely out of whack with how we’ve evolved to eat. With The Greening of Southie, a film about green building in Boston, we explored the physical spaces we find ourselves living in. And now we’re looking at this question of how we light our world and how it represents a real disruption in our circadian rhythm. We’ve evolved for many, many generations with certain cycles of light and dark. It’s very interesting to live in an urban environment and think about how can we design spaces to give us the things we want out of a city, which are many, and yet not make us sick or unhappy or solipsistic in the process.

Really we just take these recklessly boring topics like watching corn grow and watching buildings go up and star gazing — its not blockbuster stuff — and we try to suggest ways that they are fundamental to our lives.

For the film, you developed a letter-grade system for rating star visibility in different locations. Sky Village, Arizona (?) received an A; Times Square an F. The highest grade for NYC – at least of the areas you list in the film  — is a C+ (Staten Island). Did anywhere in New York City get a better grade? Are there any secret corners that are still good for stargazing?
I bet there are places in New York City that can rock a B—. Maybe Floyd Bennett Field? That’s where all the astronomers go. There’s also a wonderful guy named Jason Kendall who runs an astronomy program up in Inwood. He leads groups, does stargazing and meteor-gazing there.

What’s next for Wicked Delicate Films?
We got a little development grant from SilverDocs, in partnership with Whole Foods, for a film called BlueSpace, which will be a film about urban waterways around New York City. We’re looking at the idea that the city’s waterfronts and harbors — its “blue space” — should be considered as powerful and important a resource as its green space. I’m infatuated with that idea, especially given the city’s history of thinking of our water as a toilet. We’re just digging into that.

Courtesy of Ian Cheney

Ian Cheney is a Brooklyn-based documentary filmmaker. He grew up in New England and earned his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees at Yale. After graduate school he co-created and starred in the Peabody Award-winning theatrical hit and PBS documentary King Corn (2007), directed the feature documentary The Greening of Southie (Sundance Channel, 2008), and co-produced the Planet Green film Big River (2009). Ian maintains a 1/1000th acre farm in the back of his ’86 Dodge pickup, which is at the center of his recent film Truck Farm (2011). He has been featured in The New Yorker, The New York Times, on CNN and on Good Morning America. An avid astrophotographer, he travels frequently to show his films, lead discussions and give talks about sustainability, agriculture, and the human relationship to the natural world.

Photo by Alicia Rouault

Until the early 20th century, New York City’s waters were teeming with oysters. Some biologists estimate that the Hudson-Raritan Estuary was once home to half of the world’s oyster population, serving as both an abundant culinary delicacy and a natural water filtration system. Oysters are considered “ecosystem engineers” that shape their environment into complex three-dimensional structures to support themselves and a host of other organisms. Estuaries — bodies of water formed where freshwater and seawater meet — offer ideal conditions for these diverse ecosystems of marine and plant life to flourish. But now, due to overfishing, the destruction of natural wetlands, poor water quality from sewage overflow and decades of contamination, biodiversity has reached a low point — and the once ubiquitous oyster, a paragon of water filtration and habitat production, has nearly disappeared.

Today, the Oyster Restoration Research Project (ORRP), a partnership led by the Hudson River Foundation, the US Army Corps of Engineers, NY/NJ Baykeeper, the New York-New Jersey Harbor Estuary Program, the Urban Assembly New York Harbor School and the New York City Department of Environmental Protection, is working to reverse that trend. The ORRP, which covers an area of the estuary reaching out 25 miles from the Statue of Liberty, is bringing together policy, science and community engagement to restore a keystone oyster species once native to New York and New Jersey waterways. The nature of the restoration project is largely misunderstood as an effort to revive oysters for food. ORRP partners tell a different story, one of equal value, that brings New Yorkers to the water and puts wildlife — wildlife that can improve water quality, facilitate nutrient cycling, enhance biodiversity and stabilize our shorelines — back into our waterways.

Monitoring oysters by Soundview Park | Photo by Alicia Rouault

The program stems from a major planning document released in 2008: the Comprehensive Restoration Plan (CRP) for the New York-New Jersey Harbor Estuary. The CRP, which was developed as part of a study by the US Army Corps of Engineers – New York District, the Port Authority of New York & New Jersey and the New York-New Jersey Harbor Estuary Program, identifies a series of short- and long-term goals that aim to restore a “mosaic of habitats” to eight specific planning regions throughout the estuary. The ORRP project will help partners analyze the feasibility of this ambitious plan, which calls for restoring 500 acres of oyster reefs by 2015 and 5,000 acres by 2050. Six pilot reefs have been installed in and around New York Harbor, at Hastings on Hudson, Soundview Park, Governors Island, Bay Ridge Flats, Staten Island and Jamaica Bay. Each has been stocked with 50,000 oysters, which are being monitored for development, survival, growth and ecological performance.

Earlier this month, I joined Jim Lodge of the Hudson River Foundation, Katie Mosher-Smith and Kerstin Kalchmayr of NY/NJ Baykeeper, and Kate Boicourt of the New York-New Jersey Harbor Estuary Program to check on some recently-planted oysters in Soundview Park in the Bronx. As we donned our waders and headed towards the water, the team offered some insight into their collaborative process, the educational aim of their program and the unique challenges of bringing oysters back to New York Harbor. –A.R.

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The Oyster Restoration Research Project (ORRP) has a uniquely collaborative model. Tell us about some of the partnerships that have helped make oyster restoration a reality.
Jim Lodge: We currently have about 28 (see full list below in Comments) different organizations on the project, and within each organization there are multiple partners. Partners range from not-for-profit groups like the Hudson River Foundation, Rocking The Boat (a Bronx River-based group) and the Bronx River Alliance; to city departments, like the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation’s Natural Resources Group;  to federal government agencies, such as EPA Region Two, the Harbor Estuary Program and the US Army Corps of Engineers; to student groups, including the Urban Assembly New York Harbor School — ORRP is, at its heart, a research project, so we have a lot of academic institutions and partners on the project, including Stonybrook University and University of New Hampshire — and then, of course, NY/NJ Baykeeper.

NY/NJ Baykeeper has been a pioneer in pursuing oyster restoration for New York Harbor. They have been exploring the potential for natural recruitment of oysters since 1999. Around the same time, they started the Oyster Gardening Program, which has done a lot to highlight the challenges of restoration and the importance of bringing oysters back to the harbor.

Creating an artificial oyster reef off Governors Island, October 2010 | Photo courtesy of the US Army Corps of Engineers

The Oyster Gardening project is a public program?
Kate Boicourt: Oyster gardening is a system of citizen science that’s been used up and down the east coast for a while, engaging schools, individuals and community groups in restoration work.

Jim Lodge: It’s a strange name for what it is. It’s called a “gardening program,” so people associate it with food production. But that’s clearly not the goal. The Oyster Gardening Program teaches people about restoration through raising and cultivating oysters. It’s not just high schools that are getting involved, but community groups, senior citizen centers and preschools. That’s why the model is so powerful, because you can involve the public at multiple levels and encourage a connection between the average citizen and the estuary. And it’s fun! People get to participate, they get to watch oysters grow and eventually these oysters will be used in restoration efforts.

Kerstin Kalchmayr: We want to create an oyster reef specifically for these garden oysters so that participants can feel that they’re part of the greater project of restoring the health of the urban estuary. We want gardeners to be able to wade out and monitor their own oysters.

Part of an artificial oyster reef, October 2010 | Photo courtesy of the US Army Corps of Engineers

Where are the ORRP pilot sites?
Jim Lodge: We have six experimental research sites within New York Harbor. Starting from the south, the sites are: near Great Kills Harbor in Staten Island; Bay Ridge Flats, which is a quarter mile south of Governors Island; Buttermilk Channel, on the east side of Governors Island; there’s a site out in Soundview at the mouth of the Bronx River, which is where we’re headed today; an experimental reef site in Hastings-on-Hudson; and one in Jamaica Bay at Dubos Point.

We chose geographically dispersed sites to ensure a range of environmental conditions. We go from water with almost no salinity up at Hastings to near-seawater at the Staten Island site. Food availability varies, as do levels of oxygen. We monitor survival, growth and reproduction at each site and then look at those variables to try to understand how they influence success or failure. We are also studying predation pressures. Because we don’t have any naturally existing reefs, we need to take note of different predators across locations.

Each of the sites uses the same design. A 6-inch, granite rock, rip-rap base is followed by a veneer of clam shells and a top layer of spat-on-shell. Pete Malinowski and his students at the Harbor School cultivate the spat-on-shell in aquaculture tanks on Governors Island, which allows the juvenile oysters to settle and mature on old oyster shells before installation at each reef site.

Monitoring oyster reefs by Soundview Park | Left photo by Kate Boicourt; right photo by Alicia Rouault

What unique challenges does oyster restoration present in the Hudson-Raritan Estuary?
Jim Lodge: In places like the Chesapeake Bay and South Carolina, restoration efforts focus on providing a suitable substrate — they basically just put down shell material and there are enough larvae in the water column to take hold. We don’t have a large enough natural larval pool, so we have to go through many more time-consuming, labor-intensive steps. So we’re trying to determine how to optimize those techniques and how to take advantage of any minimal natural recruitment that we may get. Soundview has some natural oysters due to its proximity to the Long Island Sound where there is a viable oyster population.

Kate Boicourt: There’s been a specific effort to look at how we maintain our shorelines and if there are ways we can try to increase complexity and create potential for habitat. There’s not a lot of habitat on a hardened shoreline, but there are options to improve conditions. For example, oyster reef balls, which are these porous, concrete structures that mimic naturally occurring reefs and provide shelter for growing oysters. Though that’s slightly different than straight oyster restoration.

Photo by Alicia Rouault

What are your metrics for success?
Jim Lodge: To be successful on a large-scale restoration effort, you want to have natural recruitment on the reefs. But this project is focused on research and information. We want to understand how and if it is feasible to restore our oyster population, to drive future restoration efforts. And the project is not limited to oysters. We will be experimenting with different bivalves. We have to look broadly at what we’re trying to accomplish and what sort of things are going to help us reach those goals.

The Comprehensive Restoration Plan is the guiding document for what we’re trying to achieve in the region, and the Harbor Estuary Program has adopted the plan as their restoration vision. The CRP calls for about 500 acres of restored reef by 2015 — which is extremely optimistic considering it’s 2011 and we have basically none — and 5,000 acres by 2050. We don’t know if that’s realistic or feasible or not.

There has been a lot of attention given to increased usage of NYC waterways based on PlaNYC and the comprehensive waterfront plan Vision 2020. Do you see that having an effect on your project?
Jim Lodge: Oyster reefs wouldn’t be in competition with other waterway uses. Even 5,000 acres is a very small footprint within the estuary. If anything, increased attention on the waterfront is amplifying interest in restoring the habitat. People want to see the water clean.

L: Photo by Alicia Rouault | R: Raising oysters at the Harbor School; photo courtesy of the US Army Corps of Engineers

Are you in communication with or involved in other local efforts to engage oyster restoration in waterfront design, such as Kate Orff of SCAPE’s Oyster-tecture, or Mara Haseltine’s New School project? Do you see their projects having any impact on your efforts?
Katie Mosher-Smith: The director of the oyster program from Baykeeper works collaboratively with Mara Haseltine and they’re doing some illustrative experiments this year in New Jersey. We do speak with Kate Orff but we’re not directly involved with any of her efforts. They engage with different audiences than we tend to attract, which is a real benefit. Any way we can expand public interest and involvement in this issue is an advantage to our efforts.

Jim Lodge: The intersection between restoration as a planning and regulatory issue (thinking again of Vision 2020 and PlaNYC) and as an interest of the architecture and design communities is fantastic. There has always been a disconnect between restoration and planning efforts and the people on the ground. Now, our broad visions are being applied in a very real sense, providing us an opportunity to think about how to optimize that work.

Soundview Park | Photos by Alicia Rouault

What do you wish people knew about oyster restoration that is often misunderstood?
Katie Mosher-Smith: A lot of people think you’re going to eat them.

Jim Lodge: When most people think of oysters, including me in my non-work life, they think of oysters on the half shell. They think of food. The main purpose of our project is to restore oysters for their habitat value. Reefs provide habitat for fish and invertebrates. We’re also looking at the potential for water quality improvements, which we think might have limited local effect. There have been other areas of the country where people are building reefs to help eroding shorelines. The word we’d like to get out is that it’s not about bringing back a lost fishery, but lost habitat value.

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In the past year, public planning sessions were held in the eight planning regions of the Hudson-Raritan Estuary to define potential sites for restoration and to incorporate citizen input into the development of public access points for shoreline restoration sites. People were, and still are, able to nominate a site for land acquisition and restoration if they can demonstrate its potential habitat value. The sites in question are documented on oasisnyc.net, a mapping site developed by Steve Romalewski previously featured on Urban Omnibus.

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Photo by Alicia Rouault

Kate Boicourt began the position of Restoration Coordinator of the NY-NJ Harbor Estuary Program in September 2010. Through this position, she works to coordinate and advance restoration and public access activities throughout the harbor estuary, with a particular focus on those within the goals of the Comprehensive Restoration Plan. Prior to coming to HEP, Kate worked on climate change adaptation issues for the State of Maryland, estuarine ecology and science communication for NOAA/University of Maryland, and collaborated with the Matthew Baird team for MoMA’s Rising Currents Exhibit. Kate holds an MS from the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Science, where she studied the success and effects of Phragmites australis removal, and a BA from Kenyon College in Biology.

Kerstin Kalchmayr is the Oyster Restoration Program Field and Project Assistant for NY/NJ Baykeeper. She is originally from South Africa and has been living in New York since November 2008. She graduated from the University of Stellenbosch in 2005, where she completed a Bachelor of Science Honours degree majoring in Zoology. After completing her studies she went abroad to Central America and lived in Costa Rica for a year. In Costa Rica she coordinated two sea turtle conservation restoration projects working predominantly with olive ridley and leatherback sea turtles both on the Pacific and the Carribean coast. It was the work with the sea turltes that inspired her to work for the conservation and restoration of marine/estuarine habitats.

Jim Lodge has been a project manager with the Hudson River Foundation since 2002. Prior to joining the Hudson River Foundation, Lodge held a position as an Oceanographer with the New York District, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. His primary interest is integrating science and policy research into government decision making. Jim served as project coordinator and a primary author for the Target Ecosystem Characteristics (TEC) project and is currently coordinating the Oyster Restoration Research Project (ORRP) a multi-partner research project to determine the feasibility of restoring oyster to the NY/NJ Harbor Estuary. Jim holds a Masters of Science degree in Marine Environmental Management from the Marine Science Research Center at Stony Brook.

Katie Mosher-Smith manages the Oyster Restoration Program/New York for NY/NJ Baykeeper and is the Field Project Manager for the ORRP. Prior to that she served as the field manager for the Bay Ridge Flats Oyster Project and as Baykeeper’s Oyster Gardening Coordinator.

Interview conducted by Alicia Rouault, Urban Omnibus Assistant Editor.

Spanning the corridor between the 42nd Street/Bryant Park BDFV station and the 5 Av 7 station, Samm Kunce’s mosaic “Under Bryant Park” is an evocative imagining of the root and water paths behind the tiled walls. Photo by Zach Youngerman.

Unexpected stalactites drip down from the ceilings. Along the center of the tracks are rills. Somehow in the subways, there is always water. Pulled by gravity, it moves through the small spaces in concrete and soil – technically called pores – and seeps out through the tile grout. Like the puddle we step over at the corner, most of us don’t spend much time thinking about how the water got there or where it’s going.

The movement of water is universal. What takes it out of the ordinary is the infrastructure we have built around and in spite of it. Dr. Eric Sanderson’s decade-long project and eponymous book to reconstruct the ecology of 1607 Mannahatta notes that there were once 34.9 miles of “rocky headwater stream communities” and 14.2 miles of “marsh headwater stream communities” on our island, in addition to numerous springs, ponds, and intermittent streams.

There are some remote places of the outer boroughs where ancient but small waterways run above ground. Though fed by storm drains, Gerritsen Creek travels uncovered in Marine Park, Brooklyn, creating a estuarine ecology in an otherwise saltwater marsh. Similarly, Alderbrook in the Riverdale neighborhood of the Bronx emerges from storm drains before rushing down steep slopes to the Hudson. Tibbets Brook, whose headwaters are in sylvan Westchester, is the reverse. Its uncovered route collects in charming Van Cortlandt Lake before being sent through culverts alongside the Major Deegan Expressway and unnoticed into the Harlem River.

But all of Manhattan’s water paths were filled in or covered over. Now, the city’s 46 inches of annual rainfall are blocked by impervious tar roofs, concrete sidewalks and asphalt streets. To handle the water that once moved over and through the ground are storm drains and thousands of miles of pipes that lead the water into sewers. With even minor rainfall, the combined sewers overflow with rainwater and untreated wastewater into receiving waterbodies, violating the Clean Water Act.

The entity in charge of stormwater, the Department of Environmental Protection has undertaken a substantial effort to integrate natural systems with infrastructure, partly in response to groups like the Stormwater Infrastructure Matters (SWIM) Coalition and the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, which imposes Clean Water Act fines. The DEP outlined its system-wide endeavor to improve water quality in its recently-released Green Infrastructure Plan. In place of traditional grey infrastructure like pipes and storage basins, the plan details their methods for capturing and absorbing water through green infrastructure – enlarged street tree pits, rain gardens, and greenspace.

The wonder of green infrastructure is that it involves plants and a host of other species which become more productive and therefore more valuable over time. Plant a sapling and fifteen years later it absorbs more water, provides more shade, produces more oxygen. The microorganisms in its soil filter more pollutants. As written about in an Omnibus feature last month, the DEP has created a model strategy for addressing runoff in spacious Staten Island through “Blue Belts” which take advantage of natural mechanisms.

Rendering of Saw Mill River after daylighting | Courtesy of Saratoga Associates

Work is now underway to make visible the Saw Mill River in Yonkers, which is currently covered by a public parking lot called Larkin Plaza. The raison d’etre of that industrial city, the River had been put into a flume in the 1920s by the Army Corps of Engineers as a sanitation and flood control measure. The support of ever-broadening stakeholders, including Governor Pataki, Yonkers mayor Philip A. Amicone, former State Senator Nick Spano and opponent-turned-proponent developers, culminated in the groundbreaking of the project last month. The discovery of American Eel in the River by local environmental group Groundwork Hudson Valley critically shifted the project design from an open hard-edged channel to a recreated habitat.

Not that the Saw Mill’s “daylighting” means restoration to a former ecological functionality. In fact, the water flowing over replanted reeds and rocks arranged just-so will be ancillary to the flume. Such limits to ecological restoration force us to evolve past a dualistic stance that puts storm drains in one category and naturalized creeks in another. The water-oriented environmental comeback stories in New York have come because groups like the New York Restoration Project, the Bronx River Alliance, and the Parks Department’s Natural Resources Group have embraced such an understanding.

Every couple of years, the New York Times runs an article about a leaky basement which proved mysterious until a fortuitous discovery placed the site in the path of an ancient stream bed. Scott Cuppett, who works for the NYS DEC’s Hudson River Estuary Program, is skeptical about any permanent streams hidden beneath Manhattan, though. “Once you cover it over and put it into a pipe, you disconnect it longitudinally and laterally from groundwater, which is what feeds streams in dry weather.”

Doing so also disconnects us, simultaneously mediating our interactions with and altering the environment. We encounter water at our faucet and toilet, occasionally in the street, and abstractly on our bills. We are ignorant of, and thereby dangerously irresponsible for, our combined and individual actions. Making our water infrastructure more visible and highlighting where our water is already in sight will help educate us.

New York’s Green Infrastructure Plan calls for capturing 10% of the first inch of rainfall (consistently the most polluted) through green infrastructure. Hopefully these new infrastructures will consider how heuristic the user interfaces with that system are. Are there innovative ways to let residents know that they’re in the Gerritsen Creek watershed even if the Creek remains channelized at its source? Could the markers that read “Don’t Pollute. Drains to River” be put at the edge of subway platforms?

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Zach Youngerman is a designer who works broadly on integrating cities and ecology. He’s enjoying freelance writing. He grew up in Riverdale, in the Bronx. He spent four years in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and the breaching of the Federal levees doing recovery planning and green stormwater management. His goal is to help citizens understand, enjoy, evaluate and manage urban structures and their associated natural environments.

The views expressed here are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.