CitySink

By Sahar Ghaheri

At the core of CitySink, one of the semi-finalists of the BFI Challenge, is the discourse of carbon sequestration and community engagement. It is an urban and regional systemic solution with many layers.

“I submitted the project because it’s very complex to be conveyed systemically and in theory, I’ve had a lot of buy in for individual apparatus, but communicating the big idea is what really needs to be pushed forward right now, “ explains, project lead, Denise Hoffman Brandt, about entering the Challenge.

What is Carbon Sequestration and why is it important? Carbon Sequestration is geoengineering technique, which captures and securely stores carbon dioxide emitted from the global energy system. It is said to be one of the most promising ways for reducing buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Sequestration activities can help prevent global climate change by enhancing carbon storage, also called sinks, in trees and soil, preserving trees and soil, and by reducing emissions of CO2, methane, and nitrous oxide.

CitySink offers a systemic and strategic approach to the problems surrounding carbon emission, enabling New York City to adapt its landscape for more optimal absorption of CO2. The strategy involves a number of long-term sequestration apparatus. The sink apparatus are divided into seven strategies that work together. These parts of the apparatus are incrementally implemented overtime.

Technical Sink Apparatus:
Phyto-Labs: dispersed in vacant-lots and public parkland, phyto-remediation plots as formal gardens merge visual and experimental criteria.
Verge grasslands: optimize easily accessible, underutilized areas of infrastructure right of-ways as biomass/soil sinks.
Metastatic maritime plant dispersal: vital, yet vanishing ecologies are preserved in urban land-use through linking extremities of condition between degraded city land and maritime edge.
Max-bio parkland:
recalibrates the ratio of recreational to ecologically optimized territory.
Highway sound bio-barriers: soil-building bio-sound walls utilize solar power to irrigate with highway runoff.
Sidewalk and street bio-strips : an infiltrating network of planted strips managed for cycling biomass production (such as bio-fuel) and urban soil building.
Leach fields/pyrolytic biochar production : integrating waste management and clean energy, wetland parklands clean water, produce fuel and maximize public awareness of productive terrain as a systemic condition.
Deadwood: a management strategy embodied in a structure inhibiting release of atmospheric carbon from dead trees that simultaneously instigates successional forest growth.

The strategy builds on creating strong relationships with citizens and the community of related disciplines that deal with the urban environment. For citizens the network of sinks can help to link neighborhoods under a common enterprise and help stimulate and educate the public. According to Denise, they can also engage environmental justice movements and stimulate new ones. While she doesn’t fully map out these relationships it is easy to imagine the possibility.

She does, however, map existing funding streams with the technical apparatus, engaging a cross-disciplinary approach from the onset.

Funding Matrix:

Denise Brandt, head of the project explains, “The initiative is intended to alter our understanding of urban land and urban land use as much as it is to sequester carbon, and that’s a function of scale. In order to start to build that agency and enable physics and even individuals to realize that they can impact global scale ecology at that level by making people aware of the eastern forest and turning cities into eastern forests, in a way.”

Brandt’s approaches the problem from a systems perspective creating an integrated, whole-system solution. It’s not about making a green space or planting more trees, it’s about actually thinking ahead and anticipating the future. It’s about creating a system that will last much longer than the life span of those trees.

More: http://www.vanalen.org/fellowship/fellows/DeniseHoffmanBrandt