New York’s Mayor Bloomberg has raised some commotion with his newly released design competition to endorse his proposal of “micro units,” describing apartments that are 275 to 300 square feet. There are few rentable spaces that someone in the Big Apple will not shell out some cash for. I have even spotted tent space in a backyard for rent on Craig’s List. So given that the question is not whether or not people will fill these units (they will), it leaves whether or not the addition of hyper-small living accommodations are a positive addition to a more sustainable city or a step over the line in a way to just squeeze more rent out of buildings on New York real estate. Continue Reading…
Archives For Urban Planning
New York City is an environment of consistent densification with more footprints being raised up to taller heights above the street to leave the island of Manhattan as one of the most densely populated places on the planet.When the recession hit the Big Apple full force in 2008 there were many building projects that were suddenly without the funding they had already secured, forcing them to stop—sometimes even after construction had already begun—until market conditions improved. The Department of Buildings refers to these occurrences as “Stalled Sites.”
On the east side of Kip’s Bay, one restaurant took the opportunity of an adjacent stalled site and turned it into an urban farm used to grow produce for their culinary creations. The project serves as a reminder of how we can make the most of any site in the city in any condition, leaving there no place for vacant lots absently waiting out the test of time. Continue Reading…
When asked, “When should sustainability be integrated into the design process?” most green designers would dutifully say at the very beginning of the project. A better answer is: before the project even starts. Each city has a framework of regulation that may not dictate, but certainly guides the course of development within its limits, managing things like density, occupancy types and height. If building codes wind up at odds with green building efforts then the entire process becomes harder even for the most diligent practitioners. Addressing sustainability at the code level is instrumental to turning standout green projects into the new standard. Continue Reading…
The integration of natural flora and fauna into the cities has been a challenge for architects and planners since the beginning of buildings. The task becomes even more difficult when the urban spaces in question are part of our country’s neglected, post-industrial landscape. The winning entry to the recent Gowanus Lowline Competition explores the process of mending broken pieces of aged, urban fabric while dealing with not only the vacancies created by absent industry, but sites riddled with the environmental scars of a previous era.
The scheme probes at the possibility of new urban spaces, utilizing both natural systems of remediation and the active density of a modern city. Wetlands and cityscape: two realities commonly assumed to be so diametrically opposed that their overlap is all but implausible. The former harnesses natural processes to provide an ecology with no net waste or squandered resources and supports a myriad of species in close proximity. The latter is the function of fabricated infrastructural systems that levy an indisputable tax on natural resources as it bleeds energy to support a single species in close proximity. The prospective benefits of synthesizing the accolades of both environments are far-reaching, but given their respective needs of space and circulation the question becomes, how can these ecologies co-exist without one decimating the function of the other? Continue Reading…
In 1972, one of the most ambitious government-funded, low income housing projects in history broke ground in Harlem on the upper East side of Manhattan. Spanning an entire city block, the Taino Towers complex boasted four-story base with various integrated amenities supporting four 35-story towers of concrete and glass to stand over the surrounding neighborhood. The project was known as a “pilot block”, meant to serve as a new urban model for the integration of low-income housing into large cities like New York. However, there also exists a little-known master plan for future phases of low-income development in Harlem that were drafted as a model for sustainable urban growth. Continue Reading…
Pop culture’s interpretation of “green” urban landscapes have a tendency to draw a literal representation of a more sustainable city. These “Garden City” visions can include plants growing from virtually every spatial nook and cranny possible. With flowing strands of climbing plants scaling facades and trees not only lining the streets, but poking out of sky gardens stories off of the ground, the idea of a more environmentally responsible cityscape is often presented to the public as being the result of the integration of flora and fauna.
While incorporating foliage and creating micro-climates carry a number of benefits, a truly green city has to revolve around the integration of systems to help it emulate a natural ecology. Plants should be treated as one component of a network of sustainable efforts in order to be properly utilized. This vision is not really “wrong” as much as incomplete and runs the risk of misleading people into thinking that making cities sustainable is as simple as adding plant life. There is no real solution that involves only planting our way to stewardship.
Most major transit initiatives can currently be divided into two camps: those that want to make our transportation landscape greener by creating alternatives to car travel vs. those that want to create a greener generation of automobiles. Arguably, both pursuits can lead towards the same goal of reducing environmental impact but each option brings with it significant directional decisions as to the future of our culture and how we design the built environment. In the end there may not be one universal option that fits a country like the U.S., but different courses whose implementation should follow the demands between urban and suburban development.
Continue Reading…
There are a number of encouraging examples of cities trying to slowly evolve themselves into a vision of urban sustainability. Implementing bike infrastructure, upgrading the ecology of alternative transit, increasing recycling and addressing the state of our energy production systems are all noteworthy efforts being tackled by numerous cities around the world. But despite the show of goodwill, there are other examples that force one to wonder if we are simply taking two steps back for each that we take forward. The city of Dubai, rising in defiance to the surrounding environment of coastal deserts in the United Arab Emirates, stands as the hallmark of a digressing trend taking us farther away from the goals of a new cultural reality. As a poster child of modern ingenuity driven by the perpetual desire of humanity for unbounded excess, the city of Dubai casts a long shadow over our path to a greener future.
One of the new opposing forces to the deployment of renewable energy has been dubbed “Energy Sprawl,” referring to a symptom of energy sites requiring dubious amounts of land that could purportedly threaten our natural landscape. Where NIMBY voices are troublesome, these claims are more misguided. There is no question that some renewable power options need space. Energy sources like wind and solar require land in order to build arrays large enough to make them efficient, but the real sprawling epidemic has nothing to do with energy, is much worse and has been going on unaddressed for decades: suburban sprawl. Anyone raising arms about devoting land to renewable energy should be prepared to combat the growth of our suburban communities.
Over the past half century, flight from cities has created an explosion of development in suburbia that claims more virgin land every year. As late as the housing boom that lead up to the current recession, the cost of construction, laxity of zoning laws and ease in security mortgage debt lead to new communities sprouting up across the country almost over night. The result is an ever-expanding network of roadways and a lifestyle driven by automotive travel that breeds inefficiency and waste.
There seems to be a misconception that land used for building new cul-de-sacs wrapped in colonial revival vernacular is somehow less desirable than land used for erecting wind turbines or solar panels. Virgin forest or prime farmland is consumed every year to be subdivided and turned into brand new housing stock. In her book A Field Guide to Sprawl, Dolores Hayden says “the American Farmland Trust estimates that in the United States, 1.2 million acres of farmland were lost to development every year between 1992 and 1997.”
As a point of reference, a solar farm planned for Deming, New Mexico will be one of the biggest in the world, producing up to 300 MW or enough power for 240,000 homes. If completed, the array will require 3,200 acres of land. Using the same ratio of roughly 1 MW per 11 acres of land, the 6 million acres of land consumed for homes in the 1990’s could contribute a maximum capacity of 545,450 MW (545 gigawatts.) According to the Energy Information Association, our total national power generation capacity is in the neighborhood of 995 GW (so over half of our power.)
Unlike energy development, suburban land acquisition does nothing for the natural environment. Its conception lays more roads, erects more power lines and creates more commuting traffic by perpetuating the need for more cars on pavement. The fortunate developments may only waste time, money and resources by laying new sewers while those too far from town or city centers rely instead on septic systems. Despite our best wishes, pouring Drano into a sink that leads to a leeching field is nominally the same as going outside and pouring it on the ground.
Energy installations like wind farms produce clean power and by doing so are diverting generation from sources like coal and oil that can bring damaging effects to the environment along every point of their supply chain from mining to combustion. Modern wind turbines are also usually tall enough that land beneath them can still be farmed. Though some energy arrays may pose some interference with the habitat or migration of natural species (a common attack against wind farm construction), it is estimated that in the U.S. up to 130 million animals are killed on the road every year by cars.
On the other hand, suburban plots produce nothing. They are not havens for animal habits. Unlike the land that they consume, rarely are they net sources of food, clean water or energy. An article by Dan Shapley notes that according to Census Bureau data, in 2006 nine of the ten fastest growing counties were located in the South or West in areas already stressed for the capacity of fresh water. In Dallas Fort-Worth, one of the fastest growing regions in the country, a North Texas Future Fund report states “by 2050 the [water] deficit could reach 1.1 million-acre feet per year — an amount greater than total current demand.”
Like anything else, the construction of renewable energy has its drawbacks but the argument of space does not come close to comparing to the epidemic of waste that comprises our history of limitless suburban expansion.
In honor of Blog Action Day 2009
Photo Credits: Alex Maclean & Sincerely Sustainable
Visions and promises for the “new standard” are becoming a daily attraction. Enough people have realized that for an advanced society many of our vital networks are often outmoded prompting plenty of innovators to work on replacement parts. Energy production, transportation, waste disposal, utility conveyance; all show signs of promising upgrades over the next half-century towards the endgame of efficiency. But for all the thought devoted to the new infrastructure systems, what should we be doing with the old ones?
Sustainable societal innovation is a two-sided coin. Defining a better standard should be paired with ways to allocate our existing landscape for new uses rather than simply calling it trash. Over the past century trillions of dollars have been used to construct the vast, national networks that we rely on implicitly. All of that is now latent value that should not be squandered. Like anything other byproduct of our economy these systems hold possibilities for new lives and uses along side their replacements.
Not long ago I sat in a conference room at the Green Buildings New York exposition listening to an engineer talk about improving efficiency through water reclamation and reuse. His name was Edward Clerico and he worked for Alliance Environmental as part of their team specializing on water efficiency—coincidentally, he is reportedly participating in efficiency work for One Bryant Park. From behind a wooden podium with a grainy microphone carrying his voice over worn carpet and faded ceiling tiles, he spoke with excitement about the growing trends of onsite water treatment and reuse. He pointed out that if more people take advantage of things like greywater systems and green roofs then our demand for water (and its disposal) may drop to the point that our infrastructure may no longer be completely necessary. Reservoirs, aqueducts and huge pipelines guiding water to major cities could wind up as over-built, archaic achievements of a different age. Could these things have another use in the face of drastic improvements of water efficiency? It occurred to me the design problem extended far beyond simply water.
With all hope, the future of distributing power will only hold a pale comparison to our current methods. Technologies like Smart Grid systems or completely decentralized systems can begin to shape how our new power grid could work. New steps in transporting power like high voltage superconducting lines could remove high tension wires and the scars that they cast across our landscapes. There must be countless uses for the metal of those giant towers while the land beneath them can return back to the forests, plains and wetlands that they disturbed upon construction.
Power production is another scenario where some of the oldest methods of generation are also the least sustainable—namely coal. Some of our oldest coal plants have already seen their 50th birthdays and are prime targets for retirement. Being one who completely supports ridding our country of coal-fired power, I am often asked what happens to the jobs and facilities at existing plants. Not a problem, we can still use them! Complete conversions of coal plants to accept new feedstocks, namely biomass, is already underway. Cleveland.com recently posted an article describing how FirstEnergy Corp released its plans to convert a 54-year-old plant on the Ohio River to burn grass and wood cubes to produce 312 megawatts of power, leaving it as one of the largest biomass plants in the country. The retooling of the plant purportedly saves 105 local jobs.
Perhaps my favorite candidate for infrastructural reuse is our road and railway systems. In response to the industrial boom, the first half of the twentieth century brought tens of thousands of miles of paved highways and metal track carving through cities across the country. The eventual decline of industrial production and shipping in the U.S. evaporated the necessity for many rail lines, so too providing an opportunity of reuse for these aging strips of land. The first section of The Highline opened only last week in Manhattan providing the first realization of a project that has been pursued by local residents for years. The elevated tracks snaking through the city’s west side that once carried freight trains up and down an industrialized Manhattan coastline now support a growing garden and a unique urban park. Having personally experienced the Highline since it’s opening, I can attest to its outstanding realization of an amazing urban project. Likewise, retired grade-level track beds are becoming perfect locations for bike and running trails, generating ties through existing communities. The Rails-to-Trails Conservancy is one of the movement’s strongest proponents.
Strides in mass transit could help bring about the same opportunities for our aging highways and viaducts. The Toronto Sun reported on the results of a conceptual design for the city’s Gardenier Expressway. Grown from the same seeds at the vision for the Highline, the “Green Ribbon”, designed by Les Klein of Quadrangle Architects, proposes to reclaim the elevated roadway for use as gardened parks and bicycle paths. The hypothetical model includes small wind and solar arrays to create power for the lighting systems of the gardenway. With an estimated price of $500-600 million (which is likely low), it is far from modest, but the figure becomes more plausible when one considers the estimated cost of $300 million just to tear it down.
The benefits to reuse are clear. Massive waste streams would be averted as well as the pollution and energy that is wasted on demolition. New visions mean more work, and work means jobs—which everyone loves. And new infrastructural archetypes can indirectly contribute to energy production, food growth and water management while still providing public amenities. All we need is a broader view of opportunity. Solely devoting focus to what we can create can raise the risk of forgetting what it is we already have.
Highline Photo Credit: David Berkowitz
Power Plant Photo Credit: Cleveland.com