MEIR LOBATON CORONA

New Aqueous City

in collaboration with: nARCHITECT / Eric Bunge + Mimi Hoang, Julia Chapman, Sung Teak Lee, Noah Z.Levy and Sanjukta Sen

type: Speculative project for the exhibition "Rising Currents: projects for New York's waterfront" // location: MoMA, New York from March to October 2010

description: This project envisions a future for the largest and most varied of the five zones examined in Rising Currents, composed of the heights on both sides of the Verrazano Narrows Bridge (in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, and Fort Worth, Staten Island) and a low-lying area of Sunset Park, Brooklyn, to the north. New Aqueous City introduces a novel urban paradigm: a city that can control and absorb rising sea levels even as it accommodates an expected spike in population over the next century.

In counterpoint to an earlier generation’s infrastructure, embodied by the VerrazanoBridge, this project blurs the boundaries between land and sea, extending the city into the water. Habitable piers (with a new type of housing suspended above them) will be docking points for a network of ferries connecting the parts of the region. An archipelago of manmade islands connected by inflatable storm barriers will encourage silt accumulation, fostering natural resilience against storm surges (and reinforcing existing storm barriers south of the Narrows). At the same time, water will extend into the city—particularly Sunset Park—which will be punctuated by a network of infiltration basins, swales, and culverts to absorb storm runoff and function as parks in dry weather.

Underlying these planning and design suggestions is the assumption of government investment in transformative infrastructure. Biogas-powered ferries and a new tramway will supplement existing rapid transit, part of a dynamic infrastructure that works with nature rather than against it.