carbon cycle infrastructure for our built environments ... · parks, minimal human interference...

City Sink is a design research proposal for a meta-park of dispersed landscape infrastructure to boost carbon stocks with biomass and through formation of long-term sequestration reservoirs for soil organic carbon in New York City and Long Island. City Sink research merges urban land-use life cycles and the carbon cycle to describe a systemic response to elevated atmospheric carbon levels which provoke climate change. The project is a model for re-imagining urban landscapes as urban ecological infrastructure.

carbon cycle infrastructure for our built environments | Denise Hoffman Brandt

carbon cycle infrastructure for our built environments | Denise Hoffman Brandt

www.oscarrieraojeda.com

US $35

ISBN 978-988-15125-8-1

9 7 8 9 8 8 1 5 1 2 5 8 1

Denise H

offman B

randt

carbon cycle infrastructure for our built environments

Contents

.03Urban Carbon Cycle

.02Introduction

.01Foreword

10-13 14-19 20-49

.04Carbon Sink Infrastructure Planning

.05Working Policy

.06Working Parts

.07Bibliography

50-67 68-99 100-139 140-143

Urban Carbon Cycle

Physiographic regions support varied plant communities: assemblages of plants that co-exist, compete, act symbi-otically, and change over time due to those relationships. These multi-layered plant systems (occupying different strata: ground, understory and canopy for example) are occasionally retained at the margins of active parkland where they play a critical but vital role in sustaining ur-ban biotic processes. Among other city-wide benefits, pollinators (bees and birds) thrive in these zones.

In these naturalized areas, lack of management means leaf litter and dead wood lies where it falls to decompose slowly and create conditions hospitable to microscop-ic soil organisms. Retained as passive retreats in busy parks, minimal human interference contributes to their non-human biotic performance, but they are not wilder-ness. Communicating the active productive qualities of these seemingly negligible zones would be a first step in changing cultural ideas of urban landscape.

Park conditions run the gamut of poor to rich plant sys-tems. Recreational lawns look green but park managers

know the huge energy inputs required to sustain them. Park soils can be as degraded as surrounding street tree pits if they are compacted from high traffic and de-pleted of nutrients from pushing lawn growth. Quantify-ing the positive effects of planting requires consideration of planting effects both visual and systemic, how plants interact above and belowground, and the energy inputs (not just dollars and man hours, but in carbon footprint) required to maintain them. Parks may not be sinks; cur-rent park management practices are carbon leaky.

Prospect Park woodland area Prospect Park turf surface

.03

Rethinking biotic processes in urban parks

Urban Carbon Cycle

Urban planting practices often perpetuate warped images of nature and city. Trees and shrubs appear tortured, cut and bound to fit into the public realm, or simply absent. Green planning and design guidelines foreground urban plantings as valuable components of social spaces; how-ever that discourse rarely includes consideration of deploy-ment of plant communities, focusing instead on installation of individual species of street trees, shrubs and perennials.

City agencies rarely concur on the criteria for deploying plant material. Transportation departments prioritize con-formance to visibility and access standards, environmental preservation/conservation departments have only recently begun considering use of plant-soil systems as soft storm

Urban landscapes must communicate that city plants are more than scenic backdrops for city lifestyles; they are part of human ecosystems.

Manhattan: secure plants

Manhattan: security plants Manhattan: no plants

City plant systems? water management infrastructure. Otherwise, plants are often seen as an obstruction to operations. Parks Depart-ments have purview over an urban forest, with few resourc-es to invest in street planting design or ongoing manage-ment, and their tree pit criteria for robust plantings can conflict with Department of Transportation objectives.

In order to optimize urban plant-soil ecological processes these agencies will have to come together to devise oppor-tunities to implement new urban planting types that go be-yond street trees and private planter consent agreements. Diversifying sidewalk/street planting with groundcovers and shrubs, or even productive types such as nursery and phytoremediation plots, will enliven the experience of city streets and sidewalks as this communicates that these new plantings are, literally, part of the life of the city.

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Urban Carbon Cycle

Mature street trees are the normative image of healthy urban forest ecosystems. Forest biomes are classified by various factors: plant structures (trees, shrubs, and grasses), leaf types (such as broadleaf and needle leaf), plant spacing (forest, woodland, savanna), and climate. Trees are dominant in a forest biome, but the forest is not exclusively trees.

New York City is in the Northeastern Coastal Forest, a temperate broadleaf and mixed forest ecoregion of the Northeastern United States. Fragmentation of forested lands has diminished habitat for many species that are co-dependent within this ecosystem. Expanding sink ter-ritory and investing in research to model complex, urban-adapted forest systems for habitat improvement would benefit non-human biotic species.

Post-coal re-growth of eastern forests measurably offset atmospheric carbon emissions in the last century. (Compton et al. 1998)

To do this means looking at the forest for more than just trees. Forests have multiple layers of plants: ground cov-er, low shrub, high shrub and understory trees as well as canopy trees. Species in long-standing plant communities have been able to compete and adapt to diverse conditions, including the effects of other plants. Forests are active and continually changing, longevity of the whole is not contin-gent on survival of every constituent part.

Carbon ‘sink’ only occurs when plants are growing, add-ing plant tissue. Mature trees do not annually sink at the same rate as young trees that are putting on new growth. Large trees may store a large pool of carbon accumulated over years, but they do not add to that reservoir at a high rate, so while Eastern Forests are extremely valuable for their current sink storage, they are mature and their rate of carbon absorption has slowed. Carbon infrastructure offers a mechanism to amplify carbon storage across re-gions with sinks that are active at different rates and with diverse capacities. This will improve resilience in carbon cycle sink processes.

Northeastern Urban Forest Cover, graphic production: Shastine Van VugtData source: “Northeastern Area State and Private Forestry Strategic Plan”United States Department of Agriculture Forest Service, FY 2004 to FY 2008, and NASA land cover image

Eastern Forest


0 10 milesLocal planning initiatives (to boost residential growth) in accord with regional plans (for transportation infrastruc-ture) fueled sprawl. This concerted effort could transform Long Island again, undoing some of the negative impacts of sprawl by reintegrating active environmental processes into the fabric of the communities. Planning local sites that can be networked into regional carbon sink infrastructure offers potential to fuel a transition to economically and eco-logically viable suburban living systems.

Long Island’s pre-development coastal plain ecosystems were a diverse mix of forest, shrub land, grassland and wetlands. Currently, most remnant habitat is comprised of freshwater and marine wetlands along the coast and at the eastern end of Suffolk County. Since wetlands are a high-capacity, long-term, carbon sink, in addition to their intrinsic value, they can have productive capacity in urbanized areas.

Carbon credit markets could assign value to protected habitat areas, and zones of new constructed sink terrain. Regional planning strategies that elevate natural land values have po-tential to squeeze density into existing urban areas by rais-ing the market-value of formerly low-value land. This would undercut the incentive of low-land costs to develop in valued ecosystem territory, and push commercial, residential and industrial development back toward already-urbanized areas. Planning for environmental systems cannot be accom-plished under the constraints of balkanized municipal authority. Natural systems cross boundaries, and perfor-mance in one location is often contingent on what happens at a seemingly unrelated remote location. Carbon sink plan-ning requires a planning structure that seeks to orchestrate relationships rather than set boundaries and restrictions.

Long Island dense urban surface

Long Island remnant habitat zones

terrestrial geology degraded wetlands beach strand habitat dense urban surface pop = + 2700/sq.mile 5-10% growth area parks and rec.

coastal pond complex remnant pine barren industrial zones commercial corridors LIRR routes highways existing agriculture

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0 10 miles

Long Island development hot spots and managed plant systems

Data source for all maps: Long Island Index

Carbon sink planning requires local action in accord with regional vision

44-45

Urban Carbon Cycle

Million Trees initiatives accord with the premise that street tree plantings can have a productive capacity: trees work to improve urban air quality, and citizens maintain-ing the trees have a meaningful interaction with urban en-vironmental processes. The growing force of Million Trees initiatives in city planning is an important leap forward in

conceptualizing urban landscape as a valued ecological system. Million Trees and City Sink planning both advo-cate for dispersal of plants across the city to permeate urban communities and build agency for a more intense understanding of the relationship between citizens and their environment.

The City Sink proposition diverges from Million Trees in that it advocates for pervasive plant systems, as opposed

to just trees. This is an important distinction. Through dis-persal of resilient plant soil-systems, City Sink planning and design proposes to communicate to city-dwellers that ecological viability is contingent upon re-establishing complex relational connections between environmental systems in all areas of human settlement. By operating systemically, City Sink affects, and builds civic agency to mitigate local and global ecologies, including the process-es associated with climate change.

1. See the forest as well as the trees

3. Account for life cycle energy flows

4. Plan plants in time and space

5. Open public plantings to the public

6. Urban ecologies include people

2. Expand and diversify urban planting types

Diverse, multi-layer plantings are more resilient to plant-challenging urban conditions and more effective for patch habitat creation than mono-cultural plantings and trees alone. Safe sidewalks do not have to be devoid of biomass; sensibly optimizing vertical plant layers will increase car-bon sink capacity per square foot. Performance criteria for urban forests could be more effective than plant lists.

Account for energy consumed in propagation, growth, instal-lation and management of plantings in order to assure that green initiatives are not leaky carbon sources. How far away are the plants grown; and how far do they have to be trucked? Is the nursery tilling old fields to create new land for production? What kind of pesticides and fertilizers does the nursery use? Assessment of the carbon footprint for urban plantings would have a huge beneficial impact on landscape practice.

New plantings can require watering for several years after planting, yet standard landscape specifications require installation contrac-tors to warranty and maintain plants for a period of one year following completion of the project. Requirements for ongoing soil testing are un-usual. In addition to serious consideration for plant site selection, establishment of efficient low energy, mainte-nance regimes for plant-ings that can be financially sustained are necessary.

Initiatives to engage commu-nities in urban plant steward-ship can be a powerful tool to connect the public to urban environmental processes. These mechanisms cannot take the place of municipal responsibility for manage-ment of civic spaces and cash-strapped communities should not be obligated to maintain plants or suffer the consequences of die off. Ex-panding cooperative commu-nity gardens on unused sites is another effective mecha-nism to invite participation in urban landscape systems.

In addition to designing urban landscapes that will encour-age a nuanced understanding of the inter-relationships of human practices and environ-mental systems, designers and planners need to engage programs linked to employ-ment training for skilled land management. Urban land management skills will be valuable in the emerging green job sector.

Trees are, like humans, biotic organisms vulnerable to concentrated ozone levels and other factors identified with poor urban air quality. Trees cannot be planted in areas where their roots might impact subsurface utilities, where they interfere with driver visibility or in situations where they fail to conform to other access criteria. Instead of no plants, low plants can be installed to increase biomass. Diversifying the range of plant strata typically considered for urban landscapes would increase the areas in which plants can be installed in dense urban areas.

Carbon sink planning can optimize Million Trees investment

6 Steps toward (really) greener cities


Most initiatives to lower atmospheric carbon levels seek to limit release of carbon into the atmosphere, rather than retaining or sinking atmospheric carbon back into the bio-sphere. Programs generally operate at the scale of either the individual (changing light bulbs and reducing energy consumption) or non-governmental institutional policy (LEED, CDM and carbon markets).

The City Sink proposition brings municipal, community and individual agents into play with benefits across the spectrum of civic players. Performance guidelines for low energy input and high carbon storage are linked to per-formance criteria for increasing distinctive, compelling public spaces.

Capacity to operate at multiple civic scales is a critical strategy. One challenge of the design discipline is commu-nicating the complex role of humans in biosphere ecolo-gies without reverting to tech-talk, or cultish rhetoric, clear only to specialist factions of the public. Visual and verbal design language must assert a cultural connection to enable passionate advocacy.

Grand Army Plaza, Brooklyn: new bus shelter encroaching on old street tree Midtown Manhattan: grove

SINK LOGIC converges urban and environmental life cycles to activate a spectrum of civic players

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“Great works are often born on a street corner or in a restaurant’s revolving door.” Albert Camus

City Sink landscapes are the landscapes of everyday events. A pervasive sink network in cities and suburbs does not preclude diversity of experience. Sinks can be elegant, starkly utilitarian or even gritty. Green can be ‘noir’.

23rd Street, Flatiron District Manhattan, with strip sinks

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.04Infrastructure Planning

Infrastructure physically manifests social ideals and ap-parent pragmatic necessities in facilitating networked connectivity between communities and the environmen-tal and social systems that sustain them. City Sink pro-poses carbon storage infrastructure; meaning physical spaces and structural apparatus that reflect social aspi-rations for ecologically viable cities that are operationally unified to lower atmospheric carbon levels by synchro-nizing urban land use cycles and the carbon cycle.

Infrastructure investment in North America has histori-cally been stimulated by regional environmental crisis and the conflict stemming from economic disturbance (Belanger 2010). City Sink infrastructure is without doubt a response to looming environmental crisis and the inevi-table social and economic disturbance associated with it. City Sink infrastructure is designed to accord with eco-nomic structures to optimize performance; it is not de-vised to be driven by them.

Infrastructure is typically comprised of networked, yet formally homogeneous, single-purpose structures that

fill an explicit perceived need, such as: highways, dams, canals, high tension corridors and levees... Planning cri-teria for these systems accounts for local constituents and environmental conditions, but the approach gener-ally taken has been to fit a formally fixed structure into a complex and dynamic territorial condition. Terrestrial sink processes occur pervasively in many land conditions and over multiple timeframes. The City Sink proposition is therefore, multiform, to opportunistically sync with diverse urban land use scenarios. The system achieves operative scale through aggregate capacity rather than a grand ges-ture in order to enable adaptation to unique local context.

Planning will necessitate cooperation between municipal agencies—and in the case of the suburbs different mu-nicipalities—each with diverse agendas and capabilities. In order to achieve this convergence, the proposal must overcome territorial attitudes and be structured to dis-tribute the rewards and costs of construction and man-agement. The project positions infrastructure as a posi-tive public amenity, rather than an industrial mechanism to fulfill a specific function.

The sink network is both park and utility structure. This is in keeping with the movement toward co-opting unde-velopable land such as former landfills (Fresh Kills Park, NY) and infrastructure rights of way (Salt River Project in AZ, an active canal embankment) for recreation use. This section presents the key planning strategies that shape the City Sink system.

.04Carbon Sink Infrastructure Planning

City Sink is a Meta Park, it merges traditionally segregated zones of active environmental processes into the milieu of daily urban life.

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City Sink is a proposition for networked, ecologically viable urban landscape design articulated with an array of physi-cal and policy structures for carbon storage in urban land-scape. The research documented here does not provide metrics for engineering optimal carbon transfer protocols in ecosystems; it acts on the emerging understanding of carbon cycle processes to suggest that urban landscape design can be repositioned to affect this convergence of environmental and social life cycles.

The project reconsiders current planning and land use practices that prioritize real estate market value and com-pliance with a relatively homogeneous typology for urban landscape design. The lens for this reappraisal is a network

of carbon storage structures and policy changes that es-tablish alternative civic-environmental criteria in lieu of developer-driven agendas, and that provoke designers to investigate a more expansive range of systemic, productive planting types for cities.

The network shown here is a speculative rendering of the City Sink infrastructure proposed for New York City. The ar-ray of infrastructural components (described in the Working Policy and Working Parts chapters to follow) attach to lines of regional circulation, occupy discreet spatial points based on specific local context, and infill opportune field condi-tions. The diagram illustrates the assertion that local-scale structures can be systemically dispersed to the extent that

regional geography is recognizable with no actual physical features rendered beyond the sink network.

Devising the planning strategies and design of the working components was a reciprocal process. Planning the net-work established design criteria to meet objectives, (ag-gregate capacity, multiple time frames, adaptability) and concepts that evolved while designing specific structures, or exploring design potential of new carbon sink policy, were carried back into strategic planning. The network planning proposition is discussed here first, to clarify the premise of synchronizing carbon storage processes with land use life cycles and necessary shifts in land manage-ment practice guidelines to accommodate them.

New York City Sink Infrastructure NetworkData sources: Van Alen Institute Gateway Project maps: Spatial Information Design Lab (SIDL) 2009 and New York City Open Accessible Space Information System Cooperative (OASIS) 2009

Weehawken Waterfront Park, Weehawken, New Jersey. This planting, designed to be low maintenance, will typologically transform over time from meadow with trees to a more complex woody, Max-Bio, condition.

Landscape architects: Mathews Nielsen Landscape Architects, P.C., project designed by the author

Infrastructure Planning

City Sinks optimize cross-sector funding

The square-foot cost of urbanized land is so high that few, if any, institutional entities would have the cash to buy up land for a new infrastructural system of any kind. Carbon sink planning initiatives must be capable of opportunistic integration into existing urban systems and structures to be cost effective. This project suggests that infrastructure, such as a carbon storage network, can be planned to latch onto existing physical structures, can be adapted to existing policy, and can optimize funding mechanisms to maximize performance.

The matrix you see here illustrates the web of federal fund-ing options in various sectors for the sink typology defined in the following chapters. The myriad potential funding oppor-tunities for each component are possible because City Sink infrastructure is designed to simultaneously perform social (education, environmental justice, transportation, energy, economic development) and environmental functions (wa-ter quality, coastal habitat, contaminant remediation, and waste management).

Infrastructure is generally subsidized by state, local and pri-vate-sector dollars, so investment fluctuates with the boom and bust of economic cycles. Recessions and other down-ward market trends can suppress investment regardless of the need for expeditious action. Designing landscapes that engage multiple urban system processes expands the scope of available funding sources to release environmental action from that constraint.

City Sink apparatus linked to cross sector funding opportunitiesResearch Assistant: Kerry Lowe

.04Infrastructure Planning

NYC Future Carbon Sink

The point distribution plot for New York City’s future car-bon storage, speculatively based on the modest proposals for implementation described in the following chapters, blooms with sink sites. A few examples:

• The 2009 assessment indicated discord between soil and biomass systems in areas dominated by street trees, since they increase carbon stocks in biomass but do not optimize soil condition. The plot renders a still variable, but more consistent, field of organic soil carbon storage based on expanding areas of pervious surface, revising practices to focus on above and below ground plant-soil processes and installing small-scale pervasive in-ground urban plantings (Strips and Open spaces).• The degraded wetland areas of Jamaica Bay are shown to be enhanced and expanded by carbon offset credit investment.• The major parks are represented with greater carbon stor-age capacity due to Max-Bio tactics and apparatus like the Deadwood Bench.• Densely occupied zones like Midtown Manhattan, the Fi-nancial District, Downtown Brooklyn and parts of Queens are now animated by diverse policy and structures such as Green Roof Fields, Bonusable sinks, and Sidewalk and Street strips.

The following chapters will describe this array of working policy and working parts that could amplify urban carbon stocks as shown above. The apparatus universally act to boost carbon in soil and biomass based on the principle that to generate more ecologically viable cities, the mission is to construct more robust and diverse urban ecosystems.

New York City Sink network with point distribution plot of future carbon storage

Data sources: Van Alen Institute Gateway Project maps: Spatial Information Design Lab (SIDL)

2009 and New York City Open Accessible Space Information System Cooperative (OASIS) 2009

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Working Policy Ecological Easements

Usufruct. In the civil law. The right of enjoying a thing, the property of which is vested in another, and to draw from the same all the profit, utility, and advantage which it may produce, provided it be without altering the substance of the thing. Civ.Code La. Art. 533. (Black 1910 p. 1191)

Sunnyside rail yard, Sunnyside Queens: single purpose infrastructure wastes urban space.

.05Working Policy Open Space

City Sinks can enliven flagging industrial neighborhoods with a green economic engine. Neighboring properties are not degraded by sink infrastructure, but have enhanced value at many levels. Green industries offer opportunities for employment and training in skilled land management to local communities.

Open Space

Hunts Point Lot with sink tag: carbon sink landscapes can improve the civic environment without overlaying a homogeneous, alien style.

Apparently vacant and under-used lots are common in former industrial areas depreciated by the globalization of manufacturing. Used with abandon to stockpile detritus, and for marginal industries that require a low cost-per square foot to stay profitable, these areas have in recent years been eyed as sites for big-box retail (Gowanus and Red Hook in Brooklyn). The impulse to find a transforma-tive use for such sites is complicated by their proximity to economically distressed residential neighborhoods, which are desirable, even necessary, because of their low prop-erty values.

The operations of big box retail can support local commu-nities with new jobs (although they often hire workers from across the city), but they have a negative impact on the neighborhood’s quality of life by increasing truck traffic and creating vast open areas of paved surface for parking. If it is bad for the environment, odds are good it is not good for a neighborhood. Recent initiatives to bring community gardening to low-income neighborhoods (BK Farmyards among others) are models for the bottom up organization that can be applied to carbon sink sites.

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Oak Point Ave, Bronx 10474Description: Publicly owned lot (New York City Transit)Classified as vacant. Primary Zoning: M3-1Length: 213’ Width: 47’ Total Area: 1.09 acresNotes: Inside the fence dense shrubs have colonized part of an unused parking lot.

1 200’

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*assumes blacktop removal

PHYTO LAB - This industrial site has asphalt pav-ing and a scale that is too small for production, but large enough to offer adequate space for testing plant mitigation of soils contaminated by bitumi-nous compounds.

Tiffany Street, Bronx 10474Description: Privately owned lotPrimary Zoning: M3-1Length: 185’ Width: 425’ Total Area: 4.27 acresNotes: Appears to be inactive industrial site. Opportunistic vegetation visible. On water’s edge.

Tiffany Street, Bronx 10474Description: Publicly owned lot (New York City Transit)Classified as Industrial / ManufacturingPrimary Zoning: M3-1Length: 200’ Width: 100’ Total Area: 0.46 acresNotes: Paved loading dock appears largely dormant.

SALTMARSH/MARITIME SHRUBLAND/BIOFUEL - This waterfront site has potential for a native plant gradient from saltmarsh to successional shru-bland. The flatter areas of the site have productive capacity for biofuels.

MARITIME GRASSLAND/BIOFUEL - This site is also large enough to serve a dual purpose for na-tive species habitat and productive land to support community green jobs.


200’ 200’

land use life cycle short long

lot size small large

degree of permeability permeable* estimated soil organic carbon low high

amount of detritus low high

degree of visible contaminants low high

degree of visible vegetation none degree of light full sun

visible water dry

degree of compaction low high

salinity / air particulate level high

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degree of permeability permeable impervious estimated soil organic carbon low high



degree of visible vegetation none full degree of light full sun

visible water dry wet





degree of permeability permeable* estimated soil organic carbon low




visible water dry

degree of compaction high

salinity / air particulate level low high

Working Policy Open Space

Ryawa Avenue, Bronx 10474Description: Publicly owned lot (Sanitation) Primary Zoning: M3-1 Length: 424’ Width: 394’ Total Area: 6.86 acresNotes: Lot appears underused, possibly as overflow parking for sewage treatment plant. Gravel road inaccessible to public. Dense shrub vegetation growing along water’s edge.

Viele Ave, Bronx 10474Description: Publicly owned lot (NYC DEP) Classified as vacant. Primary Zoning: M3-1Length: 600’ Width: 200’ Total Area: 2.64 acresNotes: Large lot. Cracked paving, opportunistic weeds - shrubs. Adjacent to Barretto Point Park.

Bryant Avenue, Bronx 10474Description: Privately owned lot. Primary Zoning: M3-1Length: 50’ Width: 100’ Total Area: 0.11 acresNotes: Empty paved lot. Sign on fence states ‘for rent.’ Former auto parts business. Probable brownfield.


200’ 200’200’

PHYTO LAB - This small site exemplifies a phased approach to neighborhood ground contaminant remediation. Individual lots can be tested, and either sealed for continued production or put into a long-term phyto-remediation program depending on the local property market.

NURSERY PRODUCTION - Neighborhood nursery production can take advantage of the nearby mar-ket infrastructure for local community benefits. The project can be incrementally implemented, moving from container plants to urban-adapted trees and shrubs.

SALTMARSH/MARITIME SHRUBLAND/BIOFUEL - This relatively large waterfront site amplifies the native habitat impact of site 2 and expands neigh-borhood biofuel production to support local industry.







visible water dry





degree of permeability permeable* estimated soil organic carbon low high




visible water dry


salinity / air particulate level low high


lot size large





visible water dry wet



4 5 6

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A new view from the 7 train

Working Policy Green Roof Fields


The map assessment of Bonusable Plazas indicates that there are opportunities for carbon sink sites even in the most densely developed areas of Manhattan. The Finan-cial District and Midtown are like the holy grail of sink terrain; it seems unattainable to achieve any meaningful sink capacity in such dense vertical development. Despite their iconic stature as emblems of the human capacity to erase natural systems these zones have latent potential embedded in their finance structures.

When deal-making developers look for breaks from the City Planning Commission on building height require-ments and other lucrative tactics that don’t accord with zoning regulations, one of the prizes they offer to offset their proposals is construction of a Bonusable Plaza, a pri-vately held and maintained area for public use. These can take the form of plazas, pocket parks or even just widened sidewalks, although there are requirements for seating, lighting, planting and signage to make it clear they are amenities in the public domain.

Kayden’s research indicates that in some cases these pla-zas are barely used, either through design or idiosyncra-sies with adjacent context. But where there is light, there can be carbon sink, and the larger the structure, the lon-ger the potential urban life cycle for sink type implementa-tion. Some plaza areas could even be used as hyper-local tree nurseries for growing material adapted to the low-light and high-wind conditions in the canyons of New York.

Midtown Bonusable Sinks

(2000) Data source: Jerold S. Kayden, Privately Owned Public Space, 2000

.05Working Policy Bonusable Sinks

At grade and over-structure plazas are shown here with new plantings that increase biomass area in Midtown. The top view, a widened sidewalk around 34th Street, illustrates replace-ment of solitary trees in pavement with seating shaded by softwood trees that can be harvested for biofuel. Below, the lonely roof deck plaza is almost entirely given over to carbon sink planting.

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Louise Nevelson Plaza before its recent renovation and shown as a mixed low shrub planting adapted to shade and wet soils.

This site is not a Bonusable Plaza; it is one of the lar-ger Open Spaces in the Financial District created by the intersection of three major streets. In conjunction with water main and sewer repairs in the area, Louise Ne-velson Plaza was renovated in 2008. Typical city plan-ning thinking prioritizes public use over environmental function, but the financing to support enhanced use is not always forthcoming. This plaza was to have an outdo-or café for lunch crowds, but that did not make it into the final plan. There was no coordination between the design of the Plaza landscape and the repair of the combined sewer systems, streets and curbs.

Rethinking the plaza as a sink site alters the design logic. Criteria for success would be based on boosting carbon storage in plants and soils, as well as coordinating storm water management plans with DOT curb and paving de-sign to reduce runoff flow by increasing infiltrative area. Realistic needs assessment for additional lunchtime sea-ting, creating a powerful visual frame devoid of clutter for the display of the Nevelson sculptures, and the potential for introducing a vivid alternative landscape type into the neighborhood all enter into the proposition.

Financial District Open Space Open Space cross sector financing

Open signifies more complex land use scenarios that can benefit property owners, neighborhoods and regional so-cial and environmental communities. Urban landscape di-versity facilitates carbon sink retrofit into Open Spaces by linking multiple agendas. Researching the overlay of so-cial, cultural and environmental systems will almost inva-riably identify a unique combination of characteristics that present opportunities for carbon sink implementation. Open Spaces highlight the human role within a complex web of relationships in nonhuman biotic systems that can be sustained by our social and economic mechanisms.

.05Working Policy Open Space

City Sink Open Spaces linked to cross sector funding opportunitiesResearch assistant: Kerry Lowe

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New sound wall benefits: 81000 sf of planted surface and 48000 cy of high organic soil mix.

Areas of the Staten Island Expressway, where adjacent neighborhoods are clamoring for noise abatement, were examined to speculate on the effects of weaving 3-way Highway Sound Bio-Walls into existing planted verges. The Staten Island case study estimated 2700 feet of Sound Bio-Wall can be constructed along 1800 feet of linear dis-tance of expressway. The wall shown lines both sides of the expressway, and most of the wall is completely ex-posed to roadway view.

Staten Island 3-way Sound Bio-Wall case study:

Staten Island case study area ©2011 Google – Imagery ©2011. DigitalGlobe, USDA Farm Service Agency, GeoEye, Bluesky, Sanborn, Map data ©2011 Google

Staten Island Expressway 3-way Sound Bio-Wall installation sketch and plan diagram of Bio-Wall units

.06Working PartsHighway Sound Bio-Walls

Strip Sinks are conceived of as insidious and pervasive lines of plantings to increase biomass carbon storage, linked where possible to real long term urban soil im-provement. In some areas, the strips form a datum line that denotes a continuous public domain that resists the balkanizing tactics of real estate development.

In other areas, the strips are literally zones of utility, sup-porting neighborhood improvement through production and increased sink capacity.

Street strip implementation necessitates cooperation across city agencies: Departments of Transportation (maintaining viable travel and pedestrian access), Envi-ronmental Protection/Conservation (storm water man-agement improvements and navigating existing under-

ground utilities), Parks (they usually have jurisdiction over urban plants), public utilities (electric, gas and communi-cation lines), and local business improvement and com-munity organizations. The necessity for common cause amongst these entities could be seen as a fatal flaw, an insurmountable hurdle in urban design. Instead, the idea is proposed here to reassert key relationships in the ur-ban ecological system. In order to attain ecologically via-ble cities, the city relationships themselves must be more connective and robust.

Sidewalk and Street Strips

Young, managed woodland in New Jersey Layered plantings in mature, wet woodland in New Jersey23rd Street in the Flatiron District, Manhattan

CITY SINK directs our attention to the unseen, to urban ground as a substrate of biotic activity sustaining vegetative biomass and living soils.

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Deadwood Bench: a small management change with extensive capacity to escalate rates of carbon sink and reduce atmospheric carbon emissions.

Deadwood Bench and dead wood, Woodstock, New York, 2009

.06Working PartsDeadwood Bench

Gallery Deadwood Bench Installation, Van Alen Institute, Public Utility: City Sink urban landscape propositions, April 2009Photo credit: Alex Arroyo, Van Alen Institute

Deadwood Bench Redux, the bench is shown installed in a gap in the woods from recent construction disturbance, Woodstock, NY June 2009.

Maintenance regimes that seek to neutralize environ-mental processes in order to retain a scenic status quo can turn planted areas into carbon emitters instead of carbon sinks. City Sink is a proposal to recover temporally adjusted practices that reveal life cycle processes asso-ciated with carbon sink landscapes.

Plant life cycle and successional conditions are not always neat, and the mandate for maintenance often arises from a short-term desire to appear managed. The City Sink pro-position asserts that design encompasses land manage-ment practices, and design initiatives must seek to change land management practices in accord with environmental life cycles.

The Deadwood Bench is constructed of just that—dead wood—that would otherwise be mulched. Mulching relea-ses carbon into the atmosphere at a relatively rapid rate, and reduces the potential benefits of biomass carbon ab-sorption inherent in tree growth that offset the energy in-puts of plant installation and maintenance. The bench is designed to instigate collection and propagation of wind-blown seeds; in other words, it acts as a successional trig-ger to accelerate biomass carbon storage.

Gallery installation view of bench seat and hand-held video display of wood gathering, sorting and cutting filmed by Elisabetta Terragni Photo credit: Alex Arroyo, Van Alen Institute

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organic waste streams: discarded tires sewage sludge animal waste construction waste municipal solid waste crop residues

synthetic gas co-products industrial materials

return to stable soil storage: add N2, NOx, SOx to increase nutrient value ACCELERATED BIOMASS GAIN

Bio-energy produced by pyrolysis (an anaerobic low T burn) produces biochar as a by-product. Biochar is a high-carbon content soil amendment that increases biomass growth rate. This is a two-prong attack on high atmosphe-ric carbon counts since it boosts vegetative biomass while producing low-carbon emission energy.

“Combustion of bio-oil in an engine, boiler or turbine will release CO2. However, in general these emissions are bio-char. In addition, bio-oil combustion results in remarkably low emisions of NOx and SOx. Finally, remember that biooil is produced from waste which would otherwise decompose completely into CO2 and methane...”

“Biochar has been shown to be stable in soils for up to 2000 years. That is an order of magnitude longer than any other carbon storage technology.”*Disarming the Bio-Char Wars, www.re-char.com

“A hectare of metre-deep terra preita can contain 250 ton-nes of carbon, as opposed to 100 tonnes in unimproved soils from similar parent material... That difference of 150 tonnes is greater than the amount of carbon in a hectare’s worth of plants.”“Putting the carbon back: Black is the new green,” Emma Marris Nature 442, 624-626 (10 August 2006)

Pyrolysis is a carbon negative process; meaning upwards of 90% of the CO2 that would be released through combustion is captured as biochar.

Some mycorrhizal fungi prefer to germinate on charcoal; biochar directly supports carbon transfer mechanisms.

Pyrolysis Power / Biochar Production

Flow diagram of organic cycle with pyrolysisImage source: NASA earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images

.06Working PartsPyrolysis Power and Biochar

Pyrolysis as an energy source is still being investigated for urban-scale use. A pyrolysis power plant operating in Hamm Germany, managed by RWE Energie, genera-tes approximately 75 MW of gas energy, which is around 15 MWe at normal steam turbine conversion efficiency. Fuel is supplied by a variety of sources, local recycling centers and municipal waste processing. The byproduct of this operation has chemical contaminants that would be inappropriate for biochar to support food production.

However, biofuel grassland production could be increased to supply at least a percentage of the fuel stock for the plant to create a viable feedback loop.

Biochar (Terra Preta or black earth) has been used as an agricultural soil additive for thousands of years; it boosts biomass and aids in the transfer of carbon into soil. The real power of this concept for the city is in its modeling of a feedback loop between urban energy systems and soil building. Both phases of the cycle operate to terrestrially sink carbon rather than release it into the atmosphere.

Biochar and Pyrolysis Image sources: I-Cans for Educators from web .pdf by Jock Gill, Peacham, VT www.greaterdemocracy.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/

iCans-for-Educators-11.pdf and Biochar Image Source: Betchkal/Flickr. Permission: Creative Commons. www.climate.org/climatelab/Biochar

Pyrolysis Power / Biochar Production

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New York City is innovative in its reliance on a protected watershed (instead of an expensive chemical treatment plant) for its potable water supply. The success of this initiative could be a model for similar schemes to avoid the high costs of mechanical facilities compared to land management operations.

Why not approach waste water systemically too?

Clogged catch basin, Downtown Brooklyn

.06Working PartsPhyto Leach Fields

Sewage treatment plants trade off minimal space require-ments for high energy inputs. This made sense in a sce-nario of high land values and cheap unlimited energy re-sources. Carbon consciousness changes the terms of that assumption. Less energy use and increased biotic habitat have to be factored into a new urban order.

“Wetlands as an ecology are more productive in biomass production than any other environment except the rainforest.”

“The prodigious amounts of biomass that are produced are the result of the equally large masses of nutrients and sediments that are washed into the lowlands where most wetlands occur.”

“Sewage is essentially water and fertilizer. Wetland plants require water and fertilizer, and unlike dry land plants, they can grow in saturated soils and standing water and consu-me several times the nutrients used by dry land crops.”

“Thus the use of wetlands as a treatment process can be considered a form of agriculture, with the ‘crop’ consisting of clean water.”Campbell and Ogden, Constructed Wetlands in the Sustainable Landscape, 1999

Phyto Leach Fields provide point source treatment for urban waste water

Outer Coastal Plain Wetland, Cheesequake State Park, New Jersey

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.07Bibliography

.07Bibliography

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carbon cycle infrastructure for our built environments ... · parks, minimal human interference...

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