Tags: reclamation

City planners in Guelph, Ontario have approved a master plan to transform a 200-acre decommissioned landfill into the world’s largest pollinator park.  The former Eastview Road Landfill, which operated as a municipal dump from 1961 to 2003, has been capped and outfitted with a methane capturing system that converts landfill gas into usable energy. 

Eli Cohen gave a terrific talk Monday night on his work, as director of Ayala Water and Ecology, using plants to remove pollutants and contaminants from water, soil and air.  We’re grateful to the huge crowd that poured into the Arsenal gallery for the event, to Laura Starr and Yamit Perez for putting us in touch with Eli and, of course, to Eli himself for sharing his work and his thoughts.

The first phase of development is underway for 1,347-acre brownfield transformation project Orange County Great Park.  $65.5 million will fund the expansion of a 27.5-acre “Preview Park,” which opened in 2008 and features an observation balloon providing visitors a high-flying view of the entire site. 

[vimeo= http://vimeo.com/6686323]

LentSpace is a 37,000 square foot temporary park and cultural space at Canal and Sullivan Streets in lower Manhattan.  The site opened to the public on September 18th–Park(ing) Day–and is on loan to the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council for three years from Trinity Real Estate, which hopes to build on it when the City’s real estate market improves. 

Recently opened Concrete Plant Park, in the Bronx, sits on the seven-acre site of a concrete plant that operated from the late 1940s through 1987.  The park has retained some of its industrial past in the form of newly-painted silos, hoppers and conveyors, structures that once served as mixing facilities and now distinguish the park as sculptural monuments to the site’s evolution. 

Inspired by the success of the High Line, proposals to reimagine abandoned rail lines have popped up all over the country.

• Faced with the replacement of a section of San Francisco’s Bay Bridge, Rael San Fratello Architects have proposed the creation of the Bay Line, a hanging neighborhood complete with housing, cultural and commercial buildings and bike and pedestrian paths. 

Four giant coal gasometers, built as part of Vienna’s municipal gas works in the late 1800s, have been refashioned into a complex of residential, commercial and municipal facilities.  Formerly Europe’s largest gas plant, the gasometers now house 800 apartments, a student dormitory, a music hall, over 70 shops, restaurants, bars and cafes, a movie theater and the city’s municipal archive.

Greenmuseum interviews Terry Hazen, Director of UC Berkeley’s Center for Environmental Biotechnology and the Head of Ecology at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, about bioremediation, its benefits and its hazards.  Hazen is a well-spoken expert on the subject of remediating contaminated sites and the microorganisms that can be used to do so. 

The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) project aims to build awareness of the economic benefits of biodiversity by quantifying the costs of biodiversity loss and ecosystem degradation, and to offer strategies developed through science, economics and policy to move toward net growth in biodiversity. 

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has identified nearly 4,100 contaminated sites nationally, including abandoned mines, disused factories and some landfills, that could be suitable for renewable energy projects–primarily solar and wind power, and some biomass harvesting.  Contaminated sites are considered particularly appealing for renewable energy projects because they are less likely than other sites to be prized for their habitat value.

The Indianapolis Museum of Art is in progress developing the largest museum park in the US: 100 acres: The Virginia B. Fairbanks Art and Nature Park.  Formerly a construction site and gravel pit, the 100-acre parkland has evolved naturally into woodland and wetland areas and includes a 35-acre lake. 

Veru-Tek Technologies has developed a spin on phytoremediation to clean up contaminated soil and groundwater on brownfield sites.  Where traditional phytoremediation uses in situ plants, Veru-Tek uses extracts derived from plants, nanometals produced from plant extracts, and other natural substances to dissolve and oxidize contaminants (like coal tar, chemical solvents and petroleum byproducts) in place, turning them into non-toxic compounds. 

Habitat corridors are planted or wild strips of land between natural areas that encourage wildlife to migrate from place to place and, in turn, to help fertilize a broader range of places through the seeds they carry on them or digest.   

The New York Times chronicles developments at the Pennsylvania Avenue and Fountain Avenue Landfills in Brooklyn.  New York City”s Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) has completed the first phase of ecological rehabilitation of the site, which began in 2004.  After the landfill capping procedure was complete, DEP seeded the 400-acre area and planted shrubs and trees into a landscape of ecological islands. 

The Guinness Book’s record holder for World’s Largest Photograph was created at the site of the Orange County Great Park, a brownfield-to-park project in Orange County, California.  The Great Picture is a gelatin silver print measuring 10 x 30 meters, or roughly three stories high and eleven stories long. 

The aim of Dwell Magazine and Inhabitat’s recent ReBurbia design competition was to reimagine the American suburbs in the context of the current home foreclosure crisis and rising energy costs.  The competition’s cheeky winning entry posits the transformation of abandoned suburban mansions into wetlands and water purification systems for urban centers: the buildings become machines housing micro-ecosystems, and the front yards become micro-wetlands, providing habitat for wildlife. 

It takes a lot of money to clean up damaged environments, and justifying the cost of expenditure with measurable results hasn’t always been possible.  A new study published in the recent “Restoration Ecology” issue of Science quantifies the impact of ecological restoration projects on levels of biodiversity and ecosystem services in order to provide substance to cost-benefit analysis.

Another poster child for the reclamation of disturbed lands: AMD&ART Park in Vintondale, PA.  By the mid-’90s, coal mining in this part of Appalachia had resulted in severe acid mine drainage (AMD) into waterways and general public resignation to a major environmental hazard. 

It’s increasingly rare to come across new, untouched land for park development in cities. In the May issue of Landscape Architecture, Peter Harnik explains how “squeezing innovative green spaces into crowded cities requires looking for land in unexpected places.”  He outlines the potential of a variety of urban spaces to function as parkland: cemeteries, school yards, rooftops, community gardens, reservoir lands, stormwater channels, closed streets and reclaimed parking areas.  

For our Freshkills Park Talk two weeks back, Dr. Steven Handel shared insights into the emerging field of urban restoration ecology, which focuses on the challenge of bringing ecological diversity back to degraded lands like brownfields and landfills.  He discussed his research at the Freshkills Park site and others in the region and went on to describe how his expertise has informed the design of Orange County, CA’s Great Park.