The following is part 2 of Jay Wu’s interview with Denise Hoffman Brandt. Check out part 1 here! This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Q. Let’s talk about your book, City Sink: Carbon Cycle Infrastructure for our Built Environment. I was looking at the Google Books description and it said, “City Sink is a design research proposal for a meta-park of dispersed landscape infrastructure to boost carbon stocks and biomass, and through the formation of long-term sequestration, reservoirs for soil organic carbon in New York City and Long Island.” Let’s break that down a little.
A. The whole project speaks to this idea of time. We assume that cities cannot perform valuable ecological processes because land-use practices prohibit it. My argument was that, while we can’t do everything everywhere, we can synchronize our land-use processes with the timespans of biotic processes to improve the habitat for humans and everything else. You would do certain things if you had short-term access to the piece of land, if it was a sidewalk, etc. But it was all based on timing, understanding how our activities and biotic activities can be synchronized.
Q. That’s really interesting. How did that thesis come about?
A. I was thinking about the New York City Urban Soil Reconnaissance Survey — an unsung hero of urbanism. It used to be that when you looked at cities on these maps there’d be just a big purple area, meaning disturbed soils. What they did was they said, “Urban areas have soil too,” and they made a classification system for the urban soil. At the same time, there was the million trees initiative. I was well aware of the DOT constraints on tree planting in the city, for visibility, for electric infrastructure, etc. I knew that the one million trees were going to wind up plunked in vacant lots in a park somewhere and wouldn’t have any impact on the streets, where the heat island effect is most active.
So I started thinking about how you could bring it all together. I did a point distribution plot based on the soil reconnaissance survey that showed where you had the most organic soil, which is where carbon is sinking in the soil, as a relative array of soil conditions across the five boroughs. I did the same for vegetative biomass. It became clear that even though we think of trees as the big sink, in the case of New York City’s region, it’s in marshlands. The grasslands are high biomass, they cycle continuously, and the biomass just sinks down into the water where it’s sustained. Now, wetlands also release methane, which is a greenhouse gas, so marshes aren’t always the best sink, but the takeaway was that we could be looking beyond trees for ways to sequester carbon in the city. That’s when I started to think of how you could turn this into infrastructure, and recognize the validity of non-human biota through establishing infrastructure to sustain it. That was the other important idea from this project, that we should see infrastructures as the support systems of urbanity inclusive of all humans and nonhumans as well.
That was the other important idea from this project, that we should see infrastructures as the support systems of urbanity inclusive of all humans and nonhumans as well.
Q. In City Sinks, what do you mean by meta-park?
A. What I mean by meta-park is that we institutionalize territories as valuable productive territory vs. park. That’s why across the country, you always have this conflict between wildlands and fracking. According to the American principle of highest and best use, highest use is always production. Other uses may be really important, but production value— whether it can be used for office space or for high-end residential towers, or mining, etc—always trumps. I questioned why are we institutionalizing performance this way? The idea of carbon sink infrastructure being a meta-park communicated that in the way the infrastructure infiltrates into the city, it blurs the line between social production and ecological performance. The city is the park, and it is characterized by natural processes.
Q. Got it. You also said something about making legible the inextricable mesh of relationships between humans and nature. Does that mean that the design of the meta-park can itself be an educational tool that teaches inhabitants about how the meta-park operates?
A. Yeah, that was a big issue, because together with this idea of institutionalizing territories, there’s the learning territory. By spreading sink devices — and a lot of the proposals were for street infrastructure, building it right into sidewalks — the process would be so pervasive that everybody would be encountering and therefore learning from it. There was a lot of talk at the time of carbon offset accounting, that New York City was a big carbon emitter, but it could offset emissions in other places. There were UN programs for creating forests in other countries, where those sustainable forests would somehow offset the emissions of New York City. I felt like that displacement was frankly unethical, and we need to own what we do. We need to take responsibility for it, we need to see it, and we need to own it, and City Sink was a mechanism to reveal the potential for doing so.
Q. A few weeks ago, Texas saw these huge blackouts, which resulted from extreme weather conditions associated with climate change. Are there any connections you can draw between that crisis and your work?
A. Before I even did City Sink, actually, I did a competition entry called E-scape. This was so long ago, I think I was teaching at Pratt. The thing that I wanted to explore with that project was how sustainable energy could be as misused as fossil fuels. As a landscape architect, I couldn’t speak as in-depth about how it would be misused technologically, but I could talk about misuse in terms of further cementing problematic ideas like the principle of highest and best use. We’ve decided that energy infrastructure, power infrastructure, is so important that we’ll put it anywhere it has to be. So we have these massive high tension lines running out through Long Island where people are always wondering if it is causing cancer, we have transformer vaults underneath the sidewalks that occasionally fry dogs, and we just take this stuff for granted. We run the risk of doing the same thing with sustainable, renewable technologies. What if we actually had to plan to implement renewable technologies in ways that not only rebuilt the grid, but also brought human values into it. How do we turn it into recreation in some places, how do we prohibit it in others? Interestingly, after Hurricane Sandy one of the biggest topics of conversation was Long Island’s power outages. I did a presentation with Byron Stigge at Pratt where we talked about the energy issues, and about distributed systems, smaller, nonholistic grid systems. Not only are centralized systems like Texas ERCOT easy to bring down all at once, but they reflect social values and reinforce political power structures that maybe should not be understood as absolute truths.
Right after Sandy, the city was really considering the socio-political issues around distributed systems, which was a major threat to Con Edison and the Long Island Power Authority (LIPA). I think that in the years since we have gotten a bit complacent though. I suspect that Texas will too. I hope they don’t. Eventually, we are going to have to come to terms with how we want to envision our future. Is it with centralized control? Or is it with more distributed authorities? When I first looked at E-Scape, the distributed systems were really compelling. However, the technologies associated with off-grid — what we’re doing with sourcing and dumping the materials for used batteries — is highly problematic. We’re just setting up another cycle where an affluent nation can take advantage of less affluent nations. I would say that’s the biggest energy challenge we have, resolving the battery issue in a non-abusive way.
