Reanimating public space through sustainable design: Adrian Benepe at TEDxMiddlebury

Oh, good afternoon, so think about the largest park in the world. Are you thinking about Central Park? I'm sure everyone is thinking about Central Park and Central Park is this big park that everyone knows. It's the park of the world that they came with and they just put a fence around this big Natural Area, that's not really true, they didn't do it. Central Park is a highly engineered work of art and it's full of pipes and there are the pipes that fill the reservoir and there are the pipes that clean the water and these pipes under all the roads, so Central Park was a great kind of experiment. in technologies like the best technology available at the time was used to

design

Central Park as a kind of natural Disneyland and they created these beautiful lakes and this cast iron. bridge which again was the latest technology the bow bridge but the lakes are fed by a tap can be drained by opening a drain Central Park was also an experiment in urban resilience Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux wanted Central Park to be a democratic

space

where Los The rich and the poor would enter this artificial paradise side by side and become a better society for it, even in the 1930s when we needed a new kind of fiscal resilience because we were in the middle of a Great Central Depression.

Park was rebuilt and they built the Central Park Zoo in seven months and they put all these unemployed people to work after building Central Park. Olmsted and Vaux built Prospect Park and parks across the country, but the real engineering challenge of Riverside Park Riverside Park was a long narrow ribbon trapped between Manhattan and the Hudson River, they had to think a lot about how they

design

ed it, so they designed it on the steep hillside between Riverside Drive and then at the bottom where the train tracks kept you away from the river, so it was actually an incomplete park for many years, so along comes Moses, not that Moses Robert Moses Robert Moses designed something called the Westside Improvement Project in the Westside Improvement Project are big, beautiful roads that run along the river, built on a landfill in the river.

I don't do that today and then between the land that was the road and the park there are these playing fields, but there is something really important: you have to do something with those train tracks and otherwise you can't get to the river, so he covers the railway tracks in a box and on top of the box he puts a beautiful walk like a palace grounds for the common man and here is that box under construction those railway tracks have been put in a big concrete box and now you can have a big beautiful park. Plus, Riverside Park is still going.

This is the third phase of repres. I'd Park is Riverside Park South. Landscape architect Thomas Balls took over the old train yards. There is part of a large real estate development. They have to build a park. they have to pay to run it and now you can connect Riverside Park Riverside Park to the south and Hudson River Park and suddenly you have a park along the entire Hudson River. Moses, you know, divided the seas, well, he didn't part the seas here, Robert. In fact, Moses joined the seas here in Pelham Bay Park in the Bronx, he filled a marsh, we can't do that anymore, which is good, but he did it for a great

public

purpose, he did it to create Orchard Beach that big . semicircle of sand imported from the rocky roads and in 1936 the hottest and record summer in New York even today one hundred thousand poor inhabitants of the Bronx could come to this paradise and in Long Island Sound bathe and cool off and park their 6000 cars in that parking lot giant of New York City became a real crucible for the invention of how to create urban places that work together and somehow you have to cram the docks and the piers and the bridges and the highways and the neighborhoods in Brooklyn Heights that you had .

For this real challenge, you had to somehow get a highway across the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway without destroying the adjacent neighborhood and you had to put some parks there somehow, so what they did was they cantilevered the expressway, they had it. coming off the edge of Brooklyn Heights. on a double-decker road system and they made a system to force the sound, the road noise, out into the river and the docks instead of into the community and if you walk there today on this walk you don't hear the sound of the road this great park system didn't last long in the 1970s it was really in terrible shape all the big parts of new york had fallen into very bad condition and something had to happen and this is the park system i found when i graduated From the university, this was the Central Park of the 1970s.

Burned and abandoned buildings covered graffiti. The grass turned into dusty lakes full of garbage. Things had gotten really bad for Central Park, so something dramatic had to happen and what happened next was really important. The people of New York came together, a woman named Betsy Barlow was a point on the Central Market Manager and worked with philanthropic New Yorkers to create the Central Park Conservancy. The Central Park Conservancy was a non-profit organization that worked with the City of New York and got together to create a plan to restore and manage Central Park in a different way than the parks had been managed before, so this was the Sheep Meadow I knew as a teenager in New York and then when I became a park ranger right out of college, My job was to help protect the new Sheep Meadow and let it grow and explain to people that you couldn't play softball or soccer here American and that at work it was just a big piece of green grass to be a backyard for people who didn't have backyards, so this Conservancy model spread across the country and in Atlanta, the Atlanta parks were in very poor condition and Piedmont Park, which had kudzu vines growing everywhere and an empty pool and was more of a parking lot than a park. created a conservation organization for Piedmont Park and it was beautifully restored, that same pool is now open and the kudzu has been trimmed and a new pavilion has been built and those cars have been kicked out of the park and Atlanta has its Central Park back now and even In Chicago, right next to downtown Chicago, there was a big underground parking lot and there was a chain yard, an area that really needed to come back to life and they brought it back to life in the most dramatic way possible, they decorated that parking lot and they moved the cars off the road and you couldn't see the trains anymore they brought

public

art and a large new performance

space

in Millennium Park the cost of half a billion dollars brought life back to downtown Chicago for residents, visitors and tourists they brought that same lesson to Dallas and in Dallas, Texas, a big highway runs through the heart of Dallas, smelly and noisy, and they covered it over the park with a terrace and Clyde Warren Park was built with a combination of federal transportation funds and private dollars . now run by Conservancy even in San Francisco we are on the bay a former military base gradually became a place for airplanes and this was Crissy Field where the Army Air Force flew out of there in the 1990s.

This was also abandoned , but it became part. of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area and a conservation organization was founded for the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, they got a firm called Hargraves landscapers and turned this old airfield into this big, beautiful new field, as a place that every San Franciscan who wants to go goes. He has a dog. run a dog and that means everyone in San Francisco, but one of the greatest acts of urban alchemy is probably the High Line and the Highland was also built by Moses. He had to get the freight trains off of 11th Avenue, where they were killing people and going up. to an elevated freight rail line that ran downtown and served New York's factories, warehouses, and meat market, but by the 1980s it was no longer needed and grew too large, and when the trains stopped running, nature He went ahead and created this beautiful accident.

Garden in the Sky and when the neighbor, the property owners and Mayor Giuliani wanted to tear it down so they could develop the area, some neighbors said no, we have a better idea, let's try to recreate this beauty and the Friends of the Highlands met with Mayor Bloomberg and other politicians had a big new plan to make a park in the sky, they got a big group of architects from a competition and Diller Scofidio and Renfro and field operations Pete oh Dolph came up with this plan to recreate that . magical landscape and recreate the sense of the rails with precast concrete planks and they started to build this big new park, but no one knew if it was going to work and that's why this park that runs 30 feet in the air on a small narrow ribbon of steel .

It needed elevators, it needed a whole new kind of paradigm or urban design and it became an overnight success and that same magical quality of the landscape with these rails merging into these grasses and bushes and flowering trees was recreated and , more importantly, a neighborhood that was hungry for Suddenly, parks had this green ribbon in the sky and almost as important became a magnet for economic development. 40 new buildings were built. Investment of two billion dollars. $200 million in net new taxes. This is what parks can do for cities, but what do you do with them? your garbage and in New York a lot of garbage is generated and the largest garbage dump in the world was The Fresh Kills landfill, but you also needed a big idea there and the big idea was to turn this landfill into a park, so the field operations. this big new plan to turn the 2,000 acres of garbage into two thousand acres of park and this is what it looks like today, there are still 30 more years to go to make this park work, but just covering those piles of garbage with a rubber coating The new topsoil and grass has created the equivalent of an alpine meadow on what used to be mounds of rubbish beneath those meadows, however the rubbish is still decomposing, so what do you do with it?

It's creating methane gas, but that methane gas is a resource that can be sold and capped and diverted and taken and sold to gas companies and generated power. The other things that are happening in cities across the country and in New York is that you have to find space to build your parks and that space is there for the most part. in the wasted spaces, the abandoned industrial infrastructure of old cities and in Brooklyn, that was the case where shipping had disappeared, but the abandoned peers and docks are still there. The Port Authority, which owned the property, planned to develop it for residential housing, but the people who lived in Brooklyn Heights said, "Wait a second, not only are you going to block our views, but we don't have parks," and followed up with a idea for a park between An Hatton Bridge and Atlantic Avenue, and that is this park.

Brooklyn Bridge Park and it is the best recycled park. They took stone from a tunneling project under the East River and used the stone to form the new hills and this beautiful and romantic and every drop of water in this park is harvested and goes to underground containers to be used for irrigation used for naturalistic wetlands in the park is used to water the grass and that is the new practice that we need this is a new paradigm for

sustainable

parks and

sustainable

cities and even the stairs that these people sit on are made of recycled stone for a bridge that was torn down, an old bridge was torn down in the upper part of the city, so this is the example of how new parks are built but no material is wasted when building it, even the wood and the benches are from an old warehouse that was He brought down on site this lesson of resilient cities and the need for parks and the roles they can play.

These multiple layers of value that parks can create are happening all over the world. This is Singapore, where they capture the order of storms and a great do what. They call the marina Virage if there is too much water, they lower the dam and let it out to the ocean, but that same dam keeps the ocean out and is a great reservoir for the city of Singapore in Madrid. They had large roads next to the main river. Rushing into the center of Madrid, they drove those roads underground, built beautiful new parks on top of them and suddenly a neighborhood that no one wanted to live in is the most desirable neighborhood in Madrid and makes cities livable to have large new parks that London had. the Olympic Games, but they also had the opportunity to take abandoned land, a former industrial site, reprogram it, not only build an Olympic stadium, but also build an all-ages park, a park that would naturally clean contaminated water through something called bioremediation, use the soybeans in the plants to clean that dirty water and then you go back to NewYork, the so-called schoolyard, these schoolyards are just big sheets of asphalt, they are waterproof, you get hurt when you fall on them, they have no play value and they are closed They close and close after school and the weekends, so my organization, the Trust for Public Land, had a great idea and we said, what if we took these school playgrounds and turned them into full-time playgrounds so that they're not just good for schools but also for the neighborhood and transform that schoolyard into this this small soccer field is permeable it acts like a big sponge to absorb rainwater plants trees you have rain gardens you become a negative space it is a positive space with multiple layers of value even the streets are part of the public realm so the streets have all these striped areas and you can excavate those striped areas and you can come up with ideas about how to collect rainwater on them and that the rainwater has accumulated not in a big well but in a planting bed and that planting bed is called Green Street and this Green Street in Queens during Hurricane Irene captured 30,000 gallons of stormwater runoff why is it so important?

It's important because all that stormwater runoff is going into a combined sewer system and creating combined sewer overflows and polluting ports, we need to be much smarter about capturing stormwater and there is no space too small to capture stormwater. . This is called street tree bioswale. The street tree biosoil is basically a glorified tree planting pit that is designed to capture stormwater and each of these captures 3,000 gallons of overflowing stormwater. The Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn is a Superfund site, which means it is heavily contaminated. It's filled with years of pollution from nearby factories and every time it rains, the street surface captures the runoff. hydrocarbons, oil and gas, all the nasty stuff and just the sheets, drains them right into the canal, but a neighborhood landscape architect at DeLand Studio had a different idea: create something called a sponge park and at the end of each street you can have these sponge parks with soils and plants that absorb that water in that pollution and then clean it and gradually release it into the canal instead of the storm sewer or the dirty canal and by designing the sponge bark you give Realize that the layers that have to be treated are not only layers of contaminated soil but also layers of bureaucracy and in this incredible drawing you see those bureaucratic layers.

The nine federal, state and municipal agencies you have to go to to get permission to build a park on the edge of a polluted canal. You have to have real perseverance to create these new visions of landscapes for new cities and then we get to all the controversy. Lian's resilience means planning for climate change and the big storms that come with it, like Hurricane Sandy that took that boardwalk and turned it into matches and destroyed the beaches and killed 50 people in New York, we have to plan for more barriers resilient and more resilient cities, not just in coastal cities but here in Vermont, where Hurricane Irene devastated the state and destroyed towns, and we have to figure out ways to keep those cities alive without main streets turning into Russian waterfalls. rivers.

Should we keep them away from the rivers? Do we create absorbing landscapes? These are the big challenges we face in cities and across this nation, but you can play. Gosh, you can take a degraded marsh and restore it, and when you restore it, those saltwater plants act like Dutch filters for pollution, but they act to slow the effects of storm surge and to prevent flooding and your nearby neighborhoods. restore many marshes to make our cities more resilient and we still have to build barriers because I see that the sea level is rising, but you can make the barriers multifunctional, put a bike lane on them like they do on the dikes in Holland and make them beautiful and functional as part of your landscape in 2010 there was an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art called updrafts and they said, think about the New York that can withstand rising sea levels and storms.

It was very prophetic and we have to think about our cities are greener places, they have more marshes, they have barriers but also natural barriers, they are places that are not only survivable but also habitable. Thank you so much.