Jaffer Kolb
Co-founder and principal, New Affiliates; MIT lecturer
Uncharted Futures: Navigating Staten Island’s quietly radical Bluebelts
In the early 1990s, the Department of Environmental Protection began acquiring land surrounding Staten Island’s natural wetland corridors to pilot a program of stormwater drainage that would benefit the public realm. While residents had long resisted typical sewer systems designed to manage excess water runoff that could eliminate the native landscape, the DEP considered the natural ecology as a solution to the problem. In the past thirty years, the agency has developed and maintained over 90 Bluebelts: interconnected ponds, streams, and marshes that promote biodiversity, a network of trails and paths that serve as a public amenity, and a drainage system that can absorb far more than typical sewers. The program is a prime example of urban infrastructure producing new kinds of public behavior.
The program has reshaped swaths of Staten Island–providing a wild backyard for those lucky to live adjacent to DEP-owned land–and provided public circulation beloved by residents, birders, and nature-lovers alike. Like the wetlands themselves, the project has grown organically and is difficult to represent. It’s a stilted map, a fuzzy interface full of specific qualities and minor transformations. Our workshop is dedicated to analyzing and drawing the site: as a comprehensive map, as an experiment in describing the intersection of ecology and infrastructure; domestic life and public use; artificial engineering and natural features.
The workshop will take place at the AIA’s Center for Architecture as a part of the exhibition Searching for Superpublics, the outcome of a class first held at Syracuse New York this past Spring.
