NYC: Is a new sustainable urbanism paradigm emerging in the jungle of concrete?

MET rooftop view

Skycrapers stretching towards the clouds are an undeniable sign of human achievement, but these huge buildings also cast the streets below into shadow, creating manmade canyos that sunlight struggle to iluminate. — MET exhibition

I didn´t expect New York City to be a plain portrait of a city, I expected to see a whole spectrum of shades and lights, opposing and competing forces trying to shape the future of the big apple. So I went there looking for those shades, those urban paradoxes like the increasing signs of inequality and disconnection from nature; but also I hoped to find the lights, those signs of an emergent paradigm of urban sustainability. So this article is about what I found, and you can make your way into the higher notes (the lights) if you will, or you can go through the shades and the lights in that order.

The shades…

The concrete jungle
Nature and built environment

The separation between nature and the built environment is quite clear in NYC. Almost as if the city was trying to make a statement. In my visit to the MET rooftop, I could see this breathtaking yet uncomfortable view: in the background, the built environment, slim boxes made of cement and steel, high-maintenance mechanical buildings that borrow energy mostly from non-renewable sources and breathe out waste. Right in front of that background, closer to me, the trees of Central Park.

People often talk about gentrification as a huge problem in major cities as NYC, but isolating nature into islands of green might a similar issue, with more cement displacing nature and increasingly undermining our connection to it. but “there’s an enormous amount of disease largely tied to our removal from the natural environment, If we lose that we can crash into depression, anxiety and other physical and mental illnesses” (Hartig & Kahn, 2016). On one of my walks in Central Park, I met this man, we were resting together under the shadow of a tree after running. He realizes I´m not from the city and advises me “If you want to find some sanity in the city, find your rock under a tree and you´re set”. And so I did.

I realized I was not the only one to crave for some green after long hours of endless built environment deprived of nature. There, at the MET rooftop, I smiled at myself at the thought of Central Park trespassing its man-made boundaries, little by little climbing over the skyscrapers and taking over the jungle of concrete.

“Winner takes it all”
Buildings for billionaires

“Billionaires want views” I overheard once while walking in Manhattan. In a growing city of 8.5-million population — which soon will hit 9 million- new skyscrapers being built in Manhattan are no meant for everyone. In the One57 hiper-luxury highrise, one penthouse in the highest floor can cost up to 100 million dollars. Surely enough, billionaires get their views. But what does everyone else get? Are the ever-taller skyscrapers in the city the visual analogy of the rise of the one percent?

Certainly, New York City has more billionaires than any other city on the planet, Forbes reported that 79 billionaires live there. And its $1.5 billion economic output makes New York the most economically powerful city in the world. But if this system has taught us something, is that there are winners and losers in this game. And as Richard Florida highlights “the biggest loser by far is the service class who work in restaurants, offices, shops, and hospitals and account for almost 50% of the city’s workforce”, who can barely afford to live in the city.

It also came to my attention that these luxury apartments are being designed all over New York City by famous architects like Christian de Portzamparc, Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Jean Nouvel, Herzog & de Meuron, Annabelle Selldorf, Richard Meier, and Rafael Viñoly. Beautiful designs, for sure. That makes me wonder, are beautiful aesthetics coupled with money? Surely, under this “winner-take-all” system, architecture could become the art of inequality.

“Don´t lose it, man”
The not so glamorous subways

Advertising is everywhere in subway stations, you find it in panels, digital screens, billboards, and even the floor and tunnels. Most of the days I spent in NYC, I was stuck there for 30 minutes or more, trying to look away, but, as in most parts of the city, is an impossible task to escape commercial messaging. It was an exhausting experience. Now, I´m aware advertisers might call it an immersive experience, I would just call it an overwhelming assault on people´s minds. Subways are carrying human beings, not consumers. It is only fair that they change their narrative.

Also in one of these trips in the subways, I got a glimpse of something even more worrying. This man comes into my wagon shouting out loud “I’m gonna kill myself, man, I have no money, nobody cares” and then he jumps in between two wagons and starts balancing himself as if he was going to jump to the trails. “Don´t lose it man” shouts this girl, she runs after the guy and offers him some money. He takes it and leaves. An older man sitting next to me says, “Oh I’m not buying that anymore”. But something in this man´s desperation felt real. It is a fact that almost half of the people who live in the city (a full 45 percent) are at or near the poverty level (GreenBiz).

Such an irony, people´s struggle to make a living, and the subways interior spaces just shouting out loud something that goes like “just buy more!”

“Tackle the paradigm”
New urbanism follows new paradigm

Not only urban designers need the “the tools and competencies to work within social constructs and spatial contexts” (Justin Moore), but they need to remember they are working within the biosphere, in a network of ecological processes they are also meant to serve. A new design will only emerge under a new paradigm, that is an ecocentric and systemic paradigm. And so I look for signs of this paradigm in NYC. Here´s what I found.

The lights…

Reclaiming public spaces
The High Line Park

The high line was an elevated railway than ran along some neighborhoods of Manhattan. In her time as a planning commissioner for NYC, Amanda Burden helped plan some of the city’s newest public spaces and turn this railway into a public park. But she says this place was by far “
“the most contested public space in the city” because “commercial interest will always battle against public space”. It is quite clear that is might have been a battle into two paradigms. As Amanda stated “where you might see a beautiful park, a developer sees consumers”, because we know that´s the only possible view under the economic lenses. She continues “they might say why not take out those plants and have shops all along the high line, wouldn’t it be terrific? and won’t it mean more money for the city?” “Well no it wouldn’t be terrific, it would be a mall and not a park” she firmly ends. And so it is clear the lenses through which you see an urban space do matter.

Public spaces are also an opportunity for social interactions, which is why I was happy to find numerous free public activities available at parks throughout NYC. I mostly spend my days around Brooklyn Bridge Park trying out things like Free kayaking, Movies with a View, Looking at the Stars. I also enjoyed a free concert of Natalia Lafourcade at Lincoln Center.

“The artificial mountain”
New faces of the city

For those who know me better, it should come as no surprise that the first place I went to visit during my brief stay in NYC was the tetrahedron-shaped Manhattan apartment tower by BIG. As I walked in the direction to the 57th Street on the west side of Manhattan, an artificial mountain came into my view, standing out against the more traditional skyscrapers. I felt excitement and a rush of energy and made my way towards the sloped facade. What this building means to me is yet another realization of Bjarke Ingels hedonistic sustainability paradigm.

What´s that? In words of Bjarke Ingels, “the whole discussion about sustainability is always presented as a downgrade downgrade our current lifestyle to achieve something that is sustainable” (Bjarke Ingels), instead he reframes it as Hedonistic Sustainability, which is all about designing buildings as ecosystems that fit into their own landscape, improve the quality of life and human enjoyment. In that sense, Bjarke Ingels advocates for an expanded role of the architect claiming that “architects have to become designers of ecosystems”. In practical terms, this means BIGs team has to dive into the specific situation and ask themselves questions like whats the landscape? what´s the climate? how do they enhance social interactions? For that, they, for example, use participatory processes and contemporary engineering technology. The call the latter “engineering without engines” because basically, they use engineering to get information on “how to respond to the local climate in ways that are not based on machinery, but are based on the design of the building” (Bjarke Ingels).

Now, when it comes to VIA57, “the courtscraper”, as they call it, is trying “to combine the communal space of the courtyard with the density of a skyscraper”, and in doing so, maximize opportunities for connection with nature and human enjoyment as well. So the design choices they made offer positive side effects both for the environmental performance and human well-being.

For example, VIA 57 involved some efficiency and resources recycling strategies involved, and in its construction, architects used cradle-to-cradle certified products and sustainably-forested wood. To add up to that, VIA 57 brings to life biophilic designs principles, offering people opportunities to encounter nature. For example, this building has its own mini-central park in the courtyard and its terraces that look toward the Hudson River have a framed view where “you have the sunlight during all day and you see the sunset over the Hudson river in the evening” as Bjarke Ingels explains.
But also, the terraces are assembled in such a way that when you are there and if you look up you can actually see your neighbors as opposed to the awkward encounters one has in some skyscrapers elevators. Bjarke Ingels states that VIA57 “looks different because it performs different”, and you can definitely find examples of these social and environmental positive side effects in design choices in VIA57

There are some things, present in other BIG projects, missing in VIA 57 though, like there were no community charrettes for Via 57 West and there´s the fact this building remains a luxury housing, so is yet another “not-for-everyone” type of building. Although There are 36 affordable apartments up for grabs. And a lottery for affordably priced apartments in BIG’s Manhattan housing development VIA 57 West has begun, according to Curbed.

Final sunset, final thoughts.

As I made my way into one MET gallery showing an exhibition called “Metropolis” I read this text:

The growth of global industrial economies prompted shifts in population from rural to urban. Consequently, the idea of the metropolis became a powerful symbol of modern life. For many, New York was the archetypal modern city, a densely populated, dynamic space that embodied the “new”.

But that is no longer the case, industrial economies have failed. And we certainly need to re-imagine a new symbol of a desirable city. The text also read “the symbolic newness of the Metropolis was often distilled in design in the form of the skyscraper”. That also seems to be changing. Those boxy constructions are more a symbol of the status-quo and boring design. And new shapes are emerging in response to a new sustainability paradigm.

So for me, NYC in a way embodies the failures of a city shaped mostly by economical forces, but it also embodies the hopes that in that chaos something new and sustainable will emerge, something that hopefully will take over the city.

This is just another challenge for design, and we should remember, as Bjarke Ingels simply put “bad design is careless and good design is design that is informed by specific information”. Now I believe this information should encompass human aspirations, ecological process and holistic views of the kind of co-evolution we want for us and nature, or should I say for us as part of nature.

Most importantly, this is another challenge for humanity, not to conquer the clouds, but to leave behind this idea of domination of nature and be one with nature. Otherwise, we might just lose ourselves in our big jungles of concrete.

“Living in cities, naturally” Terry Hartig, Peter H. Kahn. Science 20 May 2016: Vol. 352, Issue 6288

“The Stunning Via 57 West Tower Is Probably One Of The Most Eco-Friendly Buildings In The Entire World” Hexapolis. Dattatreya Mandal

Amanda Burden: How public spaces make cities work. TED talk. published on the 07/04/2014

“Build affordable housing for the middle class, too” New York Times Daily News. Errol Louis

“The new urban crisis is upon us: Success squeezing out the middle class” New York Times Daily News. Richard Florida

The Train Is Coming. And With It, More Ads. New York Times. Stephanie Cliffordoct.

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Melissa Ingaruca Moreno

Written by

System thinker. Sustainability strategist. Wonder junkie. Flow seeker. Storyteller. Community builder.

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