We will have a series of workshops on

SATURDAY, MAY 19     11 – 2PM
SATURDAY, JUNE 16    11 – 2PM
SATURDAY, JULY 14    11 – 2PM
SATURDAY, AUGUST 11    11 – 2PM

If you are interested in the work, would like to pick up a field guide or just enjoy working with plants, please come by on any of these days. This upcoming Saturday, we will be planting mustard and blue stem grass and collect soil samples to test for heavy metals.
click here for directions

Is crowdfunding website Kickstarter a good way to redesign cities? Alexandra Lange thinks not. In a provocative post at Design Observer, she says:

“A suitable funding platform for a watch is not a suitable funding platform for a city. The expectations, the timeline, the relevant community are all wildly different.”

Lange’s critique deserves close attention, especially at City Atlas where an image of + Pool (shown above, launched through Kickstarter) is on the homepage. + Pool could be the poster child for crowdfunded urbanism.

She goes on to note the common qualities of urban projects that have succeeded on Kickstarter:

“First, they are in famous cities. Second, they access hot-button urban topics: rooftop farms, reclaimed railroads, (self-reflexively) urban conversation itself. And third, they are gizmos.” Gizmos being superficial to the real needs of a city.

Kickstarter is one prominent example of new thinking about human organization in general, as the public mood turns away from top-down systems and towards an interest in bottom-up projects. Polls and opinion research show disillusionment with government and a wish for self sufficiency in one’s own neighborhood.

An argument for bringing decisions down to the grassroots has been recently made by several experts, including Carne Ross, former British diplomat — who sees national governments steadily losing influence in a globalized, networked world, and Elinor Ostrom, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics.

In a recent interview, Ostrom looks at the very big picture:

“To solve these problems [climate change, sustainability] at any scale requires individuals to trust that others are also going to contribute to their solution. Building trust is not something that can be done overnight. Thus, the crucial thing is that successful efforts at a local scale be advertised and well known…”

Ostrom’s thoughts mesh with that of a thoroughly researched British government report on how to guide people towards a sustainable economy, “I Will If You Will” (a report which helped shape the ideas behind City Atlas). The takeaway is that people change when they see other people changing.

One twist is that in New York, the greenest, most valuable assets, mass transit and the water system, are built on a scale that only a government can effectively deliver — in the same way that the interstate highway system and the internet were creations of the federal government. Government itself can be a crowdsourced investment tool, but its successes tend to become invisible, and are as taken for granted as water coming from the faucet. More visible are criticisms of government; the distorting influence of money and lobbyists, and the belief that even when intentions are good, government is at too much of a distance to know the right thing to do on the local level.

Yet in New York City, government has also often been more forward-thinking than public opinion (or the media, for that matter) on issues of sustainability, as both bike lane disputes and a failed attempt to establish congestion pricing show. It is not impossible for government to consider the future.

A different case for experimental crowdsourced projects (aside from pitching gadgets) is to use them to inspire imagination in a way that government cannot. Making cities desirable, and shifting one’s desires within a city towards qualitative growth rather than quantitative growth, may be the most powerful effects available towards moving to a stable, livable planet.

Projects on Kickstarter and traditional urban planning aren’t mutually exclusive: cities can benefit from both crowdfunding enthusiasts and determined, educated voters. Cities can use both visionary social entrepreneurs and smart, forward-thinking elected officials. Experiments like + Pool help focus public attention on real opportunities for improving city life and the environment, and encourage people to see the city as a malleable structure full of potential, as opposed to a faceless, bureaucratic grid of property.

And imagination counts. Talent drives aspirations; if young people can leave school and pursue ideas for a future economy that works, rather than be entangled in the legacy economy, then emerging creative talent may have an important role to play in changing ideals for people their own age and younger. Cities could be key in this change of ideals, and tools like Kickstarter may help accelerate the chemistry — if that’s where people start to spend their time as producers and consumers of new ideas. It’s important to remember that sustainability currently ranks at the bottom among priorities to young people, so there is a lot of ground to catch up in terms of enthusiasm.

Alexandra Lange makes favorable mention of a more carefully designed platform called Brickstarter (with a fascinating post on reconstruction of a city in Chile) — and it’s a good comparison to consider. But what might be missing in that analysis is the difference between New York, where many people come to work 60 to 80 hours a week in highly paid, high stress jobs, and other places. Maybe it takes a wild idea like + Pool to even get busy New Yorkers to pay attention, with the limited amount of time they have to think about things apart from career.

The growing set of interviews in City Atlas cover a range of positions; + Pool is a beautiful and ingenious idea. Ioby.org is a growing crowdfunding platform for urban renewal, and provides a down-to-earth service perhaps closer to Lange’s ideals. In his interview, Projjal Dutta of the MTA describes how mass transit makes possible the density of NYC, which allows people with huge aspirations to live large with a small footprint. The subway system, built over generations, shows what a decades-long commitment by government and citizens can accomplish.

To create a carbon capture system like that described by Klaus Lackner will require a price on carbon that can also lead to another generational investment in technology and infrastructure. Both governments and citizens will need to be players in that process. And it seems likely that the kind of imagination and optimism seen on Kickstarter, or on equivalent platforms, will be essential to developing the public will for that kind of transformative change.

As noted on Transportation Nation, there are 420 stations across parts of Manhattan and Brooklyn, with more to be added in 2013. The new bike share program has a heavy emphasis on riding for daily commuting.

Screengrab of the map, below:

New York not only has a density of buildings, but of creative minds. A team in the MFA Transdisciplinary Design program at Parsons/The New School saw potential in the utilitarian structures: the result, Softwalks, is a design intervention, a kit that can give sheds features of public furniture or other uses to serve the community.

The Softwalks team is participating in a public art piece this weekend, Saturday, May 12, 9 AM – 12 AM and Sunday, May 13, 1 PM – 4 PM; Coordinated by Art in Odd Places and the Urban Design BA program at Parsons. Location: South West corner of 14th Street, between 6th & 7th Avenues.

On Tuesday, May 22, they will also have a pop-up appearance outside the Javits Center, at the International Contemporary Furniture Fair; 10 AM – 4 PM.
Follow @Softwalks on Twitter for the surprise pop-up location.

Below is a short video of a collaborative design workshop held by the team at the Horticultural Society of New York.

(Image via Transportation Alternatives)

New Yorkers still have more than half of May left to participate in bike month.  Transportation Alternatives has helped to organize curators for BikeNYC.org, who share bicycle-related knowledge, events and deals on the site.  Almost every day for the rest of May there are events, including many free organized rides.

Before you hit the road for bike month, get a free bike tune up on Saturday, May 12 at noon in Von King Park in Brooklyn thanks to the Bedford Stuyvesant Biking Coalition.

‘Scrubbing Carbon From the Air Isn’t Good Enough by Itself’

A Conversation with Carbon Capture Gurus Klaus Lackner and Allen Wright

Physicist Klaus Lackner has received quite a lot of attention for his artificial “tree” invention that can suck carbon from the air a thousand times faster than real trees. The idea for the tree was originally inspired by his daughter Claire’s eighth-grade science project a decade ago, which involved extracting carbon dioxide from the air using a fish tank pump and sodium hydroxide. For his invention, Lackner also drew on the natural structure of one of nature’s most successful carbon absorbers — leaves. At Columbia University’s Lenfest Center for Sustainable Energy, where Lackner is director, he and his colleague, Allen Wright, are still finessing elements of the “tree.”

Maria Ioshpa, a senior at Stuyvesant High School, spoke with Lackner and Allen Wright about the potential of this innovation in helping tackle climate change:

Let’s start at the beginning — how do we arrive at a need for air capture technologies like an industrial material that acts as an artificial tree?

Klaus Lackner: Some people argue about how much CO2 we are really allowed to have in the air: should the limit be 450 parts per million? Some people say no, 350 ppm was already too much. Other people are still saying 450 is all right, maybe 550 is all right. And it doesn’t really matter what you think is all right, because once you’ve gotten to that point, the only way to prevent CO2 levels from going higher is to — for all practical purposes — stop putting CO2 in the air.

Why is that?

Klaus Lackner: If you want to stop at 450 ppm, how many tons of CO2 are in the personal CO2 budget of the average person on the planet? It turns out, about 30 tons. Think of a big tanker truck full of gasoline or jet fuel which you may have seen in an airport next to an airplane trying to fill that up — that’s approximately your personal budget. Not for today, not this year, but forever — for you, for your children, and for your children’s children. So every time you go somewhere in a car, you fill it up out of that truck. Every time you fly somewhere you pull it out of that truck. Every time you have Thanksgiving and you have a turkey and turn on the gas stove, you have to take it out of that truck — and it turns out the average person in the US goes through a truck like this in five years. So our budget is gone in five years from now. The world’s budget is gone in about 30 years from now because most people don’t consume as much as we do. Some are a little more careful with it. Some are just too poor to consume it. So at the end of the day you have not much time left to stop.

(Klaus Lackner, Director of the Lenfest Center; photo Justin Strauss)

I know this tree creation isn’t magic, although it nearly seems that way. How did you come up with the concept, how does it work, and how much does it cost to operate?

Allen Wright: The basis is a plastic leaf that has the property of being a vehicle for “air capture.” By air capture, I’m talking about the removal of carbon dioxide from ambient air; from the air outside. If you took all the CO2 out of a block of air roughly the size of a card table, you would just about fill a teacup. Our job is to remove that teacup’s worth of CO2 from any given block of air, concentrate it, and deliver it as a stream of pure CO2. This is different than the removal of CO2 from a concentrated source, such as the exhaust from a power plant or the exhaust pipe on a car.

Consider a situation in which someone is running an old coal power plant somewhere in the world that continues to put CO2 in the air, then what can we do to compensate for the power plant’s emissions? Well, air capture, and this material [holds up artificial pine branch] allows us to take the CO2 out of the air that they have put in.

Does it matter where the CO2 is being emitted? Do you need to set up these trees in the same location?

Allen Wright: Actually, one of the reasons we want to remove carbon dioxide from the air is to capture emissions that are occurring in other parts of the world. It turns out that the atmosphere in the world is very well mixed. So if you put CO2 into the air in California, in no time at all that CO2 is very well mixed into the air and you can very effectively take it out of the air in New York City. Now, if you put a ton of CO2 in the air, and you remove a ton of CO2 from the atmosphere somewhere else, you have effectively eliminated the impact of that ton of CO2.

This material has a funny characteristic. In a dry environment (like in the summertime on a hot day, or in the desert), this has a very strong affinity for CO2; CO2 in the air wants to bind with the molecules on the surface of this plastic. In a wet or very humid environment (like it would be here in New York in the summer, or in the tropics), the humidity causes the CO2 to come off of this material and go back into the air.

Well, that’s really neat because that means all the energy we have to use comes from the evaporation of the water off of this as it dries. So, we take this material, which is full of CO2 from being out in the air, and we scrunch it up and put it in a tube, make it wet, and all the CO2 is going to come off of this material and into the gas stream. Then, we can suck that CO2 off and we can deliver it as a stream of carbon dioxide gas. So now we have this material that is wet and empty of CO2, and all we have to do is stick this outside, and if it’s dry outside, the water will evaporate off of this material, and it will revert to the state where CO2 can bind to it again.

And so, in essence, this is a CO2 pump: it takes CO2 from the air and pumps it and delivers it into this stream. This will work over and over for years and years.

(Allen Wright, Senior Staff Associate)

How many of the tree samples that you have shown me would be necessary to reduce significantly the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere?

Klaus Lackner: Of those little ones, an awful lot. But you have an awful lot of trees too. So we figured out how to package them for a device which can collect one ton per day and that would fit into a big truck, into a shipping container. Such a unit can collect much more CO2 than your car puts out. You don’t put a ton of CO2 out in a day.

And you would need millions of those one-ton-a-day units, but that’s not so bad if you think about it: If you had ten million such units you would take back 3.6 gigatons of CO2 a year, and right there that’s about 10 or 12 percent of the world’s yearly CO2 output. That’s a pretty good start.

If the air capture units last ten years, then each year you have to build a million new ones to replace the old ones, creating a production line of one million units a year. Now the world is producing 70 million cars and trucks a year, so we can do manufacturing on that scale — we do that with automobiles already. So we could make this happen on a scale that is meaningful.

What’s fascinating is that your process and your invention can be seen as a potentially powerful investment if we put a price on carbon.

Klaus Lackner: I do want to point out that we are working with a private company, Kilimanjaro Energy, which is actually trying to figure out whether there is a market for CO2.

Would the creation of these air capture devices be a sort of magic pill, making people less inclined to stop the production of CO2 because of it?

Klaus Lackner: It’s a complicated question. Will this tempt you to not deal with the problem? Let me turn this around: What other options do you have?

Furthermore, I think this won’t by itself solve the problem. Scrubbing CO2 from the air is one weapon in the arsenal; by itself it’s not good enough. Clearly there are other places where other strategies are more economical. If you had a power plant and you were to scrub the CO2 out of the power plant that would be much smarter. If you had power which didn’t make CO2 in the first place that would be very useful. But you do end up with some fraction of power that for a long time will emit CO2 because we have that infrastructure, and because it’s actually very difficult to get rid of liquid fuels.

So to come back to your question regarding whether this will encourage people to ignore the problem for a while: The answer is, maybe for some people it does. But the flip side of the problem is: you may not have a choice anymore but to take back CO2. You need some way of pulling the CO2 out of the air, and forests are not quite fast enough.

How much of a role do people’s choices play in this discussion?

Klaus Lackner: I’m not particularly an advocate for the idea that we have to give up liquid fuels. What I am arguing is that if you successfully remove the problem that liquid fuels create, and you pay for removing that problem, then there’s nothing wrong with using liquid fuels. If you can’t fix the problem or it is too expensive, then you have to find another solution. And in the long run, we cannot let CO2 pile up in the atmosphere. So we have to find answers.

Now, with individual choices it’s always easy to say, ‘I’m such a little bit that it doesn’t matter so I’m ok.’ I’m always amused when I go to a conference and we all talk about how much CO2 everybody emits, and then I proceed to ask a “dumb” question: “How did you all get here?” And the participants all came on long intercontinental airplane trips. When I follow up by asking how much CO2 each participant caused to be emitted on that flight, I am often met with a response to the effect that, since the trip was taken for a good cause, the output in that case doesn’t count. That may well be true, but if we all think that way, we’ll never fix the problem.

So we have two choices: we make it totally expensive to contribute to the problem, such that people opt not to, or we pay for whatever it takes to avoid the problem in the first place. And of course it’s not just one — there are many problems associated with fossil fuel. The first and immediately most important one is that it puts greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. But there are other issues as well. Mining is hazardous and often environmentally difficult business, so you have to figure out how to fix that too. You have work on all of these pieces, but currently the most pressing is CO2.

What can the younger and future generation do to fix this problem? What careers can they enter to effect change?

Klaus Lackner: I think it’s not just one career — there are very many different paths. I would argue that what we at the Earth Institute call “sustainable development” has many different pieces to it that are so central to the problem. We’re being challenged environmentally. We have technologies to address energy and transportation issues; we have technologies to for a lot of things. Where we run into trouble rather routinely right now is the environmental footprint of the things we do.

So we have to figure out how to make those footprints smaller, and that involves people from different facets of our entire society. You can decide that you want to be a political scientist, and there are plenty of relevant policy questions to address there. You can decide to become an engineer and solve the problems by looking at the engineering issues. You can become a scientist, and a lot more of science today is focused on how, precisely, the planet works and on what the environmental issues are that come with it. You can also become an astrophysicist and you would not be particularly concerned with this planet, but if you are worried about the planet, there are still many ways to get involved. It is not one size fits all, and I can’t even tell you which one is more important. Adding to that, politicians are perfectly willing to find a good solution if they feel like there is a solution, but as long as the engineers don’t provide anything, nothing much will happen. And if the engineers aren’t focused on these problems, nothing will happen either. So you have to get all of the various fields and disciplines together, and push in the right direction in whatever field you end up in.

Do you have any general advice for environmentally-conscious people?

Klaus Lackner: That is a very difficult question. In my opinion, you have to combine realism with optimism because if you can’t do that, you feel like the problems are all so daunting and you’re not coming out of the other side. Realism means that you look at the issues and recognize that there are real problems that require real solutions and then start working on solutions. Don’t start from the premise the world is coming to an end; be an optimist, but be a cautious optimist and make this optimism real.

What can initiatives like City Atlas do to help your cause?

Klaus Lackner: By making carbon footprints and other environmental impacts more visible, by getting people excited, you’re getting the message out there. The issue right now is that nothing happens, because there’s no political will to make it happen, and the political will can only come from informing the public. I think there are a lot of messages out there that are saying we’re all doomed, and that’s there’s nothing we can do. And that message doesn’t rally people to do something. I think it’s better to say that here’s a problem, and here’s a solution. It may not be the only solution, it may not be the best solution, but at least it means there’s a way out. This creates hope, which leads to the assurance to start asking questions like, “Can’t we do better?” And if you come up with something better, I’ll take it.

Klaus Lackner is the Ewing Worzel Professor of Geophysics at Columbia University, where he is also the Director of the Lenfest Center for Sustainable Energy, the Chair of the Department of Earth and Environmental Engineering, and a member of the Earth Institute faculty. Lackner’s current research interests include carbon capture and sequestration, air capture, energy systems and scaling properties (including synthetic fuels and wind energy), energy and environmental policy, lifecycle analysis, and zero emission modeling for coal and cement plants.

Lackner earned his degrees from Heidelberg University, Germany: the Vordiplom, (equivalent to a B.S.) in 1975; the Diplom (or M.S.) in 1976; and his Ph.D. in theoretical particle physics, summa cum laude, in 1978. He was awarded the Clemm-Haas Prize for his outstanding Ph.D. thesis at Heidelberg University. Lackner held postdoctoral positions at the California Institute of Technology and the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center before beginning his professional career, and he attended Cold Spring Harbor Summer School for Computational Neuroscience in 1985. Lackner was also awarded the Weapons Recognition of Excellence Award in 1991 and the National Laboratory Consortium Award for Technology in 2001.

The Lenfest Center for Sustainable Energy focuses primarily on developing the next generation of carbon capture and storage technologies, as well as technologies that will improve energy efficiency and thus reduce carbon emissions. The center, part of The Earth Institute, Columbia University, is also engaged in policy research and outreach on a variety of energy topics, with a common emphasis on sustainability and climate change.

___

Photography by Justin Strauss

New Yorkers rely on the trains and buses to get us where we need to be, when we need to be there. Almost as inherent to MTA city travel as the sound of screeching brakes is the griping and groaning we do while on board. Why isn’t the train here faster? Why does it stop in the middle of the tunnel? Why don’t they run more crosstown buses? We’re really good at being critical of the system, some with vocal indignation and others with more mild resignation, and few of us has probably ever really stopped to think critically about this system we love to hate.

I spent my first 5 years in NYC in a love/hate relationship with the MTA. I loved when the M15 Limited got me from 14th to 96th in 15 minutes, but I hated when the 6 was so packed I had to let three trains go by and be late to work. I recognized and appreciated that the MTA let me never need or want a car and allowed me to be exponentially greener than my suburban counterparts, but I came to abandon my petty grievances and love the MTA wholeheartedly after reading Projjal’s interview for City Atlas where he explains the basic structure of the system and how the MTA is in fact doing a whole lot to be greener.

In his presentation at Green Festival (Taking the Car out of Carbon) he outlined just how much credit the MTA deserves for reducing carbon emissions. The MTA’s 2012 Earth Day Report on Sustainability found that every subway or bus trip prevents 10.4 pounds of carbon from being released, for a whopping 17 million metric tons collectively. The scale of the system allows it to be green in a way that has an instant and significant impact, a way that recycling your kombucha bottle simply doesn’t.

The scale of the system is an asset but also a liability. Mr. Dutta explained that because most of the underground infrastructure of the extensive system was built in the early 1900s, simply maintaining it for 24/365 use is the full time job of many. For all Projjal’s prestigious credits, among them certification as a LEED A.P. and MIT graduate, he has a knack for illustrating concepts in palatable ways. When an audience member at Green Festival complained about the constant route changes for construction and asked why they didn’t “just fix things right and upgrade them the first time so they wouldn’t have to continuously make repairs,” he didn’t gloss over the question with a boiler plate response one might expect of a city employee; he smiled and offered the following analogy: “how many things do you have that belonged to your grandparents? How many of them to you still use? How many of them do you use all day long every day of the year? How many of them do you share with millions of friends?” Obviously we can’t shut down the entire system for a year to take it out and replace it with an entirely new one, so the MTA is charged with coming up with creative ways to repair a system that is constantly in use.

In his presentation, Projjal used many graphics to illustrate how carbon emissions from driving are indisputably the most massive factor in greening our lives and the planet. He boldly stated that recycling, organic food, and plant based materials mean nothing if you’re driving to get them. He argues that climate change is in large part a result of the emissions from driving. In a fascinating micro-history of Eisenhower and American politics, Projjal explained how a shift in land use and population density resulting in response to the creation of the U.S. interstate system created a nation of drivers and carbon emitters. He offers the important distinction that cars themselves aren’t what pollute the planet and make us fat, driving them is. When you create a system of transit that fosters population density and practical land use, you create a system that does good things for the environment and better things for people.

Mr. Dutta also addressed how the MTA spends billions of dollars fortifying itself against flooding and other problems resulting from climate change, a problem to which the MTA system itself contributes next to nothing. He asked listeners to consider that the reason they don’t see more new trains and technology is because funds often have to be diverted to immediate problem solving for circumstances (often weather related) beyond their control; in these situations the MTA receives no extra funds for making these system amendments, consequently leaving them with less capital for the kinds of visible and meaningful-to-rider improvements (like countdown clocks and new trains with LED strips) that many riders lament the lack of.

Reconceptualizing the MTA and just taking time to pause on the platform to consider just how many hurdles that 2 train has to overcome to make it to the station may be tough, but it’s possible. Perhaps the most helpful grain of information for better understanding why the MTA works the way it does is to consider where the money comes from. The MTA is not a city agency; it’s a state one. Funding for the city’s buses and trains comes from Albany, not City Hall. When the policy makers all drove on state roads to get to their transit budget meeting, well, they just tend to put those roads before new signal switches for the BDFM and the millions who rely on the MTA annually.

[Note: Mr. Dutta is an advisor to City Atlas.]

(Crossposted from the Examiner)

Top image of newly built 34th Street 7 Station, courtesy of the MTA.

Making Policy Public uses innovative graphic design to explore and explain public policy. Each publication is the product of a collaboration of CUP staff, an advocacy or organizing group, and a designer. This series aims to make information on public policy truly public: accessible, meaningful, and shared.

Partners will be chosen with the help of a jury of esteemed advocates and designers. This year’s jury members are Maya Wiley, Executive Director of the Center for Social Inclusion; Sondra Youdelman, Executive Director of Community Voices Heard; Prem Krishnamurthy Co-founder of Project Projects; and illustrator Tomer Hanuka.

Advocacy partners will receive 1,000 copies of the color publication to distribute directly to their constituents and an honorarium of $1,000. CUP will manage the research, editing, art direction, and production processes.

————–

Past Making Policy Public Vendor Power! project by CUP and Candy Chang.

————–

Applicants should be interested in engaging in a collaborative design process and, most of all, interested in explaining an aspect of public policy. The series defines public policy broadly. Topics have ranged from the barriers to re-entry for formerly incarcerated people in Upstate New York to domestic workers’ labor rights. Although CUP is a New York City-based organization, submissions need not address New York specifically. Topics could range in scope from the governmental to the informal, and in scale from the local to the international. Applicants must be able to regularly attend meetings in New York City.

Proposals must be received by May 6, 2012, no later than 5 pm. To learn more about the program visit: makingpolicypublic.net

————–

Check out the City Atlas interview of Christine Gaspar, executive director of CUP!

On Monday, May 1, the New York City Council approved a far reaching set of zoning changes to smooth the path for building owners to adopt new, green technologies. The Council’s visionary goals are described on the Department of City Planning website:

“[These changes will] remove zoning impediments to the construction and retrofitting of green buildings. [They will] give owners more choices for the investments they can make to save energy, save money, and improve environmental performance. This proposal will help bring our buildings into the 21st century while protecting the character and quality of life of our neighborhoods.”

To examine the ways the new zoning may re-shape the city, the New York Times hosted a Q and A with Howard Slatkin, director of sustainability for the Department of City Planning, and Paul Freitag, the director of development in New York for the Jonathan Rose Companies. Among the likely effects: more green roofs, quicker adoption of solar, and new efficiencies in heating and cooling.

The aggregate transformation for New York, through the opportunity for step-by-step changes in thousands of individual buildings, can be pivotal as the city moves to become more resilient. More green roofs help control runoff from storms, better heating and cooling will lower New York’s per capita CO2 footprint (already, thanks to the MTA, among the lowest in the US), and more opportunities for rooftop farms mean a more vibrant and livable city.

(Image of the new Via Verde development in the Bronx: Jonathan Rose Companies)

You may not realize it, but when you walk the High Line, below your feet is an intricate drainage system that helps to reduce storm water runoff and helps to keep our planting beds healthy.

The High Line’s landscape uses some of the same underlying technology as green roofs, and has the same environmental benefits: a reduction of storm-water runoff by up to 80%, a mediation of the “heat island” effect created by hard, reflective city surfaces, and healthy plantings that create shade, oxygen, and habitat for insects and birds.

The average depth of the soil on the High Line is about 18 inches, with the depth ranging between 8 inches at its shallowest to 36 inches in the raised planting beds near Gansevoort Street, the 23rd Street Lawn, and in the Falcone Flyover, between West 25th and West 27th Streets. Because of the shallowness of the soil, water is of special concern – it’s easy for the moisture balance in the soil to become too dry or conversely oversaturated. Thankfully, the design team, led by landscape architects James Corner Field Operations, designed a green roof-style drainage system that both deals with the issues of excess rainfall or drought and helps to create a healthier environment for the High Line’s plants.

The concrete pathway system you’ll find throughout the High Line was designed both to reduce storm water runoff and reduce the amount of watering needed for the plants. The paths are made of open-jointed pre-cast concrete planks that allow rain water to drain between planks and into adjacent planting beds. Perforated metal panels located between the planting beds and the area beneath the walkways allows for rain water to drain into the plant beds. The strategic location of drains at low points in the planting beds means that water can be absorbed into the beds when it’s needed, or drained out in the case of the soil being oversaturated.

Beneath the finer more nutrient-rich topsoil that our plants call home, there are many other layers that help maximize healthy water drainage, while slowing and reducing the flow of runoff. After the initial topsoil, there is a thick layer of specially-mixed coarser, clay-based subsoil. Below the subsoil is a filter fabric that helps prevent soil from being washed away where it might clog the drainage system. Following the filter fabric is a drainage mat filled with crushed gravel to temper the flow of excess water into the sewer system.

The drainage mat also acts a reserve of water that can be called upon when needed. When excess water drains all the way through the planting bed, some water is retained in this bottommost layer, in the egg carton-shaped cups of the drainage mat. These cups retain water that can be reabsorbed by the soil during drier times.

Similar types of drainage systems can be found in many other green roof projects around the world. The High Line’s drainage system means that less rainwater is making its way into our sewer systems and less water is needed from the city to water our plants – making for both a greener New York City and greener planting beds on the High Line.

————–

via High Line Blog, visit for more behind the scenes images!

Photo courtesy nyclovesnyc