Tags: New York City

The New York State Electronic Equipment Recycling and Reuse Act went into effect earlier this month, enabling easier recycling of old computers, cell phones and other electronics.  The act requires electronics manufacturers to accept old equipment from customers purchasing new electronics, regardless of the brand or model of the old equipment. 

On Monday, the City of New York released Vision 2020: The New York City Comprehensive Waterfront Plan. The document will guide waterfront planning  in the City over the next decade.  It has eight overarching goals:

1. Expand public access
2.

The Interdisciplinary Laboratory for Art, Nature and Dance will be holding its third annual symposium next weekend, to survey and discuss interdisciplinary work at the intersection of dance and ecology.  “Slow Networks: Discovering the Urban Environment Through Collaborations in Dance and Ecology” will include presentations from past participants in iLAND’s residencies, general discussion panels and hands-on workshops in the field. 

Design Observer runs an interview with Adriaan Geuze, principal of landscape architecture firm West 8, on its approach to designing Governors Island Park.  He discusses the master plan for the park and how it accentuates the island’s natural attributes, location, and views, and how topography plays a pivotal role in the vision. 

The New York Times outlines ways that the New York City Department of Environmental Protection hopes to generate energy from the 1.3 billion gallons of wastewater that enters the city’s sewage treatment plants daily.

Heating fuel can be extracted from sludge and butanol, an alternative fuel to gasoline, from the algae generated by wastewater.

Dwell profiles Freshkills Park in its March 2011 “We Love New York” issue.  Land Use and Outreach Manager Carrie Grassi features as the story’s heroine, speaking candidly about the site’s transformation.  The writing and narrative of this piece, in particular, really resonate with our experience of the site and its shifting identity: it has a storied and contentious past, yes, and it makes for a complex sell, but it is also enormously beautiful, always evolving and full of such promise that it pushes us on in support of an ambitious vision.

The City Room Blog features writer Lisa Dowda and photographer Liz Lignon, the team behind “Chasing Sanitation.”   A new exhibit of their photos and narratives, called, “This is New York’s Strongest” opened Saturday at 411 Lafayette Street in Noho. 

The Freshkills Park Talks lecture series continues in Downtown Brooklyn tomorrow, Tuesday, February 15th, with Michael Marrella, Project Director of the Comprehensive Waterfront Plan for the New York City Department of City Planning.

Michael will be discussing Vision 2020, an update to the New York City Comprehensive Waterfront Plan that sets the new long-range vision for the City’s waterfront and waterways. 

iLAND, the Interdisciplinary Laboratory for Art, Nature and Dance, has released a Request for Proposals for applications to their iLAB Collaborative Residency Program. The goal of the program is to support multidisciplinary teams of residents in creative processes that meld New York City ecological issues with public performance- and movement-based art. 

This year’s ONE PRIZE—an annual design and science award to promote green design in cities—is being awarded through a design competition centered around the development of New York City’s “sixth borough,” its bodies of water.  Organized by Terreform 1 and Planetary One, the competition aims to advance the City’s potential to develop the world’s largest urban clean technology corridor along its waterways and water bodies, as well its capacity to host a clean tech world expo in 2014. 

The NYC Department of Parks & Recreation and the Fellows of the Design Trust for Public Space have prepared and released a manual called “High Performance Landscape Guidelines: 21st Century Parks for NYC.”  It’s a comprehensive design and construction manual for sustainable parks and open spaces and will henceforth guide the design, construction and maintenance of New York City parks, in alignment with Mayor Bloomberg’s PlaNYC 2030.

The bloggers behind Friends of the Pleistocene hold forth on Urban Omnibus to outline the ethos behind Geologic City, a series of field reports that are part urban exploration and part geologic survey. The project aims to investigate and reflect on New York City’s contemporary landscape and the relatively recent interaction of humans with geological strata in the context of of vast timescales.

A new ferry equipped with emission-reducing technologies will soon make its appearance in New York Harbor, transporting visitors to the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. The 600-passenger New York Hornblower Hybrid will be powered by a combination of hydrogen fuel cells, solar panels, wind turbines and diesel engines that meet EPA Tier II emissions standards. 

We meet people all the time who have stories about Fresh Kills.  Folks who live nearby, who used to live where the landfill now is, who worked on-site, who were part of the 9/11 recovery effort, who are part of the team working on landfill closure right now. 

We’ve recently added a series of  high-resolution aerial photographs of the Fresh Kills region to the Freshkills Park flickr stream, displaying the incredible transformation that the West Shore of Staten Island has undergone since 1943 (landfill operations began officially in 1948). 

This weekend, Anthology Film Archives presents Site Recordings: Land Art on Film and Video, a series devoted to films by and about artists associated with the Land Art/Earthworks movement.

In the late 1960s and early 70s, modernism’s affirmation of fixity, permanence, and autonomy lost its hold on the Western imagination, shaping the manner in which a whole host of artists engaged with the moving image.

The New York City Urban Field Station is a brand new office, laboratory and residence for visiting and resident urban ecology research activities and researchers, located in Fort Totten Park in Bayside, Queens.  The facility is a physical base for The New York City Urban Field Station program, launched in 2006 by the Parks Department and the U.S.

Yesterday, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe broke ground on the second project in the development of Freshkills Park, the $6.5 million renovation of Schmul Park.  (The 28-acre Owl Hollow Fields were the first project.)  An 8-acre park in the Travis neighborhood, Schmul Park will serve as a community gateway into the larger Freshkills Park. 

MillionTreesNYC is seeking volunteers to help plant 20,000 trees at parks throughout the five boroughs this Saturday, October 23rd.  Spots are still available at two sites on Staten Island, Clove Lakes Park and Wolfe’s Pond Park, as well as at Ferry Point Park in the Bronx. 

Chasing Sanitation: Falling in Love with New York’s Strongest is a series of portraits and interviews with New York City Sanitation workers produced by writer Lisa Dowda and photographer Liz Lignon over the past two years.

Sanitation Workers – they’re not saints.