-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).

These days, the imperative of sustainable design invokes the health of ecosystems more readily than the health of individuals. Fossil fuels expended, old growth forests cut down, carbon produced in manufacturing: the environmental stakes are well known. But the biological implications of the choices we make in constructing our buildings and cities are harder to come by. The shocking medical realities of malignant substance like asbestos have led to surprisingly little public information about substances that may be damaging, if only we had sufficient data from consistent testing.

To redress this lack of information, the architecture firm Perkins+Will went about creating a free, online database – called Transparency – of building materials that contain substances known or suspected to be harmful to health. The database is geared towards the consumers who most often specify what materials should be used in a building project – architects and interior designers. The firm based their listings on a careful, two-year review of scientific papers and government research. The goal is to “encourage the building product marketplace to become more transparent from extraction to end of life for all points of contact, from manufacturers to de-constructors, so that people are further empowered make informed decisions about specifying, maintaining and disposing of the products in their buildings.”

In the interview below, Peter Syrett, Associate Principal at Perkins+Will explains the development and applications of Transparency, reflecting on architectural responsibility, the nature of scientific certainty and the role of buildings as instruments of public health.

- C.S.

Image courtesy of Perkins+Will

Urban Omnibus: Tell me about Transparency.
Peter Syrett: Transparency is, first and foremost, a concept. We’ve applied this concept to the development of an online tool to help consumers or anyone else understand the total footprint of a project or a product in ecologically- or socially-responsible terms. The classic example of this type of thinking is, “What’s the environmental footprint of my lunch? Where does it comes from?” If it’s sourced locally, it has a lower embodied energy than if it’s a piece of beef from Argentina with a higher embodied energy. The point is to try to understand the implications of your actions as a consumer.

How does the tool work from a consumer’s point of view?
As a consumer, your power is at the point of purchase. In order for you to apply that power, you need to understand, at the point of purchase, what you’re buying. That’s the idea of transparency. At the point of purchase of a building product, the specifier or gatekeeper of that purchase is often the architect or designer. And so it is up to the architect or designer to understand the ecological composition of a carpet or a window system or a cladding system outside a building.

In essence, right now, as an architect, you’re blind when you buy something. You are privy to a product’s price, you are privy to how it relates to certain building codes – how it would combust, etc. You may be privy to some of the manufacturing process, but not all. And you may be privy to some of the composition of the product, but not all. But you are unable to make a comprehensively informed decision on your purchase. Transparency is about being able to make informed decisions, to compare in a meaningful way multiple things next to each other and understand the ecological implications of your purchase. Daniel Goleman writes about this in his book Ecological Intelligence, and so we are seeking to apply that logic to the building product world.

When and why did Perkins+Will see the need to establish this service?
This is an issue that some of my colleagues at Perkins+Will and I have been wrestling with for a long time. Over a decade ago, I was working on cancer center and we decided that we wanted to make it carcinogenic-free. We thought, somewhat naively, that this would be a straightforward or self-evident process. It wasn’t. We simply couldn’t get the information.

And so we locked onto this idea of finding ways to make the information available. How else can we make sure that we’re making things in line with our values? If the building materials in a cancer center are possibly carcinogenic, clearly that’s against the Hippocratic Oath to do no harm.

Do you see the information and materials listed as part of a growing database?
As I see it, there are two ends to the spectrum. There’s understanding what the implications of substances in buildings materials are — that’s our precautionary list, our list of asthmagens and asthma triggers, and our list of flame retardants – and then there’s understanding what the materials are made of in the first place – that’s our work with construction specialists to label a product with lists of its components. With those two ends, you have the clarity of knowing what’s actually in the product and also a detailed back-up to help sift through what government regulators think may be harmful to humans or environments. Our databases are living lists: substances come on and off the market; regulations change; other governments are doing their own testing (the impact of the European Union’s chemical policy will obviously be important to materials specifiers in the US, for example).

What are some of the other ways the information is categorized on the site?
If you go the website, transparency.perkinswill.com, you can search by health effects; you can search by division numbers according to the Construction Specifications Institute (like concrete, masonry, metals); you can search by substance name. There are several ways to search, for example, if you are concerned about respiratory issues in particular.

We started in 2009 by releasing our Precautionary List, a list of substances that, whenever possible (and it’s not always possible), should be avoided. We soon realized that there are big holes in the knowledge base, particularly opaque sections of the material market. Flame retardants, for example: there’s virtually no information out there. So we hired a researcher from Berkeley, Dr. Arlene Blum, whose team did some original research. Asthma triggers are another important area about which very little information is compiled. Eleven people in the world die every day from asthma, and 30,000 people have asthma attacks.

Speaking of the precautionary list, the website invokes the “precautionary principle.” Could you explain what that means?
The precautionary principle comes from the Wingspread Conference, which was a gathering of scientists, lawyers, policy makers and environmentalists in 1998. Its primary concern was with climate change. The principle essentially states that in the lack of scientific certitude on a topic or an issue, one should choose a more conservative position rather than assuming that there’s nothing to worry about. That’s what we have applied in our compiling of the existing information about material safety. In other words, if you worry about the consequences of your acts, and if you are given a choice and you don’t know scientifically whether something is good or bad, then is better to err on the conservative rather than a purely rational position based on the limited testing that’s been done.

Science has never been about certitude. Once one scientific question is answered, there is always another question to be asked. And in the global climate change debate, we’ve seen people use that fundamental structure of science against what the Nobel Laureates agree is pretty clear evidence about climate change.

Of course, science will continue to explore human health and substances. But it may not clearly come back to the lay population, like myself, in a way that can be applied without a huge amount of additional research. The issue is not so much the lack of scientific study, it’s the lack of people’s ability to digest the information that’s out there. Both sides of the fence agree on that.

I’m interested in what you were saying at the beginning about a comprehensive understanding of the footprint of products and materials, from extraction to disposal. Is that sort of full life cycle, supply chain, systems thinking different from the ways in which existing regulation or standards view material safety?
Yes and no. In essence, the regulatory framework that governs what goes into building products relies on the permitted substances listed in the Toxic Control Substances Act of 1976, which lists about 82,000 substances. Of those, about 600 appear on an EPA watch list, and of those only 200 have been tested and only five have been banned. In other words, the substances in our building products are pretty much unregulated and unmeasured. So the burden is on the consumer to know what might be harmful, and yet it’s so opaque that it creates a central contradictory proposition. In terms of regulation and the market, the government isn’t looking at this terribly well. And for many reasons, we don’t really know what the products are made of. So it’s a real quandary. That’s why the concept of transparency is so important.

The food industry presents a good model for us. It’s a much more transparent industry in terms of content. Take, for example, a company like Coca-Cola. It has been able to maintain its top secret formula while still listing the primary ingredients on the can so a consumer can decide if she wants to put that in her body or not. So I don’t really buy the proprietary argument that more information infringes on intellectual property. If there’s a chance that BPA is harmful to infants, then of course I want to know that my baby’s formula is BPA-free.

Which raises the question, how has the construction industry reacted to Transparency?
Very well, I would say. This past year has been the year of transparency, in a way. Initiatives launched at GreenBuild; the Environmental Product Declaration process developed by UL Envrionment that recently came out. I think these efforts show that the thinking around this path is beginning to change and hopefully in the near future we’ll see broader adoption by the whole design committee. After all, one of the reasons to share this information is to begin to move the whole market. It doesn’t help if we have all this knowledge and research and silo it. We encourage our peers, firms large and small, to use it. The more people use it, the better the whole industry will be — and we hope that our peers have other knowledge that they can begin to share. Maybe there’s a whole other way to think about this profession, to think about resources, to begin to get the greatest leverage out of our collective experience.

How do you personally define responsibility in architecture?
A long time ago, people understood the importance of building for their own health. It was more immediate because buildings were shelter and therefore survival. I believe that buildings are essential to public health, I believe buildings are instruments of public health. And to that end, I want to make sure that I make environments that are healthy and allow people to be healthy and thrive. And that means understanding what they are made of.

Unless otherwise noted, all images by Marcelo López Dinardi.

Peter Syrett AIA, LEED AP, is Associate Principal and K-12 Education Market Leader at Perkins+Will’s New York office. His expertise focuses on sustainable institutional projects, specifically K-12 and healthcare work. He leads teams in viewing the larger ecological picture, one that looks beyond LEED, overseeing projects from brainstorm to detail. Peter’s philosophy on design is the creation of a unique conceptual vocabulary that embodies a client’s mission in space, material, form and character. He lectures regularly on green institutional design and is a recognized expert in the field. He is currently teaching a class at the New York University School of Continuing and Professional Studies entitled “Managing Sustainable Building Projects.”

screengrab of Examining MetroCard Usage from wsj.com

EXAMINING METROCARD USAGE
The Wall Street Journal has sifted through a year’s worth of data about MetroCard use, recently released by the MTA, to see what they could find out about how people move around New York. By breaking down what kinds of cards (unlimiteds, pay-per-rides, senior discount) are used where, patterns emerge across demographics and neighborhoods. A high percentage of senior discount MetroCards swiped at a station suggests an older population, and the variation in use of 30-day-unlimited cards versus pay-per-ride cards tells a story of where commuters go as opposed to visitors. The dataset also coincides with the most recent fare hike, which allows for additional analysis into how the cost increase has affected ridership city-wide as well as ways it has disproportionately affected people of lower income levels. Read more about the analysis here, or head straight to the interactive map to explore for yourself.

EAST RIVER FERRY EXCEEDS EXPECTATIONS
When East River Ferry service launched early this summer, the city was optimistic that New Yorkers would take to the waters for a more pleasant commute away from subway crowds and service changes, but detractors claimed that waterborne travel was a flash in the pan, noting a drop in ridership once a month-long free pilot period ended. But now, word is that ferry use has exceeded expectations, drawing twice as many riders as anticipated (on weekends, ridership is six times higher than projected). Ferry operators are eager to expand service in response to enthusiasm and demand from both residents and tourists, and both the operators and the City agree that ferry service has the potential to bring economic activity and aid development in areas along the route. But city officials cite limited financial resources as a significant obstacle, and some are waiting until cold weather sets in to determine whether adding capacity year-round makes sense. Read more in The New York Times and The Brooklyn Paper.

Image by Massachusetts Institute of Technology via theatlanticcities.com

CAT SCANS FOR CITIES
Improved energy efficiency and reduced environmental impact are topics that dominate contemporary discourse about our built environment and urban spaces. Now, cities have a new tool to properly identify existing problems and better understand how to address them. A group at the MIT Field Intelligence Lab is advancing the use of “energy diagnostic imaging,” inspired by medical diagnostic scans like MRIs and CAT scans. Infrared cameras capture differences in energy use in the urban landscape in “thermal portraits” that divulge where insulation is failing or excess energy is being produced. Pinpointing the source of the inefficiency allows for more accurate and effective solutions, and a healthier city. Read more on The Atlantic Cities.

NEW ZONING FOR NEW YORK
The 1906 and 1916 zoning ordinances in New York City were landmark policies that combined use zoning and form zoning, and were incredibly forward thinking for their time, setting the standards for cities around the country. But our zoning ordinances, which have enormous impact on determining the form of our built environment, haven’t been comprehensively rethought for 50 years. Last week, during the Municipal Art Society’s second annual MAS Summit for New York City, a panel of zoning experts convened for “A New Zoning Resolution for the 21st Century: Its Necessity and Potential” to discuss the ways New York’s regulations don’t align with the changing needs of its residents and what could be done to make them better. Touching on land use codes, environmental review processes and contextual zoning, the conversation also focused on housing issues, such as the restrictive definition of what a “family” is according to zoning code. These topics were highlighted by panelist Jerilyn Perine, the executive director of the Citizens Housing & Planning Council (and our partner in Making Room, the project we introduced earlier this month to address how we can make New York’s housing more responsive to the ways we live now). For more coverage of the panel, check out Streetsblog.

Video of “Rebuilding Crumbling Infrastructure” with Chris Ward, Vishaan Chakrabarti and Madelyn Wills from masnycsummit201

REGION IN CRISIS
Also at the MAS Summit, outgoing Port Authority Executive Director Chris Ward expressed some big ideas for New York. Calling the New York metro area a region in “economic and environmental crisis,” he emphasized the need for the city to wean itself off its dependence on truck transport and instead advocated the expansion of freight rail service — a topic we explored in depth earlier this week. Equally transformative was his vision for the Brooklyn waterfront and Governors Island. According to Ward, the success of Governors Island rests upon moving the activity of the Red Hook Container Terminal further south, to the South Brooklyn Marine Terminal, and rethinking the use of different portions of Brooklyn’s waterfront, focusing instead on recreation and transportation to spur development. For more on Ward’s ideas from the Summit, as well as a recap of frequent Omnibus contributor Vishaan Chakrabarti’s thoughts on the advantages of intense densification for New York from the same session, click here. And to learn about Patrick Foye, Governor Cuomo’s choice to run the Port Authority when Ward steps down at the end of this month, click here.

MTA MANUFACTURING
Chris Ward’s proposal to shift industrial use out of Red Hook doesn’t mean the city is ready to abandon industry in the five boroughs. In fact, efforts are strong to restore manufacturing capabilities to some key sites. Building the Future, a conference organized a few weeks ago by “a coalition of union interests, policy organizations and sustainable-living advocates,” met to discuss options for encouraging the return of manufacturing to both New York City and State. One proposal: manufacturing for the MTA. The city’s public transportation system is in a constant state of disrepair — as many things that are loved and used constantly often are — but the production of repair parts and new vehicles is increasingly contracted to facilities out of state. Returning MTA manufacturing and repair to New York would be a boon for the economy and the job market, so what’s holding the MTA back from staying local? The buildings still exist, the workers are still here, but the money isn’t. Both the city and the state have decreased funds towards the MTA in the past three decades, and the proposals set forth by Building the Future would require unavailable public funds. Read more in The New York Times.

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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.

DOT rendering of potential wayfinding signage | Image via NYCDOT

WALK THIS WAY
This week, the New York City Department of Transportation released a request for proposals to develop a comprehensive pedestrian “wayfinding system” in four districts: Long Island City, Queens; Prospect Heights/Crown Heights, Brooklyn; and Chinatown and parts of Midtown in Manhattan. The RFP is, in part, a response to the DOT statistic that 9 percent of New Yorkers and 27 percent of visitors admitted to being lost in the past week. The selected system will cater to both locals and visitors, allowing people to better gauge travel time and navigate unfamiliar neighborhoods. “As our streets become safer, more inviting places, it’s even more important that a common language unite these spaces and open them up in new and exciting ways,” said Commissioner Sadik-Khan. See more from the DOT here.

Chart from US and Canada Green City Index

GREEN CITIES
The US and Canada Green City Index report was recently released by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), commissioned by Siemens, ranking NYC as the third greenest city in North America. The survey took into account 31 factors developed by a panel of experts in environmental sustainability, which rated cities on environmental impact in land use, waste, air, transportation and a variety of other environmental categories. New York beat out all other cities in Transport and Land Use (scoring major points for density and public transportation), but was ranked 16 out of 27 on waste management. To read the full report on New York and other cities, see the full report here.

SAFE STREETS
Last month, Mayor Bloomberg revealed new safety measures as part of the DOT’s revamped pedestrian safety plan. Calling for a reduced speed limit of 20 mph in the Claremont neighborhood of the Bronx, this is the first manifestation of the DOT’s plan to introduce new slow speed zones around the city. DOT will also be placing radar-equipped signage throughout the boroughs to notify motorists of their speed and intimidating digital displays of skeletons to discourage dangerous driving. Mayor Bloomberg was joined by DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan and UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon (to support the “Decade of Action for Road Safety”) to announce the safety initiative. A report released by Transportation Alternatives states that 39 percent of observed motorists drive in excess of the 30mph limit, vindicating what many bikers and pedestrians know all too well. Secretary General Ki-moon noted that the chance of surviving after being struck by a vehicle traveling at 40mph is only 30 percent, and that nationally road fatalities kill 1.3 million people per year and injure another 20 to 50 million more. Read more on the story in coverage from Streetsblog.

Image via FOP

NYC WATER: GEOLOGIC CITY
Friends of the Pleistocene published a fascinating Geologic City Report on New York City’s relationship with our drinking water, how aquatic architecture shapes dynamic space, and what happens to road salt, waste, and other solvent undesirables once they “disappear.” Even with some of the cleanest and tastiest water in the country, sources of NYC drinking water are still exposed to “microbial contaminants, inorganic contaminants, pesticides and herbicides, organic chemical compounds, and radioactive contaminants.” Thankfully, the city has intricate sanitation and delivery infrastructure in place to safeguard consumption, much of which remains generally unknown to the public. 97 percent of water reaching the city every day is carried solely by gravity via channels, tunnels and pipes. The system itself, which you can read more about in this 2008 story in The New York Times, provides water for 9 million residents through a network of turn-of-the-century reservoirs and aqueducts. City Water Tunnel No. 3 is currently under construction with a completion date slated for 2020 and a budget of $6 billion dollars. The new tunnel will help to ease the demand on the two older tunnels, both of which are in dire need of inspection and repairs. Read the full story at FOP and learn more about their Geologic City Reports in a piece they wrote for Urban Omnibus last year.

EVENTS & TO-DOs:

BEAUX ARTS BALL
Save the Date: The Architectural League of New York’s annual Beaux Arts Ball will be held this year on September 17th, 2011! Stay tuned for more details about this year’s location, the designers who will create the environment for the event and how to buy tickets. In the meantime, take a look at photos from past Beaux Arts Balls over on archleague.org.

FIELD GUIDE TO PHYTOREMEDIATION: NYC-based design project A Field Guide to Phytoremediation has launched a Kickstarter campaign ending July 30th. Kaja Kühl, founder of youarethecity and creator of A Field Guide to Phytoremediation, hopes the guide will reflect her research on vacant lots and provide a methodology for DIY phytoremediation. The funds will directly support a print version of  FIELD GUIDE (a DIY guide book for phytoremediation) and help build an on-site installation at La Finca del Sur, a community farm in the Bronx. Find out more about phytoremediation in Kühl’s 2010 Urban Omnibus piece.

ELASTIC CITY TOUR: Elastic City is premiering four new walks with women in July, with Andrea Polli hosting “City Island Hop,” a walk to discover City Island. Although technically part of NYC, City Island remains isolated, sitting just on the border of Nassau County. Incorporating anthropological field study techniques, this walk will use the island as a living laboratory for exploring New York City’s history and future. Participants will be engaged in exercises designed to observe the environment and decipher its visual and aural cues and uncover the relatively unknown wonders of this “island existence.” See here for more on the tours and to read up on Elastic City’s past work, check out our interview with EC founder Todd Shalom and participating artist Neil Freeman.

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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.

Dana Gumb has been working on the Staten Island Bluebelt since 1988. He started first with the Department of City Planning and then went on to lead the Bluebelt project at the Department of Environmental Protection (NYC DEP), the agency responsible for the City’s water supply — that’s 1 billion gallons a day, 7,000 miles of water mains and 7,400 miles of sewer lines. NYC DEP started acquiring property for the Bluebelt in the early 1990s and since 1995 has worked with the water engineering firm Hazen and Sawyer alongside teams of consultants ranging from environmental planners to archaeologists to architects. In the interview below, Gumb sketches out an overview of how the project has evolved. And he reveals how the project goes way beyond stormwater control, probing the intersections between land use planning, environmental engineering, improving public health, providing open space and sustaining biodiversity. -C.S.

Left: Headline news of the kind of storm that crippled Staten Island before the Bluebelt. Right: A Bluebelt waterway performing its natural function: to convey, store, and filter stormwater | Images courtesy of Hazen and Sawyer

What is the Staten Island Bluebelt project and how did it come to be?
In the mid-1970s, Staten Island was in the midst of a huge wave of development and it lacked the infrastructure to support it. Specifically, storm drainage and sanitary sewers. Some creative thinkers working in the Department of City Planning at that time recognized that a lot of wetlands were still in existence. A wetland is an area that is inundated for a certain period of time during the year, frequently enough that its soil and vegetation can thrive under water. So, rather than building a costly conventional storm sewer system — especially costly when you are dealing with a low density, suburban development — some visionary city planners decided to use the wetlands for purposes of stormwater control.

Basically, the Bluebelt project is trying to replicate the pre-development hydrology of these wetland systems. In the 10,000 years since the last glacier, Wisconsin, retreated from the area and left the current topography and watersheds in its wake, Staten Island has mostly been the site of forests, meadows, maybe a few farms here and there, but basically nothing that was too much for the stream to handle. These days, instead of forests and farms you have roadways and rooftops. So, you don’t get the infiltration of the storm water into the ground any more. You get much more runoff, which, at its peak, becomes a big slug of water that arrives at the stream all at once. What we are trying to do is to hold that water back in extended detention ponds and then slowly release it. That way, instead of this flash flood situation, where the water bursts down into the creek system and ruins it, we are able to control flooding and preserve the stream system as much as possible.

How the Bluebelt works. Adapted by Purva Jain from an interactive diagram produced by NYC DEP.

A lot of the areas that we clean up and and where we create wetlands haven’t seen a positive measure since European settlement on Staten Island. Our process combines stormwater management with natural area restoration so we get a bunch of benefits in one go: flood control, water quality improvement and a new natural area for birds, aquatic life and, in some cases, park access for citizens.

We didn’t call it “green infrastructure” at the time that we started this. But the idea of “stream valley parks” – linear, open space systems that reach into communities while providing drainage service for flood prone areas – is an urban planning concept that goes way back. Frederick Law Olmsted’s plan for the Emerald Necklace in Boston follows the same basic idea. In Staten Island in the ’70s, some basic assets were there to begin with: Staten Island is the last frontier of freshwater wetlands in New York City.

Left: Constructing a wetland. Right: Carefully planned landscaped zones remove pollutants while maintaining biodiversity | Images courtesy of Hazen and Sawyer

At the time, were there other examples of using wetlands to deal with stormwater elsewhere in the country? Or was this idea something we had forgotten about since the days of Olmsted?
The concept of a “stream valley park” was around, especially in other suburban areas. The cutting-edge aspect that distinguishes the Bluebelt program from earlier projects is this concept of BMPs – Best Management Practices. When we say Best Management Practices we are talking about best practices in the management of stormwater, in controlling the quality and quantity of the water runoff that eventually finds its way into the stream system and the receiving waters.

Wetlands are the planet’s kidneys. Our goal is to re-introduce wetlands disturbed by Staten Island’s development.

Typically, in other systems, the drainage mechanism is just a simple storm sewer — one that just dumps the water into the stream system. This approach is limited for two reasons. In terms of quantity control, it means you get these slugs of stormwater traveling through the stream system at high velocities, causing stream banks to collapse, the streams to fill with sediment and the eventual loss of the streams’ capacity to convey water. In terms of quality control, you get all sorts of contaminants washing off street pavements and rooftops and making their way into the stream system.

The Staten Island Bluebelt works differently. It’s a system of BMPs on a large scale — about one third of the land area of Staten Island will be served by the Bluebelt system eventually – all municipally owned and operated. In other parts of the country, particularly in the Chesapeake Bay, you’ll find isolated, private landowners with a BMP in place to improve water runoff conditions. You might find, for example, a Kentucky Fried Chicken with a little constructed wetland pond. The Staten Island Bluebelt stands out in a national perspective for its scale: we have plans for about 90 BMPs in South Richmond – of which 50 are built and in operation – and plans for 30 more in the mid-island area.

The watersheds of South Richmond | Image courtesy of NYC DEP

How do you plan for something on that scale that also has to respond to such specific conditions in each instance?
To put it in a few words, we’ve based everything on watershed level planning. A watershed is a geographic area that contributes water to a particular stream or water body. South Richmond has about 15 or 16 watersheds, and for each one the first step is to look at zoning to determine the ultimate development pattern within that watershed. Next, we build a mathematical, hydrological model that will predict what the flows are going to be in the stream system. We then acquire the land around the stream system so that we can maintain the streams as a way to convey the stormwater to the ultimate receiving waters. In a conventional suburban sewer system, when the water gets to the end of the street it is simply dumped into the stream. The cutting-edge aspect of the Bluebelt is that at each and every storm sewer discharge point, at each point where the gray infrastructure transitions into green infrastructure, we have these special facilities — the BMPs — that address the issues of urban stormwater discharge in wetland conditions. Sometimes it’s as simple as a series of sumps — or holes in the ground — that slow the storm water down and allow for sediments to settle, accumulate and eventually get removed by our maintenance forces. Once contaminants have flowed into the natural receiving water body, you can never get them out.

Within each watershed, the best site for BMPs is a disturbed wetland – an area that has been filled or paved or otherwise messed up, but yet remains low lying ground. In the last 20 years we have learned a lot about how to construct a wetland, how to get the plant material right, etc. Wetland scientists tell me that wetland plants are unique: while submerged, they are pumping oxygen down into the root mass creating aerobic conditions in what would typically only be anaerobic. Aerobic conditions in the root zone support the bacteria that can eat up the water’s contaminants. Bacteria are the workforces of our planet, breaking everything down and allowing for cycling of nutrients.

Wetlands are considered the planet’s kidneys: they filter out and remove contaminants. Our goal is to re-introduce some of the wetlands disturbed by Staten Island’s development.

Clockwise from top left: Landscaping plan for stormwater wetland in Blue Heron Park; elevation of typical stone faced headwall; cross section through stormwater wetland shows landscaping and vegetation details | Images courtesy of NYC DEP

It sounds like the program was instituted just in time. If it had gone another 10 years…
That’s right. The wave of development started after the Verrazano was opened in 1964. But some of this story goes back to the boom times of the 1920s. Old farms were sub-divided, streets were laid out on paper and many little lots were sold sight unseen. Many people in Brooklyn and elsewhere were persuaded by the possibility of owning a little piece of New York – but little did they know that in certain cases the lot they bought was in the middle of a swamp. And then, when the Depression hit, people could not pay their property taxes and a huge amount of land went into city ownership. So, that was kind of a basic asset for the Bluebelt.

The point is to cobble together whatever public property we can – parkland, highway rights of way, land owned by the State’s Department of Environmental Conservation. The DEP’s acquisition program targeted the missing links, and in all we have amassed 350 acres. Anybody who says condemnation is easy hasn’t been through it! Reviews, public hearings, contacting owners… Luckily, we haven’t had a lot of controversy because in most cases owners are dying to get rid of this property. A common scenario we hear is: “Grandma bought this property in 1924 and every Thanksgiving we get together and laugh about how ridiculous it was that she bought land in that swamp out there. You want to buy it? Oh, great!”

So none of this would have been possible without city ownership?
Absolutely. In terms of the BMP development, we have to be able to do the construction, land-work and earth-moving on the properties. We need to ensure the conveyance capacity of the stream – that we are not flooding anybody out.

In a lot of other places, you’ll find a big watershed with a lot of political sub-divisions, where trying to get everybody together to make a single, watershed-level plan is very difficult. So, that’s one of our advantages, and why we have been able to go as far as we have. We’re lucky that we have a unified DEP agency that can manage this scale of planning.

The Lighthouse Avenue culvert at Richmond Creek | Image courtesy of Hazen and Sawyer

Which leads me to wonder, to what extent it is scalable to other parts of the city and the country?
The Bluebelt system fits right in with PlaNYC and the stormwater plan that was done back in 2008-2009 that mentions the Bluebelt as part of the green infrastructure of the city. DEP has projects going in Queens and the Bronx, both of which have pretty sizable BMPs. The basic idea, again, is that you have a conventional sewer system with a pipe that comes down to a certain discharge point where you want to add a BMP. Making a pond BMP works well with sewer projects that are adjacent to parks with surface water features. We can fix up the park and manage the stormwater at the same time. For example, Springfield Lake in southeast Queens has never been emptied since the 1930s, when it was built. There are maybe six inches of water in it; algae blooms in the summer. We are going to dredge the lake, make it a part of the drainage system, and add BMPs at each discharge point to intercept sediments.

And yes, there is applicability elsewhere in the country as well. There are a lot of areas where private builders are trying to create these BMPs. One area, in our experience, that has attracted a lot of interest is field management: How exactly and how often do you clean these things out? What is the best way of measuring the accumulation of sediment? What are the design features that make the maintenance easy to accomplish? Because we have so many BMPs in a very distinct geographical area and a single municipal agency has control over this very large area — like I said, it is possibly the largest municipally owned system of BMPs — the Bluebelt has attracted a lot of interest and continues to set national standards for managing the quality and quantity of stormwater runoff.

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Further reading:

• Gumb, “Staten Island History and Bluebelt Land Acquisitions” in Clear Waters (a publication of the New York Water Environment Association), Winter 2009.

• Garin, Gumb et al., “Bluebelt Beginnings” in Clear Waters (a publication of the New York Water Environment Association), Winter 2009.

• Brauman, Gumb, and Duerkes, “Designing for Wildlife in the Bluebelt” in Clear Waters (a publication of the New York Water Environment Association), Winter 2009.

• Hsu, “Sustainable New York City“  (a project of the Design Trust for Public Space and the New York City Office of Environmental Coordination), 2006.

Photo by Flickr user niznoz

Stormwater in New York City is everybody’s and nobody’s problem. Rain falls everywhere: on public property, on private property, everywhere. But even with PlaNYC in the works and ambitious stormwater management initiatives inching closer to home via Chicago, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, New York has yet to make a dent in the approximately 27 billion gallons of stormwater-induced sewer overflow that contaminate our waterways every year.

In the summer of 2009, members of the North Brooklyn Compost Project, a volunteer-run compost pile in McCarren Park, Brooklyn sought permission to retrofit a section of vegetation on N. 12th Street to manage the stormwater from the road. Compost, in addition to literally bringing dead city soil back to life, can help absorb and detox polluted urban runoff. We had noticed a long grassy strip between the sidewalk and gutter where the old slate curb had already sunken to the level of the roadway. Here, water pooled into the vegetated area during rainstorms whereas an intact curb would have hurried the rain down to the storm drain on the corner.

Street view of site adjacent to McCarren Park

This eureka moment led to a game of “What If?” What if we took out a section of the curb and brought the water into the vegetated area on purpose? What If we planted a rain garden there? What If all gutters around the city had similar depressions in them where soil and plants could thrive and drink up some of the extra rain? What if the air was cooler and cleaner? What if the sewers no longer overflowed when it rained?

Most runoff flows directly into the city’s combined sewer, and once the stormwater is in the sewer, you’ve pretty much lost your chance to do anything useful with it. And one way or another, we have to pay: we either pay to treat it like sewage – which it is not – at the sewage treatment plant, pay for it ecologically when it overflows with a mixture of sewage into local waterways, or pay for it in that big picture way when, by breaking natural environmental cycles, we perpetuate chronic ills such as urban heat island effect. So what can we do? Interventions that might help alleviate the problem require the support and approval of multiple agency gatekeepers. The Department of Transportation has to uphold the integrity of the curb, the Department of Parks and Recreation has to sign off on planting, and the Department of Environmental Protection has to inspect specific stormwater overflow mechanisms.

In short, when North Brooklyn Compost Project became interested in testing a stormwater management strategy on a block in Williamsburg, we found that everybody liked the idea, but nobody could say yes.

Subwatershed deliniation, NYCSWCD

To get an idea of what this small-scale intervention might accomplish, we enlisted the help of experts from NYC Soil and Water Conservation to analyze the site as though it were a mini watershed. We learned that our gutter received water from just under .2 acres of roadbed, a “micro watershed” indeed. But as a 100% impervious paved area, that area can shed almost 5,000 gallons during a 1-inch storm. This is what 5,000 gallons of water looks like, more or less:

According to Dr. Paul Mankiewicz at The Gaia Institute, “every 33 gallons of water captured by natural landscapes and evaporated through green plants each day provides a ton of air conditioning, displacing the amount of energy needed, and the energy cost, of cooling urban areas. … About every ten gallons of water captured and fed to trees, shrubs, and herbaceous plants can capture one pound of carbon. There is no way for plants to capture or fix carbon without this water. Stormwater capture is essential to the carbon balance of the landscape.”

Basically, we could look at the 5,000-gallon storm as a swimming pool-sized problem for our watershed, or we could see it as an opportunity to generate 150 tons of air conditioning and capture 500 pounds of carbon, and rehabilitate the soil ecology. That’s how we ended up in the gutter, contemplating the wastes of the city as something potentially incredibly productive.

Unfortunately, good intentions only get you so far. The Department of Parks and Recreation, in charge of all things vegetated, would not permit existing tree roots to potentially be disturbed or road salt to enter the soil (despite promises to excavate by hand or the rationale that the curb was already sunken). The Department of Transportation could not permit a curb inlet where cars would parallel park (again, despite the curb’s already sunken state). We offered stepping stones in response to concerns over egress, subterranean French drains in response to predictions of turned ankles on varied terrain, but finally, begrudgingly, we had to abandon the site.

In retrospect, our little project never stood a chance. Even if we arrived at a concept design that appeased both Parks and DOT concerns and still did what we aimed to do in the beginning, who would guarantee maintenance? Not to mention the tens of thousands of dollars required for construction grade drawings that the city wanted to even continue the conversation.

So who, if anyone, would be able to implement a project like this in New York City? Through the Stormwater Infrastructure Matters (S.W.I.M.) Coalition, a network of local community-based organizations and environmental groups, we learned of a handful of gutter projects that had been implemented in New York City, and a larger handful that were struggling just like ours. Together we wondered, how is the implementation process influencing design? How can barriers to implementation be removed? And how can we deal with the specific design challenges related to stormwater management in the public right-of-way, a rough third of the entire city’s surface that is 100% impervious?

So began Minds in the Gutter, a call for submissions to anyone — professionals, students, the general public — with ideas for managing stormwater runoff from New York City roadways and sidewalks, and an exploration into what agencies and individuals are thinking about and working on these issues. We recognized the opportunity, in selecting members of our jury, to bring different voices from city government, academia, urban pedagogy and state-level green infrastructure planning to the table.

Minds in the Gutter Jury Members:
Nette Compton, Senior Project Manager for Design at NYC Department of Parks and Recreation and Design Trust Fellow for Designing Parks for the 21st Century
Karen Engel, Green Infrastructure Coordinator at NY State Department of Environmental Conservation
Christine Gaspar, Executive Director of the Center for Urban Pedagogy
Aaron Koch, Policy Advisor for Water at the Mayor’s Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability
Wade R McGillis, Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University
John McLaughlin, Director of the Office of Ecological Service in the Bureau of Environmental Planning and Analysis for NYC Department of Environmental Protection
Margaret Newman, AIA, LEED AP, Chief of Staff for NYC Dept Of Transportation
Alexandros E. Washburn, AIA, Chief Urban Designer for NYC Department of City Planning

We also recognized the opportunity, in requesting designs from the broader community, to grow that table of voices and expertise. Dozens of submissions, representing hundreds of individuals, came in, exceeding our expectations in many ways. We received everything from the back-of-the-envelope sketch to the future perfect renderings of architectural firms. Some minds were focused in on the sidewalk, the curb, street trees and catch basins, while others addressed entire street corridors. Some minds tackled a gutter they traversed every day, while others build prototypes with intent to travel almost anywhere. (See p. 2 for a gallery of submissions selected by the jury.)

Today’s results of Minds in the Gutter are interesting for the designs themselves but also for the underlying community they reveal, representing all five boroughs and many different points of view. What if we could all get to the table when decisions about the public right-of-way are made? What if, similar to the DOT’s Plaza Program, where inspiration for new plazas are taken from community groups who then participate in their stewardship, you could request that your bus stop go vegetated, your street tree be paired with a cistern, and your “NO Parking Anytime” spot be permeable? Would urban design get better, become more attuned to local needs and values, or would the curb crumble in the great cacophonic tradition of Babylon? What if all these small requests stitched together into widespread stormwater management strategies for each of New York City’s local watersheds? At the very least, we can continue to grow the virtual table, and continue to collect your ideas for the gutter. Stay tuned at www.mindsinthegutter.org.

Click through to page 2 to view images from Minds in the Gutter submissions selected by the jury with commentary by Kate Zidar.

The first viewing of the Minds in the Gutter designs will take place on Earth Day, Thursday, April 22, 6:30pm at the Museum of the City of New York. Deborah Marton, Executive Director of the Design Trust for Public Space, will moderate a panel discussion about the submissions, featuring some of the competition’s jurors, exhibiting designers and representatives of the S.W.I.M. Coalition. For tickets and event info, click here. Minds in the Gutter was made possible by the New York City Environmental Fund.

Kate Zidar is an Environmental Planner working on soil, water and food issues in New York City.  She coordinates the Stormwater Infrastructure Matters (S.W.I.M.) Coalition, teaches at Pratt Institute’s Graduate Center for Planning and the Environment, and runs the North Brooklyn Compost Project.

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.

brandpost by Johan Thornqvist.

Maybe we have art on our minds more after our featured interview with Spanish artist Roberto Mollá, but we have noticed quite a lot of noteworthy city-focused illustration, installations, and video this week. Drawn! introduced us to the work of Johan Thörnqvist, who sketches charming miniature urban scenes on existing photographs. Scott Burnham posted an interesting piece on street art and urban interventions that mentions, among others, the double take-prompting street installations of Mark Jenkins, whose work is always worth revisiting. SpaceInvading (via Archinect) showed us that buildings can appear in unexpected places and at unexpected sizes. GOOD pointed us to Hyperallergic’s photo gallery of NYC street sculpture. And if you haven’t seen this video yet, take a two and half minute break to watch Space Invaders, Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, Pong and more take down New York City. A well-executed and just really cool short film by Patrick Jean:

PIXELS by PATRICK JEAN.

The leak of NYU’s 2031 plan had the city buzzing a couple of weeks ago and the university was quick to say that the official strategy wouldn’t be released until April 14th. But the plan is now up and live on the NYU 2031 website, complete with interactive map and a few renderings. Explore the plan through the sections on “Why NYU Must Grow,” “Urban Sustainability,” and “Community Dialogue,” or jump in with the letter from NYU President John Sexton which describes the plan as an “overall strategic roadmap called Framework 2031.” But don’t take April 14th off the calendar –  NYU is holding an open house that evening to allow the public to see the plan and voice their opinions. Our guess is that it will be a well-attended event…

We talk a lot about ways to introduce new planting to our cityscape (think urban agriculture, Million Trees NYC, streetscape design ideas) but we don’t always discuss the impact planting of non-native species or the removal of existing flora for urban development is having on our area’s biodiversity. But scientists at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden do. Through the New York Metropolitan Flora Project, the Garden has been documenting and cataloging all plant life within a 50-mile radius of New York City over the past 20 years. The project provides an incredible database, searchable by species, location and various other keywords, that, as the project website states, can be a vital resource “for those involved in environmental efforts, from preserving rare plants, to planning parks and greenways, to repairing degraded habitats, to designing home gardens in which native plant communities are preserved or restored.”

The Garden’s science director, Gerry Moore, recently spoke to The New York Times about how invasive species and urbanization are influencing our region, the Garden’s effort to monitor the health of our flora, and the need to preserve and replenish our area’s native plant life for both the health of the plant population and that of the insects, birds, or other fauna to which they are inextricably linked.

Next Friday, April 16th, the Regional Plan Association (RPA) will be hosting Innovation and the American Metropolis, an event and topic familiar to many Omnibus readers from last week’s interview with RPA’s Tom Wright and Rob Lane. For those who can’t make it in person, RPA is offering anyone with an internet connection the opportunity to participate in the conversation. Tell them your thoughts on innovation and who you are, and they’ll feature the online responses during the regional assembly and on their website.

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

Since the Omnibus crew decamped from our previous digs on the banks of the Gowanus Canal this past fall, we’ve tried to hold ourselves back from reblogging every time its tortuous path to cleanup makes the news. But today that path became a little clearer – the Canal has been designated a Federal Superfund site. According to The New York Times, “The E.P.A. estimates that the federal cleanup will last 10 to 12 years and cost $300 million to $500 million.” The City expressed disappointment; its own plan claimed to be “a faster route to a Superfund-level cleanup and would have avoided the issues associated with a Superfund listing” including costly litigation and a stigma that will likely change development priorities. Nonetheless, spokespeople for City Hall have promised to work closely with federal agencies to achieve everyone’s stated goal – a clean canal.

In addition to following canal news closely in our roundups, we’ve reviewed art projects about it, shared videos shot along it, and co-hosted (along with our friends at the Center for Urban Pedagogy) a live talk show that went beyond the slugfest community meetings about Superfund designation to mine the environmental and biological histories of toxins. To analyze the EPA’s Superfund program in the context of emerging art forms informed by both eco-visualization and internet-based art practice. To connect the local landscape to national precedents. To ponder what any of this has to do with the ethics of risk, the implications for financing local development, the design of our environments. Given today’s news, maybe it’s time for a look back at some of the ideas that emerged from that event. Below are video excerpts from the presentations of our three panelists last summer, artist Brooke Singer, environmental historian Sarah Vogel and environmental activist Anne Rabe.