A link to my article Designing for Food: Facilitating Continued Agricultural Opportunism and Entrepreneurship within the EcoCity.
This article built off my work in developing the program for the Food District at Weinland Park. I presented the paper at EcoCity 2011 in Montreal and it was peer reviewed published in the fall of 2013 as part of the EcoCity Summit Library.
http://www.ecocitybuilders.org/resources/ecocity-summit-library/2011-2/integrating-2011/
Background
In 1975 Alan Sonfist reclaimed a piece of land in Lewiston, New York that had been used as a toxic chemical dump. The project, entitled Pool of Virgin Earth, collected wind-blown seeds throughout the spring, eventually producing a modest collection of wildflowers and invasive shrubs. Sonfist described this as a reminder of what the city once was or, more provocatively, could yet be (Sonfist, 1998). In 1982 Agnes Denes reclaimed a former dumping site at the tip of Manhattan, now Battery Park City, transforming it into her much celebrated Wheatfield, a critique of “food, energy, commerce, world trade, [and] economics.” Denes referred to this work both as “an intrusion into the citadel, a confrontation of High Civilization;” but also as a nostalgic “Shangri-la, a small paradise, one’s childhood, a hot summer afternoon in the country, forgotten values, simple pleasures” (Denes 1996 (1982). In both examples the artist embraces the waste dialectic of the late 20th century American metropolis, what Lawrence Buell has described as Toxic Discourse (Buell, 1998). Waste is both shunned as the literal by-product and also, perhaps cloyingly, embraced as the figurative life-blood of the industrial/corporate city. Both artists set forth the act of reclamation as a critique of, and bulwark against, the proverbial on-rush of civilization. Yet, both artists also freely acknowledge the ineffable attraction of the work’s hybridity — the illicit quality of an adolescent nature co-mingling with the implicit corruption of a toxic culture, and the increasing awareness of the complex and often ambivalent dialog between human actions and ecological responses. Denes’ work particularly, achieves this dialogue through the overt spectacle of immediate juxtaposition. The spectacle of Wheatfield is not defined merely by the act of planting a field of wheat on a former dump site, but by doing so within the cradle of the American cultural zeitgeist, Manhattan. Images of Wheatfield do not suggest a small, isolated, installation within the yawning maw of the city, but rather a comparable opponent of equivalent scale and grandeur. The spectacle of juxtaposition thus brings home the obvious social critique, and yet also heightens the odd sense of ambivalence rooted in the eerie beauty of the ecologically disturbed and culturally dislocated (Williams 135).
Sonfist’s and Denes’ work precedes and underlays the Landscape Urbanism movement which surfaced in the mid 1990’s and early 2000’s and was, perhaps, most thoroughly realized in the original, year 2001, competition for Fresh Kills. Like the land artists before them, Landscape Urbanism sought a way of intervening within the built environment that utilized ongoing ecological process and management as fundamental design tools. Landscape Urbanism eschewed the idea of a static and consumable image of nature, for a nature in process, recognizing the scale of time and the complexity of ecological and cultural entanglements that continually shape and re-shape the cultural landscape (Corner, 2006).
Field Operations’ Lifescape, the winning entry into the original competition, and the basis for the current Fresh Kills draft master plan, envisions the transformation of the landfill into a “synthetic, integrative nature, simultaneously wild and cultivated, bewildering and cultivating.” This synthesis is achieved through an elegant drawing out of site constraints and potentials for varying “patches,” or ecological communities defined by the constraints of site aspect, soil moisture and quality, ecological drift and an imposed and corresponding disturbance regime. The proposed landscape is thus a direct reflection of the site’s altered state. Moreover, the design capitalizes on the site’s constructed condition in order to enhance the region’s ecological infrastructure, adding heterogeneous prairie and meadow patch types that are alien to the Mid-Atlantic Region in order to augment the site’s ecological capacity beyond its original condition. Lifescape’s project description states that “nature is no longer the image we look at, out there, but the field we inhabit, an active lifescape where life below ground, on the ground, in the water, and in the air is continually manufacturing new environments as it reproduces and evolves” (Field Operations).
Project Proposal
Heat Island proposes an intertwined set of interventions: a landscape scale augmentation of the site that utilizes its embodied infrastructure and energy in order to amplify its cultural and ecological value within the region; and a new system of waste-to-energy infrastructure that would allow the City of New York to function in a more ecologically and economically sustainable way.
Capitalizing on the existing site infrastructure, Heat Island proposes a reutilization of the existing methane syphoning system in order to create a modified geothermal heat-pump. This heat pump would draw out the low grade heat being generated deep within the landfill and distribute it to the surface via the existing network of methane syphoning pipes. Raising the temperature of the site at the ground level would result in a fundamental alteration of its climatic, and thus biotic, nature. Since higher temperatures have been shown to lead to higher rates of precipitation, it is theorized that the heat pump will generates the equivalent of a lowland equatorial rain forest on the site – a jungle. Beyond its explicit aesthetic value, the jungle becomes a hyper-performative bio-type within the regional network of habitat patches, a spatial anomaly allowing for a broader range of animal and vegetal species than would otherwise be possible. Moreover, the jungle becomes a permanent registration of the ongoing life of the landfill below, expressing the profound scale and ambivalent hybridity of human alteration of the land – an ecological cyborg.
For the production of energy, the Jungle is selectively harvested or “disturbed” in order to provide a balancing agent for a series of four urban-scale anaerobic bio-digesters. The bio-digesters, located on the existing flare station sites, re-utilize the landfill’s waste delivery and transfer infrastructure in order to bring in food and garden waste from across the city. Collectively the bio digesters would remove 220,000 wet tons of municipal solid waste from the city’s sanitation budget per year and add 6 Mega Watts of electricity to the city’s power supply.
A conceit of the project is that it co-mingles rather than conjoins the act of power generation and the act of sculpture. Like Sonfist’s Pool of Virgin Earth and Denes’ Wheatfield, the spectacle of the jungle, the action of its perpetual cycles of disturbance and change, and the anomalous aspect of its being are meant as a critique of consumer culture and traditional ideas of nature, particularly the nostalgia and ecological fascism of the nativist movement. The bio-digesters feed off but juxtapose the jungle, residing within it as appropriately utilitarian monuments to waste culture — banal temples to the gods of consumption.
The Food District is a project that I’ve been engaged with for some time along with Kay Bea Jones here in the KSA and a team of people from CEDCO and MORPC. I lead the programming and some of the strategic visioning for the project (You’ll notice some programmatic similarities with my Civic Agora competition entry). Kay Bea and I worked with Design Group and MKSK to develop the schematic design. I’ve posted some images from process below. The project is currently going through a capital campaign to try to fund construction. I’ve included the project overview blurb and some local press below.
Using an $864,000 planning grant from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development
(HUD), the Mid-Ohio Regional Planning Commission (MORPC), Godman Guild and its subsidiary
Community Economic Development Corporation of Ohio (CEDCO), and partners The Knowlton School
of Architecture at OSU, OSU Extension, the City of Columbus, Local Matters, and Wagenbrenner, are
developing a plan for a multi-purpose food processing and packaging center, unique to the region and
the state. This value-added food center, envisioned for the former 3M site in Weinland Park, will not
only reduce food waste by repurposing it into nutritious, affordable meals, but also create jobs and
education opportunities for residents and spur economic development around the region. It would be
a social enterprise operating as a strong, profitable business while improving the quality of life for
our region and its people.
Some local press on the Food District project.
More Food District Stuff here:
The Nutrient Extraction Device (NED) is a speculative project intended to address non-point nutrient pollution in freshwater lakes, rivers, and streams. It is designed to be portable, easily produced, adaptable, and affordable.
Current physical systems for handling water pollution, like waste water treatment plants and constructed wetlands, deal with water at one monumental station within the system – cleaning water as it exits or enters or circulates through the system at that point. These cleansing methods work well for point source pollutants (PS) such as those coming from factories, power plants, and municipal sewer systems, which evacuate wastes at a known point. However, these systems are poor at combating non-point sources of pollution (NPS) – pollution that comes from a wide variety of sources and may enter the water system at almost any point. Non-point source pollution is primarily the result of urban and agricultural storm water runoff which may carry a host of pollutants such as Nitrogen and Phosphorous based fertilizers, pesticides, and heavy metals. Existing approaches to preventing NPS pollution utilize land management strategies. Federal programs currently address NPS pollution from regulatory, policy, non-regulatory management, incentive and educational program positions. While such programs are necessary, they are far from universal. They are only effective over an extended period of time, they require large amounts of political will, and often, they impose reforms within a single political boundary while a water system may stretch between multiple municipalities, states, and even between nations.
NEDs are an attempt at providing a small, cheap, and effective solution to the most common and destructive form of NPS pollution — nutrient pollution. Nutrient pollution is the result of an overabundance of dissolved nitrogen and phosphorous in water bodies. Though Nitrogen and Phosphorous are naturally occurring elements, an over abundance of either leads to the uncontrolled growth of certain organisms. These organisms, in turn, use up available oxygen and destroy other forms of life — a process called eutrophication. Essentially, NEDs mimic a natural wetland’s nutrient uptake process on a small but mechanically and biologically enhanced scale. A NED uses a river or stream’s natural current to pull water through a series of biological capsules. Light and heat are provided for these capsules by a small turbine that also harnesses power from the river’s current. Because the NED is small, inexpensive, and able to be mass produced many individual units can be strategically deployed in order to address NPS in a dispersed manner. Their passive design allows them to operate over long periods with no energy inputs, and with only periodic maintenance. Because NEDs are able to reside in-stream, essentially within a public right-of-way, they involve minimal political complexity, and no public or private land commitments.
Some images from a project that I’m currently working on with the Lower Olentangy Urban Arboretum (LOUA), envisioning what Glen Echo Ravine might look like if daylighted at High Street. This project is still in an early stage, I’ll continue to post images as it takes shape.
A portion of my graduate research investigated the use of high temperature tolerant species of algae in the removal of greenhouse gasses from coal fired power plants and the impact that such technology might have on energy infrastructure. In these systems, algae strips power plant emissions of harmful carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide gasses before emitting mostly oxygen as a by-product. Algal blooms are then harvested and pressed, extracting a high quality vegetable oil. This project speculates on the ability of a similar system to remove greenhouse gasses from automobile exhaust.
The Algal Greenhouse Gas Elimination Element replaces the extension pipe connecting the catalytic converter to the muffler in an automobile’s exhaust system. In essence, automobile exhaust is forced through the AGGEE, a simple algal chamber where algae consume the carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide that escape the catalytic converter.
Because AGGEEs are located out of direct sunlight, a full-spectrum light source powered by the cars battery provides the necessary light while also indicating when the AGGEE needs to be replaced. As the algal blooms grow within the chamber they block more and more light — a dark AGGEE needs to be replaced. Subsequently, functioning AGGEEs emit a soft illumination similar to “ground effects.”
Because AAGEEs require relatively frequent replacement, I investigated the locational strategies of several drive-through services. Drive-through services distribute as a function of distance from a market and the perceived time interval between visits. Wendy’s fast food restaurants locate within a one mile radius of one another in order to maximize their coverage over a dense population. Alternatively, Jiffy-lubes — which expect less frequent but no-less regular visits — locate within a five mile radius of one another. AGGEE based services might need to locate within a two to three mile radius of one another. Finally, system inputs and outputs were mapped as way of speculating about business externalities and as a way of developing site and production level strategies.
