Protecting New York City from storms, surges

his proposal. “The multiuse path can provide bicycling and walking opportunities. Fishing and bird-watching amenities can also be provided.”

The Times reports that another proposal is to absorb the water a storm may bring to the city, especially in Lower Manhattan, which includes the financial district. Architect Stephen Cassell and a team from his firm Architecture Research Office, and a partner firm, dlandstudio, want to create marshlands on the fringe of the lower end of the borough.

“Our goal was to design a more resilient city,” Cassell said. “We may not always be able to keep the water out, so we wanted to improve the edges and the streets of the city to deal with flooding in a more robust way.”

In order to prevent water from affecting neighborhoods like Chinatown, Little Italy, and the Financial District, Cassell and his team want to install a network of grassy land-based parks accompanied by watery patches of wetlands. On the Lower East Side of Manhattan, Cassell and his team want to extend the edge of the borough by a block or two to create enough space for salt marsh and a new park.

The wetlands and parks would be able to absorb the force of incoming water and at the same time serve as recreational areas throughout the year.

“When there’s a storm surge, it creates an enormous amount of energy,” Cassell told the Times. “Wetlands absorb that energy and protect the coastline.”

In addition to the parks and wetlands, Cassell and his team would change streets in lower Manhattan to make the areas more equipped to handle surging waters. Some roadways would have asphalt replaced with porous concrete, which would soak up excess water like a sponge and irrigate planting in the street bed. Other streets would be designed to send water into the wetlands and prepositioned ponds. Streets parallel to the shoreline would be designed to drain surging water back into the harbor.

“We weren’t fully going back to nature with our plan,” Cassell said. “We thought of it more as engineered ecology. But if you look at the history of Manhattan, we have pushed nature off the island and replaced it with man-made infrastructure. What we can do is start to reintegrate things and make the city more durable.”

Architect and landscape designer Kate Orff wants to use oysters to protect the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Gowanus and Red Hook. Orff wants to blend “urbanism and ecology” and at the same time is “looking to the past to re-imagine the future.”

Orrf’s design includes creating a system of artificial reefs in the channel along the neighborhoods made out of rocks, shells, and fuzzy rope that will promote the growth of oysters. The oyster studded barriers would mitigate onrushing tides.

Oysters act as natural water filters, as one can clean up to fifty gallons of water per day. By placing them in the Gowanus Canal, Orff thinks they can clean what is already a federal superfund site.

“This is infrastructure that we can do now,” Orff told the Times. “It’s not something we have to think about and fund with billions of dollars 50 years down the road.”