Tag Archives: green infrastructure

Miscellaneous thoughts on Hurricane Sandy

A few items to share in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy:

Hurricane Sandy from NASA GOES-13

Prediction: As the son of a meteorologist, I feel obligated to note that this storm was very well forecast.  Given a broader critique of science on a number of fronts, the accuracy of the forecast and the warning it provided is worth noting.  For other examples of pushback against reason, see: Frontline on climate change; the various reactions against Nate Silver; Michael Gerson’s trouble understanding statistics, etc. (I thought Ta Nehisi Coates has written well in response to this assault on logic, reason, and objectivity). Nate Silver devoted a chapter to meteorology in his recent book, much of which is discussed in this teaser in the New York Times entitled “The weatherman is not a moron.”

Accurate prediction for storms like this gives lots of time to prepare. While I was attending the NACTO conference in New York, I had a chance to visit NYC DOT’s traffic management center in Long Island City on Friday afternoon before Sandy hit; city officials were preparing for the storm well in advance at the time, thanks to a good forecast.

Resiliency: Prediction can help you prepare on a shorter timescale, but ensuring our cities are resilient to these kinds of events requires a whole host of other adaptations. Some ideas:

Financing Improvements: Matt Yglesias makes a point made before in the aftermath of DC’s derecho storm: burying power lines is expensive, and funding that cost is a lot easier to do in a densely developed community. The specific improvement need not be burying power lines, as the threats in some areas will be different (as Mayor Bloomberg noted, just pulling emergency generators out of basements prone to flooding is a good start – along with other “granular improvements”). \

Recovery: Leaving aside the opportunities for hardening vulnerable infrastructure like New York’s subway, the response and rather fast recovery of New York’s subway system (given the extent of flooding) is remarkable.  New York Magazine tells the story:

The first thing the MTA did right was informed by a colossal mistake. After the 2010 blizzard, which embarrassed the mayor and took out the subway for days, the MTA was too slow bringing its trains and equipment somewhere safe and dry. “We kind of dropped the ball and we learned from that,” said Tom Prendergast, president of New York City Transit, the part of the MTA that handles city subways and buses. This time the MTA shut everything down on Sunday evening, the day before the storm arrived. Waiting longer would have wasted time and man power needed for the cleanup afterwards.
…
In the future, Prendergast says, the system will have to rethink the way it designs its infrastructure. At the very least, ventilation ducts and gratings should be moved higher up or built so that they can be covered and made water-tight along with station entrances.
Implications for DC: The Washington Post looks at the worst case scenario for storm surge in DC.  In 2003, Hurricane Isabel wasn’t far from the worst case in terms of storm track, pushing water up the Potomac and into DC’s low-lying areas.

 

Green vs. gray – two sides of the same coin

DC Water's Blue Plains waste water treatment facility. CC image from erin m.

While perusing Twitter (hat tip to Jeff Wood), I came across this Guardian article about urban uses of natural processes to do the dirty work of urban pollution mitigation.  The piece discusses all types of green infrastructure and the natural processes they emulate, such as bio-filtration. I’ve taken note of local examples before, but the phrasing of their summary of the concept caught my eye:

Gray infrastructure is the system of pipes and ditches that channel storm water. Green infrastructure is the harnessing of the natural processes of trees and other vegetation — so-called ecosystem services — to carry out the functions of the built systems. Green infrastructure often intercepts the water before it can run into streets and become polluted and stores the water for gradual release through percolation or evapotranspiration. Trees also clean dirty water through natural filtering functions.

While drawing the contrast between green and gray infrastructures, the idea of “harnessing… natural processes” sparked a memory of this extensive summary from Mammoth of DC’s Blue Plains wastewater treatment facility – gray infrastructure on a massive scale.  In describing what goes on at Blue Plains, they note “the process of waste water treatment mimics — in an accelerated fashion — the natural cleaning processes of waterbodies.” The accompanying footnote:

Scott Huler explains this in his fascinating On the Grid, quoting a Raleigh wastewater treatment superintendent T.J. Lynch:

“All we’re doing is what a river would do… what happens in our plant  is the exact same thing that happens in a stream. That’s exactly where the process came from. We’ve just concentrated it. It might take the river a couple hundred miles to accomplish what we’d do in a couple days.”

Figuring out where any given piece of green infrastructure might fall in the spectrum from a naturally occurring ecology to a engineered technology is an interesting mental exercise. Rhetoric about sustainability aside, the same physical process is occurring using mostly similar mechanisms.

Low impact development near the Navy Yard

Near the soon to be opened and fantastic Park at the Yards, there’s a lot of new low-impact development infrastructure.  These bioretention areas should be a great example of the new kind of both urban and environmentally sustainable infrastructure can be.

IMG00071

These are not ordinary tree boxes.  Instead of draining into a standard storm sewer, these gutters drain into the tree boxes, where stormwater then naturally drains into the ground instead of into a storm sewer.  This reduces the amount of water entering the combined storm and sanitary sewer, and thus can help reduce the number of combined sewer overflow (CSO) events.  Since the combined sewer system mixes storm water and regular sewage, substantial rainfall will force the system to overflow into area rivers, dumping raw sewage mixed with stormwater directly into the Anacostia and Potomac.

From the street side:

IMG00072

Storm water will slowly absorb into the ground, aided by the various plants soils that can capture pollutants though the process of biofiltration.  Look at other rain gardens and tree boxes under construction – note the drainage layers of soil and gravel to be added.

IMG00073

IMG00075

In this completed rain garden/tree box, note the grade of the soil in the box, below the grade of the curb:

IMG00070

Cross-posted at Greater Greater Washington

Infrastructure + Networks + Security

A series of (somewhat) tangentially related post/items/articles I’ve been meaning to mention here:

1. Security Theater – mammoth

There are always tensions between openness and security, and cities like DC have plenty of examples of this – everything from bollards anchored in 6 feet of subterranean concrete to jersey barriers strewn in front of building entrances.  Given these tensions, there are questions about how much is necessary, and how that which is necessary can be better designed:

Though Perlin’s project explores the former possibility, the latter fascinates me, as it reminds me of the concept of “security theater”, coined by Bruce Schneier to describe the ways in which the public apparatus of security (at airports, government buildings, schools, transit stations, etc.) exists primarily not to provide security, as those measures are demonstrably ineffective, but to provide a fearful public with the illusion of security.

This tension has serious consequences for how we use space…

2. Death of a Lie – DCist

The Capitol Visitors Center was built, amongst many reasons, to help enhance security for visitors to the halls of Congress.  It’s also meant the death of traditions:

Before the advent of the CVC, a visit to the Capitol meant a tour for taxpaying citizens guided by hapless interns who would straight up lie to them. Just bald-faced, outrageous, entirely untrue claims about the nation’s history and its legislative process.

Is nothing sacred? Security kills even the most benign and stupid traditions.

3. Regional Security – CSG + COG

At the Coalition for Smarter Growth’s 11/12 forum to discuss the Greater Washington 2050 plan, one attendee asked about the inherent contradiction between the agglomerations and concentrations inherent to urbanism and the desire for various federal agencies to have uber-secure campuses – or at least ones that put on that particular show in the theater.

DC’s Planning Director, Harriet Tregoning, mentioned the inherent tension between the openness of urbanism and the desired security, but also noted there were some design considerations that need to be taken into account.

All the more reason to push for the elimination of unnecessary security theater – as the built forms that result likely aren’t all that desirable.

4. Secure + Connected Infrastructure – mammoth

Mammoth again notes the challenges of updating our infrastructure, both to provide redundancy and security, as well as enhance development and feed the economy.

I do greatly appreciate the thrust of one of those student projects, ‘The Diversity Machine and Resilient Network’2, which argues that, though Beirut’s “urban fabric… lacks consolidation… optimization or efficiency”, this is not a weakness, but a strength: “it is precisely the ‘redundancy’ of the distributed social infrastructure and relative autonomy of the neighbourhoods that lends the city its resilience.” Though made more specifically in reference to urban form and less in reference to infrastructure, this point reminds me of two things.

First, as faslanyc noted in the comments on a previous post, the impact of an infrastructure on the territory in which it resides should be evaluated not just by its scale, but also for its degree of distribution and connectivity…

Second, and directly related to that first advantage, I’m also reminded of the article Fracture Critical, which ran recently in Places and draws an interesting parallel between two ways of designing specific infrastructures, fracture-critical and fracture-resistant, and ways of designing larger systems. […] Given that the consequences of a networked super-project being fractured would be enormous, I suspect that there’s a place for being cautious about the design of such projects, even while recognizing their value.

Lots to digest here – the notion of how we perceive ‘infrastructure’ is key.  I suspect the urbanist sees it as the backbone on which a city can grow – as we see vestiges of that growth in the urban forms and fabric from various generations of housing stock, transportation facilities, etc…

5. Parcel by Parcel

It also raises the issue I noted with some of the proposed Eco City Beautiful infrastructure – how does one visually convey the vision of urban development around a core infrastructure system without dictating architecture and urbanism?  How do you convey the kind of organic growth of a city – parcel by parcel, building by building?  Mammoth again:

I’d like to think that learning to work infrastructurally (to use Lahoud’s language1) means working more flexibly (despite rhetoric which differs sharply from modernist rhetoric, the two designs presented appear to be close kin of modernist residential housing collectives and contemporary superblocks, as both take a large piece of land and develop urban fabric wholesale upon it), less directly (designing the infrastructure upon which the city grows, with an awareness of how the shaping of the infrastructure will affect the growth of the city, but not presuming to design the city itself) and accepting a degree of loss of control over the aesthetics of the resulting city fabric (which presents a host of drawing problems — how do you draw something which you are not presuming to design and still manage to communicate the importance of the work you’ve done in designing the scaffolding? — but still seems to me to be a humility worth developing).

“Accepting a degree of loss of control” is a nice way to put it.  Kostoff described the key attribute of cities as “energized crowding,” a kind of social context that can’t fully be designed.

6. But, what about scale? – mammoth + NYT + Infrastructurist

Louis Uchitelle argues that we’ve got a superproject void in the US these days – Infrastructurist responds with an impressive list of projects, if only a little disjointed – and mammoth notes the missing connective tissue:

That said, Infrastructurist doesn’t really respond to Uchitelle’s points about the relationship between scale and economic effect, as Uchitelle is arguing not just that that contemporary infrastructure projects are smaller, but that there’s something fundamentally different about the economic effect of a very large project, like the ARC Tunnel, which, while physically impressive, operates in a relatively small geographic territory, and a superproject, which connects formerly disconnected territories (as the interstate highway system did), aggregating markets. The obvious contemporary corollary to the interstate is high speed rail, but Uchitelle also rightly notes that the Obama administration project which is closest to a superproject, defined not just by impressive physical impact, but also by economic effect and ability to facilitate new connections, is the proposed integrated health care computer network.

While the idea of high speed rail has the potential for that kind of connectivity and transformation of markets, what’s missing is the systemic planning.  Looking at DC as a analogous situation, the city and region have benefited immensely from a system planned as a system – and built out in full.  Piecemeal construction on a line by line basis has been less than successful in other cities, and that pattern could hold for intercity rail, too.

7. Paying for it – The Transport Politic + Streetsblog

One place that has taken a system-oriented approach is Denver, and TTP notes the pain they’re dealing with for their foresight.

Perhaps good long term decisions like those in Denver could be vindicated with a little help from a National Infrastructure Bank?

More ideas for the Eco-City Beautiful

I’ve been meaning to say something on some more water + city issues raised by mammoth a short time ago, but I haven’t gotten around to it.   Mammoth points us to another entrant in the design competition for Toronto’s Port Lands (following up on some of the discussion about McMillan Two).  The project, called River+City+Life, aims to re-imagine urban wetlands rather than simply recreate a faux natural setting.

The design team faced a complex challenge: to renaturalize the mouth of the Don River while simultaneously reengineering the flood plain and creating a new thriving edge to the city’s downtown. Working at the confluence of urban core and derelict waterfront, Stoss pursued an adaptive strategy based on the primacy of the river and its dynamics. Of particular significance is the project’s explicit emphasis on building resilience, which was to be achieved by recalibrating the mouth of the river and its floodplain as a new estuary — not a restored estuary, but a landscape transformed through the creation of a new river channel and “river spits” — sculpted landforms capable of withstanding changing lake levels and seasonal flooding, while also providing new spaces for recreation and housing.

River+City+Life - Site Rendering

River+City+Life - Site Rendering

By proposing new, integrated ecologies for the site, organized principally by the river and its innate properties, the Stoss plan “puts the river first.” This constitutes a complete reversal of a century and a half of straightening, channelizing and deepening the river for the economic benefit of the citizens of Toronto. Centered on renewal rather than restoration, the design strategy comprises adaptation to occasional flooding, mediation between native and alien species, and a thick layering of habitats and edges, both cultural and natural, seasonal and permanent. In this way River+City+Life weaves a resilient urban tapestry of public amenity, urban edge and ecological performance, conceiving the city as a hybrid cultural–natural space and setting in motion long-term evolutionary processes in which new ecologies would be encouraged not suppressed.

River+City+Life - Hydrologic Elements

River+City+Life - Hydrologic Elements

River+City+Life - Massing Study

River+City+Life - Massing Study

This is the kind of potential meshing of green infrastructure, site, and urbanism we should demand from McMillan Two.  Though this specific example raises some questions in my mind about public space, streetscapes, and other urban design elements – the overall approach of the city and its infrastructure as a kind of living machine is fascinating.

River+City+Life - Aerial

River+City+Life - Aerial

With this specific proposal, a few of those renderings and massing studies scare me from an urban design standpoint – with arcaded buildings suspended over streets and sidewalks – but it’s a tremendously interesting idea to play around with.

Speaking of water…

A book that I really ought to add I’ve added to the reading list is Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner.  It’s the story of the American West and the battle for water resources.