-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).

screenshot from The City Dark

DARKER CITIES, BRIGHTER STARS
The drive to limit light pollution has taken on increased prominence lately, with specialists across fields stressing its importance. The Atlantic Cities’ Nate Berg last week highlighted this growing movement and how one small town, Homer Glenn, barely 30 miles outside of Chicago, through a simple initiative has become a poster-child for the ease with which the problem can be addressed. The simple use of lower-watt light bulbs with light shields directing the light downward instead of upward can significantly make it easier to observe night skies in an urban setting. Light pollution prevents astronomers from doing their work, disrupts animal migratory patterns and simply disconnects us from our night skies. For more on the effects of light pollution on our environment, society, bodies and psyches, look back at our interview with filmmaker Ian Cheney about his documentary The City Dark.

New REI store in SOHO | via businessinsider.com

REI’S ADAPTIVE REUSE
What happens when you mix green architecture with historic preservation to house a outdoorsy retail chain that just happens to be the nation’s largest consumer cooperative? GreenBuildingsNYC took a tour of REI’s new store in Soho and describes in detail the ways the popular outfitter adaptively reused original features of the historic Puck Building, including the steam-engine flywheels that once powered the printing presses of Puck Magazine, the country’s first successful humor magazine (in publication from 1871 – 1918) and the original tenant of the iconic address at Lafayette between Houston and Mulberry Streets.

TURNING CITIES INTO LIVING ORGANISMS
A while back we looked at the DEP’s comprehensive effort to mitigate the damaging effects of stormwater run-off in Staten Island by adapting the area’s natural wetlands. This week, Fast Company profiles new approaches to stormwater control that combine the kind of low-tech, high-impact methods of the Staten Island Bluebelt with the lastest technological solutions made possible by cloud computing and the “Internet of Things” to create “high performance” infrastructure that can anticipate demand and prepare accordingly — infrastructure that can respond to its surroundings like a living thing.

Architects’ sketch of the Donnell Library | The Library of Congress

DONNELL DEMOLISHED
The Donnell Library has been demolished. It happened with little public fanfare, similarly understated to the building itself. Designed by Edgar I. Williams and Aymar Embury II (the architect of last week’s featured Orchard Beach Pavilion), the Modernist, cusping-on-Brutalist building had lived across the street from MoMA since 1955, overshadowed by its neighbors. The closing of the library space, famous for housing the original Winnie the Pooh dolls, has infuriated neighborhood residents for years, a sentiment that the new plan for the site — a 46-story hotel and condominium building — is unlikely to assuage. Read more about the demolition at Docomomo and find more information about the history of the Donnell Library in this 2009 piece from The New York Times‘ City Room.

2012 TED PRIZE WINNER: THE CITY 2.0
Since its founding in 2005, the TED Prize has traditionally gone to a visionary individual who is granted “one wish to change the world.” This year, the prize is going to an idea: The City 2.0. The $100,000 cash prize will go towards one wish, collaboratively identified by the “many individuals, organizations and companies doing spectacular work” around advocacy for a smarter, fairer, more sustainable city. It’s a decision that some find puzzling, and potentially counterproductive. On Co.Exist, Greg Lindsay points to “a murderer’s row of qualified” individuals who could have received the prize, but, putting that aside, considers some possible directions the collectively-crafted wish could take. Though this reminds us a bit of the year TIME magazine’s person of the year was “you,” we’ll have to wait until February 29, 2012, when the wish is unveiled at the TED Conference, to see the results of this experiment. For now, those who wish to contribute their ideas on behalf of The City 2.0 can write to tedprize@ted.com.

Drawing Hands, 1948 | MC Escher | via arch.columbia.edu

EVENTS and TO DOs

AN EVENING OF PSYCHOMETRIC DRAWING EXPERIMENTS, ARCHITECTURAL NON SEQUITURS, AND FREE ASSOCIATION: Studio-X NYC’s Night School series continues this weekend with a free drawing workshop with Sam Jacob of FAT (Fashion Architecture Taste) and Strange Harvest. An Evening of Psychometric Drawing Experiments, Architectural Non Sequiturs, and Free Association “will explore the potential of drawing to generate and represent the spatially impossible, using techniques derived from police artists, psychiatrists, and parlor games.” Bring your own drawing utensils and sketchbooks, and don’t be shy about your drawing skills, none are required. Saturday, December 10, 6:30-8:30pm at Studio-X NYC, 180 Varick Street, Ste. 1610. RSVP on the Studio-X Facebook page. For more info, visit BLDGBLOG.

THE UNFINISHED GRID: Reminder: Tomorrow, Saturday, December 10th, at 4pm at the Museum of the City of New York, Architectural League Special Projects Director and curator of the current exhibition The Unfinished Grid: Design Speculations for Manhattan Gregory Wessner will be moderating a panel discussion about the themes and ideas that emerged from the Call for Ideas that led up to the show. Joining Wessner on the panel will be Amale Andraos, Mark Robbins and Ken Smith. More info here.

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

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.

For architecture-, design- and urbanism-themed cinema fans in New York, the next few weeks are a treasure trove of festivals, screenings and panel discussions. This weekend, from October 15-16, is the Red Hook International FIlm and Video Festival. The Architecture & Design Film Festival runs from October 19-23, and then from November 2-10 we’ll get DOC NYC, New York City’s Documentary Festival. Though only one of the three festivals is explicitly dedicated to architecture and design, all three have lineups full of films that readers of Urban Omnibus are sure to find interesting. To help you sift through the options, we’ll be bringing you suggestions of what not to miss from each event. Stay tuned for suggestions for the A&D Film Festival and DOC NYC next week. But first up, this weekend’s Red Hook Festival.

The Red Hook International Film and Video Festival presents short films from around the country, with a particular focus on Brooklyn filmmakers, stories from New York City, and reflections on the festival’s home base, Red Hook, “an urban, industrial, waterfront community where fisherman, longshoreman, artists, small businesses and housing projects live together.” The films range from 5 to 27 minutes, and will be presented in five screenings organized around themes like “Stories from the Streets” and “Underneath the City.” The Red Hook Festival takes place at the Brooklyn Waterfront Artist’s Coalition at 499 Van Brunt Street in Red Hook, Brooklyn, on Saturday, October 15th (1-6pm) and Sunday, October 16 (2:30-6pm). Read on for some highlights from the event (including two Urban Omnibus-produced short films!) or click here for more information and complete listings.

Still from Lehigh Valley 79

Lehigh Valley 79
Saturday, October 15th, 2:30pm
In 1986, Red Hook resident David Sharps bought the Lehigh Valley #79, also known as the Waterfront Museum and Showboat Barge, for one dollar. Since purchasing the vessel, Sharps has devoted his life to restoring the barge to its original condition — while raising his family on board. Lehigh Valley 79 will be screened as part of the program “Red Hook Block: Family and Tradition.”

Still from Urban Soil Horizon

Urban Soil Horizon, Urban Watershed and The Urban Homesteading Project
Saturday, October 15th, 4:00pm
The short films clustered assembled for the session titled “Art on the Waterfront” explore the city’s boundary between land and water. Urban Soil Horizon documents “the existence of dirt in a world of concrete and asphalt” and chronicles the the rhythms of erosion and accretion in the urban, human driven environment. Urban Watershed follows the paths of water in the city, as it travels over surfaces, into storm drains and then to groundwater systems carrying both nutrients from and detritus of the city. Urban Omnibus‘ own George Trakas at the Water’s Edge: Newtown Creek is next on the docket, followed by The Urban Homesteading Project, which highlights an installation that took discarded Christmas trees and deposited them in semi-natural formations “to mimic natural forests in industrial zones located along the Newtown Creek.” “Art on the Waterfront” concludes with the second Urban Omnibus video appearing in the festival, Archipelago, which captures a day in the life of five New York City neighborhoods: Hunts Point, Jamaica, Mariner’s Harbor, Downtown Brooklyn, and Chelsea. For a complete list of films screened during “Art on the Waterfront,” Click here for more films screened as part of “Art on the Waterfront.”

Still from Masstransiscope

Masstransiscope, Inspiring Spaces and Undercity
Sunday, October 16th, 2:30pm
The session titled “Underneath New York” focuses on the city beneath the surface. Masstransiscope is a short portrait of Bill Brand’s zoetrope installation in the abandoned Myrtle Avenue station in Brooklyn, visible from Manhattan-bound B and Q trains, from its creation in 1983 through its recent restoration. Inspiring Spaces: 25 Years of Arts for Transit profiles the history of this MTA program that brings public art to New York’s subway stations. Undercity follows urban explorer Steve Duncan to the city’s extremes, from the underground tunnels and streams to the top of the Williamsburg Bridge. Click here to see more films screened as part of “Underneath New York.”

Still from Nobody Can Predict the Moment of Revolution

Nobody Can Predict the Moment of Revolution and To Be Seen
Sunday, October 16th, 4:00pm
“Taking it to the Streets,” the final session of the weekend, will look at public expression and protest. Nobody Can Predict The Moment Of Revolution, a particularly timely screening, is an 8-minute glimpse into days five and six of Occupy Wall Street. And To Be Seen examines street art’s capacity for social, artistic and political expression, with a particular focus on work found on the streets of New York City. Click here to see more films screened as part of “Taking it to the Streets.”

Jessica Cronstein is a project associate at Urban Omnibus. She is a designer and writer interested in the point at which the social, cultural and physical growth of a city intersect. She has just completed her M.Arch at Rice University and lives in New York City. 

Urban Umbrella design by Young Hwan Choi, with Andrés Cortés, AIA, and Sarrah Khan, PE, of Agencie Group.

URBAN UMBRELLA
Two years ago, the NYC Department of Buildings and AIA New York sponsored a design competition to develop an innovative solution for city scaffolding. This week, the winning team unveiled the prototype of the “urban umbrella.” The UrbanSHED competition asked designers to create better “sidewalk sheds” — the ubiquitous blue plywood and metal scaffolding structures seen around town. The winning design comes from Young-Hwan Choi with architect Andrés Cortés and engineer Sarrah Khan of New York-based Agencie Group, who won $25,000 for their efforts. This prototype was constructed by Brooklyn-based architecture and fabrication firm Caliper Studio. “Urban umbrellas” feature modular metal canopies, optimized to allow natural light to reach the sidewalk and designed for cost and structural integrity, that can be custom-installed to meet site dimensions. LED lights will light up the shed at night, which will make for a far safer pedestrian overhang. See a slideshow of the prototype at Inhabitat and read more on this from The Architect’s Newspaper.

Real estate holdings of key players in higher education

CAMPUS HOLDINGS
Mitchell Moss, Professor of Urban Policy and Planning at the Wagner Graduate School of Public Service at New York University, wrote a compelling piece for The Architect’s Newspaper on recent development trends tied to hotspots of higher education in the city. Illustrated with this beautiful map, Moss points to the fact that the city’s colleges and universities are building up and out at a time when other development is in decline. He cites an incredible statistic: “There are twice as many people enrolled in degree programs in New York City than live in the entire city of Buffalo.” Using every planner’s tool in the box, from eminent domain, rezoning, leasing, trading air rights, public-private partnerships, strategic acquisitions, to contributing space for public purposes, campuses are expanding. The most notable expansions include an additional 6.8 million square feet to Columbia’s current 17-acre Manhattanville campus, an additional 396,000 square feet to CUNY’s 3 million square foot campus, and new buildings for SVA, the New School, and Cooper Union.

Parallel Networks, designed by Ali Fard and Ghazal Jafari of Canada for Water as 6th Borough Competition

PARALLEL NETWORKS
As a challenge to envision “Water as the Sixth Borough of NYC,” the annual 2011 Terreform ONE prize asked designers to develop a vision for New York City’s future waterway use and to connect this idea with the upcoming Clean Tech World Expo. Designs focused on New York’s waterways, recreational space, transportation and local industry. The grand prize winners, Ali Fard and Ghazal Jafari of Canada, titled their work “Parallel Networks,” and received $10,000 for their work. “Parallel Networks” features a flexible network of floating pods which function as islands for public space and habitat space, with renewable energy, water filtration and food production elements. The pods are easily moveable and adapt to their environment. The modular, add-on system can be grown to diverse scales or could start small, holding potential for adaptation to climate change and other factors. See the full winning design here, as well as other honorable mentions.

FOOD POLICY
New York City Council enacted five bills and several resolutions this week, intending to bring more locally produced food to city residents, schools and jails. The passed initiatives were largely distilled from Speaker Christine Quinn’s “FoodWorks New York,” the proposed comprehensive food system plan for New York City. According to Quinn, New York is the second largest institutional purchaser of food in the city, after the U.S. Department of Defense, which hints at the huge potential these efforts have to influence the region’s food market. Notable measures include: amending administrative code to encourage the purchasing of food grown and processed in New York State; Intro 338-A, which aims to make it easier to construct rooftop greenhouses; and Intro 615, which requires an annual report on the food system from City administration. For more on the benefits and challenges of the City Council’s legislation, take a look at this blog on food policy and this recent piece published in Gotham Gazette by Nevin Cohen, food policy expert and Professor at the New School (who also spoke with us last year about the Five Borough Farm project).

Growing produce in milk crates at Riverpark restaurant

POP-UP FARM IN MIDTOWN?
GOOD Magazine reported this week that a food-producing pop-up farm has been constructed east of the FDR drive in Midtown. The farm sits in the middle of what should have been the Alexandria Center, a bioscience complex that has since been stalled by its developer. Instead of letting the space go,  the developer has partnered with GrowNYC to grow fresh vegetables for Chef Tom Colicchio’s Riverpark restaurant. All the vegetables have been planted in removable milk crates for the time being, considering the site will likely be built out at some point in the future. New York City has more than 600 stalled construction sites and 596 acres of vacant public land. Could milk crate farms be the future for urban ag? See more at GOOD.is.

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

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.

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.