The Architecture of Remediation: Riverbank Park
Praxis 13 Eco-logics | 2011Waste landscapes, which flourish as cities enlist designers to reclaim landfill for recreation, are more complex problems than dumps requiring alchemical conversion to playing fields. Advocates celebrate such sites as automatic urban amelioration without much critical attention to the processes that shaped them or the specific groups who live with them. Focusing on technical solutions, architects often ignore the social and political implications of the urban environment, and with that an opportunity to mediate an urban ecology that better serves all enmeshed in it. Similarly, numerous designers and municipalities have attempted to convert functional infrastructures into valuable amenities and therefore productively engage in processes of urban environmental change. Rather than mediating the conflicts necessarily entailed by the management of urban ecologies, they see the social and “natural” aspects of urban environments as either separate spheres or entirely in sync. This is rarely the case, as the long saga of the planning and design of New York City’s North River Waste Water Treatment Plant, and the Riverbank Park that was ultimately built on its roof, have demonstrated for almost fifty years. The project presents a lesson in the complexity and possibility of designing urban ecologies that include people as well as plants and animals.
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