The Well-Tempered City by Jonathan F. P. Rose

Author:Jonathan F. P. Rose
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2016-08-10T16:00:00+00:00

Integrating Natural and Human Infrastructure

New York City has always been proud of its extraordinary water system, but in the 1980s, as development increased in the 1,600 square miles surrounding the city’s upstate watershed, its water quality was threatened by sewage leaking from sprawling new homes. In 1991 the federal EPA required New York City to build a water filtration system at an estimated cost of $10 billion. Like Philadelphia, the city proposed an alternative: to purchase huge swaths of land surrounding its reservoirs and preserve them as natural filters for water flowing into the system. The cost of the preservation strategy was $1.5 billion, which offered significant savings from the capital outlay requested by the EPA, and the cost of labor, chemicals, and power for a series of large filtration plants, expenses that would only have escalated over the years.29 The plan worked. Today New York City’s water remains among the purest in the world, and its water system’s operating expenses have been contained.

After this success New York City began to focus on enhancing benefits from other natural elements of its infrastructure. In 1996 two city departments—Parks and Transportation—began to work together on a Green Streets program to transform unused roadside areas into green spaces that could beautify neighborhoods, improve air quality, reduce air temperatures, absorb storm water, and calm traffic. Since the program’s inception, more than 2,500 Green Streets projects have been created citywide. In 2010 the city expanded the program into a green infrastructure strategy by adding the Department of Environmental Protection to the collaboration. By restoring school playgrounds to grass from asphalt, planting swales of natural plants along sidewalks, and adding a million new trees, the city aims to reduce its combined sewer outflow by more than 3.8 billion gallons a year. By integrating differing agencies to achieve common objectives, the city is developing more coherent communities with quantifiable co-benefits such as cooler summers, reduced energy use, increased property values, and cleaner air.

New York City’s JFK International Airport is a significant piece of infrastructure. Thirty-five thousand people work there, and planes carrying more than 48 million people take off or land there every year, consuming fuel, food, and replacement parts, and emitting air pollution, noise, solid waste, and runoff. But airplanes aren’t the only frequent fliers into and out of the JFK area. Directly adjacent to the airport is Jamaica Bay, where more than 325 species of migrating birds rest and feed—more than twice the number of bird species in the Galápagos! The bay is an important part of the Hudson River Flyway, a corridor for annually migrating birds from Canada and New England flying south for the winter and returning north for the summer. Jamaica Bay lies in the heart of Gateway National Park, America’s first urban national park and the only one in the country that can be reached by subway.

Surrounded by an airport, intense urban development, and four sewage treatment plants, Jamaica Bay suffers from intense nitrogen pollution that causes algae to bloom, suffocating its biodiversity.

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