Download Reclaiming Spoiled Landscapes

Reclaiming
Spoiled
Landscapes
By Peter Gisolfi, AIA, ASLA, LEED AP
What will it take to clean up the Gowanus Canal? The severely polluted canal, which runs through Brooklyn, New York, is now
an EPA Superfund national priority site.
A new way of
thinking about
an entrenched
problem.
Reprinted from Planning — February 2011
Last year, I participated in the review of a thesis project
in the Master of Landscape Architecture program at the
City College of New York. The student proposed a plan
for the land next to the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn.
She was conversant with the environmental problems
involved and had analyzed all aspects of the accumulation of industrial sewage and community dumping but
had no rational plan for reclamation.
That was understandable, since the Gowanus Canal
has long been severely polluted. The 1.5-mile-long canal, completed in 1869, was once an industrial shipping
hub. Today, there is little shipping, but the canal remains
extremely polluted, even with regular flushing through
an elaborate pumping system. What do we do now?
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency placed
the Gowanus Canal on its Superfund national priorities list in 2010. That’s a start, but to be restored to
its natural condition, the canal water would have to be
clean, the buildings in the immediate area would have
to be demolished, and all the toxic soil would have to
be removed and replaced by new, clean material. None
of this is likely to happen even with the EPA listing, so
new thinking is needed.
Rethinking Categories
Planners and landscape architects continually face dilemmas like this one because natural landscape reclamation is an important part of contemporary practice. Is
there a theory or some defining system by which we can
categorize or rationalize the huge variety of possible
landscape reclamation projects? And can improvements
be justified, even in extremely difficult settings where the
results are uncertain? I suggest the following categories:
• A modest-scale landscape reclamation restores a
piece of land without significantly changing the
natural system. even a modest-scale intervention is tied to an underlying natural system and
is self-sustaining.
• At the other end of the scale is the reclamation
of an entire ecosystem. While the proposed
reclamation of the Everglades suggests that a
grand ecosystem revival is conceivable, the typical
unit of ecologically based land planning is the
river basin. Seldom is an entire river basin even
in play. This means that we have limited ability
to reclaim an entire ecosystem.
• A system-wide intervention is more realistic. Here
we seek to improve the health of an ecosystem
without reclaiming all of it. In this category one
might include an effort to reestablish the native
vegetation of a forest or meadow—something
that could be done incrementally, eventually with
system-wide results. The overall objective is to apply landscape reclamation techniques to individual
components of the compromised natural system,
and thus create a more self-sustaining environment.
In the context of these definitions, a natural landscape
reclamation project should meet the following criteria:
It should make the landscape more natural. It should be
tied to and be part of a definable natural system. It should
increase the self-sustainability of that system. And finally,
it should suggest a future path for continued and expanded
landscape reclamation. Consider five ongoing projects that
relate to these proposed categories and criteria.
Reprinted from Planning — February 2011
Interstate 90 passes over the Back Bay Fens, part of the Emerald Necklace in Boston, MA.
Boston: The Emerald Necklace
In 1883, Frederick Law Olmsted took on one of his
more ambitious reclamation projects: the plan for the
Emerald Necklace, a 1,100-acre chain of contiguous
parks, streams, ponds, and marshlands that measures
seven miles, by foot, from Boston Common to Franklin
Park, the city’s largest park. It was was a visionary plan
that involved open space design, civil engineering, and
environmental repair. The result was a park system of
continuous open space and restored waterways that were
relatively clean and self-sustaining.
However, by the mid-1960s, when Interstate 90 reached
Boston, the Emerald Necklace was threatened. I-90 entered Boston from the west, making the open space system
discontinuous and damaging to the Fens—the parkland in
Boston’s Back Bay area. New landscape reclamation projects could mitigate some of the destruction.
Today, the Emerald Necklace Conservancy is cleaning up the Muddy River, which connects to the Fens,
by dredging contaminated sediments and implementing
other structural improvements, including unburying the
river and improving its integrity, appearance, and floodcontrol capabilities.
The Emerald Necklace qualifies as a system-wide
intervention for three reasons: It improves the waterways,
which are parts of the natural systems; it naturalizes fragments, such as the Fens, which are self-sustaining; and it
identifies a way for landscape reclamation to continue.
New York City: The Bronx River
Not since 1776, when Washington’s Army retreated from
the British by rowing up the Bronx River from New
York City to White Plains, has this waterway been un-
tainted. In the 19th century, industrial waste turned the
river into an open sewer. From 1913 to 1923, the work
of Gilmore David Clarke, superintendent of construction for the Bronx River Parkway Commission, partially
reclaimed the waterway, dramatically changing the river
basing that had been dammed farther upstream to create
the Kensico Reservoir.
River bends were straightened and new dams put in
place. The Bronx River is now primarily a manmade
river needing periodic maintenance and dredging. Reclamation begun in the early 20th century now continues
along the river from the New York Botanical Gardens in
the Bronx to the Kensico Dam in Westchester County.
The Bronx River project is another long-term systemwide intervention, dramatically compromised by the
introduction of automobile pollution and an unnatural
waterway. It is still polluted and unsustainable. The Kensico Reservoir will never be eliminated, and it is unlikely
that the dams in Westchester County and the Bronx will
be removed to allow for a more natural, meandering river.
Among the programs now in place on Cape Cod is a
water resource management program to restore most of
the natural systems within the park’s estuaries, wetlands,
and salt marshes—many of them interrupted by a series
of dikes, ditches, culverts, and roads. In addition, the
National Park Service oversees the park’s native plans,
wildlife, and shellfish aquaculture.
As park of a current effort, the Herring River Restoration Project will modify or remove manmade restrictions to restore tidal flows and reestablish the shellfish
population that once thrived there. Restoring natural
tidal flows will result in a higher high tide, and rushing
water will reduce mosquito breeding.
Because of the complexity of its glacial topography,
many portions of the Cape Cod National Seashore
could be identified as ecosystems. The project has made
the landscape more natural, is part of a natural system,
is substantially self-sustainable, and suggests multiple
avenues for continued landscape reclamation: the public
will to keep going, the inertia of the approval process,
and funding for the required improvements.
Massachusetts: Cape Cod National Seashore
Cape Cod National Seashore, created by the federal government in the 1960s, stretches 40 miles along the Massachusetts coast between Chatham and Provincetown.
The law that protects this 68-square-mile area preserves
the dunes along the Atlantic coast on the east, the Cape
Cod Bay shore on the west, and the freshwater ponds
that dot the glacial topography.
Once the public land of the National Seashore was assembled, virtually no additional construction was allowed
within its borders. As a result, an enormous environmental resource has been protected from destruction and has
been systematically reclaimed over the last 40 years.
New York: Fresh Kills
New York City dumped its garbage on Staten Island for 50
years, ultimately creating an enormous mass of trash and
toxic gases that covers about half of the 2,200 acres Fresh
Kills site. The landfill was closed in March 2001, but 40
acres were used temporarily to dispose of debris after the
World Trade Center attack on September 11, 2001.
Now the city wants to transform the landfill into a
park. The James Corner project, now in design, would
reclaim the land for nature trails, recreation, dining, and
community events along the banks of the Fresh Kills
estuary. This elaborate plan envisions covering the solid
waste with a cap conforming to the national landfill
protocol and a second cap of clean soil at least two feet
deep that will support plant life. Overall, the project
could take 30 years.
The reclaimed landscape will be a hybrid—something created by human intervention that can support
aspects of natural processes. It will always be a managed landscape, never self-sustaining. It could most appropriately be considered a permanently compromised,
system-wide intervention.
Fayetteville: University of Arkansas
On a much smaller scale, a five-acre parking lot at the
University of Arkansas in Fayetteville is being removed
as a first step in the eventual reclamation of a 47-acre
Cape Cod National Seashore
Fresh Kills, Staten Island, NY
streambed. The initial phase involves removing the
asphalt paving, the gravel subsurface, and some soil, then
putting new soil on the site, regrading the site to approximate the original topography, and installing native
plant material.
Once this phase is complete, a multi-year project could
fully restore the strembed to its natural condition and create facilities for environmental research and education.
This is a modest landscape reclamation effort that
could become a small system-wide landscape reclamation. If the project continues, it could improve the natural environment, connect to a definable, self-sustaining
natural system, and suggest a pathway for continued
landscape reclamation.
We should save our serious efforts in natural landscape
reclamation for this projects with broad scope and
enough support to achieve success. if the reclaimed
landscape cannot be self-sustaining, at least it should be
set on a clear path toward increased sustainability.
Human stewardship has not generally helped—in
fact, has often destroyed—the natural landscape. We
need to embrace a new attitude toward natural reclamation—one that values and respects natural processes—as
part of solving our larger environmental problems. As
planners and teachers, we cannot save the entire planet.
But we can plan for improvements.
For starters, we can follow our own precedents. When
the parks movement held sway in the second half of the
19th century, every city in the nation needed a public,
pastoral park. In the 1930s, when the gospel became recreation for every child, countless small parks, playgrounds,
and swimming pools sprung up. And in the 1970s, the
Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act established new
standards for the health of the natural environment—
positive steps for a new attitude towards stewardship of
the landscape. Nevertheless, we did not commit ourselves
to planning self-sustaining natural landscapes.
If we choose now to pursue natural landscape
reclamation whenever the opportunity arises, we will
change our underlying theory and our way of working.
We should seek a new balance between man and nature,
where natural landscape reclamation emerges as fundamental to our practice and training.
Peter Gisolfi is a registered architect and a registered
lanscape architect, and the senior partner of Peter
Gisolfi Associates, architects and landscape architects
in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, and New Haven,
Connecticut. He is also chairman of the Spitzer School
of Architecture at the City College of New York.
His book, Finding the Place of Architecture in the
Landscape, was published in 2008.
The Way Forward
These examples show the diversity of projects undertaken in the last 130 years. None is complete. Even the
oldest, the Emerald Necklace, is still a work in progress.
Returning to the Gowanus canal, it is important to note
that simple analysis does not constitute a landscape reclamation plan. A specific intervention must be planned—upgrading the waterway, for example, or selectively detoxifying
the adjacent land or capping vast areas of toxic land and accepting that it has been irrevocably been degraded. If such
a plan were proposed, it might become a project that meets
the criteria for a system-wide intervention—not perfection,
but a step in the right direction.
Reprinted from Planning — February 2011
Resources:
Emission Control
U.S. Landfill Project Protocol provides guidance to
quantify, report, and verify greenhouse gas emissions
associated with installing a landfill gas collection and
destruction system at landfill operations. The protocol
was first adopted in November 2007 by the Climate
Action Reserve, formerly the California Climate
Action Registry. Compliance is voluntary. See www.
climateactionreserve.org.