CITY SINK
SUMMARY: CITY SINK is a meta-park of dispersed landscape Infrastructure boosting carbon stocks in both short – term biomass storage and through formation of long- term sequestration reservoirs for soil organic carbon in New York City. Urban-landscape is reshaped into apparatus, empowering citizens to affect global ecologies through civic practice.
PROBLEM SPACE: The Kyoto Protocol set parameters for trading carbon credits; the Clean Development Mechanism supports ‘sustainable’ agriculture/agro-forestry development of “lands having low potential to support biomass”. The Mechanism abets a global agricultural economy, and dislocates sites of amelioration from the populace responsible for excessive consumption.
SOLUTION: A network of sink apparatus – structures activating multivalent processes – is delineated. Apparatus amplify urban carbon stocks, fuel sustainable energy production, loop with storm-water management and integrate into the daily life of citizens.
Selected 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.
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