A Framework for Adaptive Community Infrastructure
By Eleanor Garside and Madeleine Ghillany-Lehar
Eleanor Garside is in her final year of her Master of Architecture studying how to design environments to promote health and wellbeing. Her interests are in healthy spaces across many realms, from healthcare and patient rooms to sustainability and renewable energy systems.
Madeleine Ghillany-Lehar is in the final year of the Master of Landscape Architecture program with a certificate in Urban Resilience. Her work focuses on the experiential opportunities inherent within large-scale climate infrastructure, from flood management to technological carbon capture and storage systems.
An Energy Crisis
While the state of New York has made progress expanding the number of green energy generation plants, an overwhelming majority of the volume of power comes from nonrenewables. In the densest part of the state, there are virtually no appropriately-scaled green energy plants operating or planned.
Nowhere in the five boroughs is more vulnerable than Brooklyn, whose power is dependent on the functioning of a single transmission line. When demand is high, additional power comes from peaker plants that emit noxious gases within neighborhoods.
COMMUNITY
CIRCUITRY
ABOVE: Existing infrastructure relies exclusively on local nuclear gas plants and cross-state transmission of renewables.
Energy generation and storage are visualized through reactive elements along the parkway such as solar panels and misters. Pockets at the street level provide charging stations and interactive screens with real time metrics on the parkway’s energy systems.
Ocean Parkway’s location is transformed and utilized for a renewable energy transmission and storage zone. It serves both a new energy park and the adjacent neighborhoods. Topography along the parkway changes to make room for energy storage or energy generation systems.
Energy generation and storage are visualized through reactive elements along the parkway such as solar panels and misters. Pockets at the street level provide charging stations and interactive screens with real time metrics on the parkway’s energy systems.
Housing along the energy park temporarily houses neighbors as their neighborhoods become denser. Passive energy systems as well as renewable energy sources are incorporated in the design.
As people are displaced due to climate hazards around the world, the housing along the park is occupied by climate migrants. Public program on the ground floor is used by the community for gatherings and job training. And during emergencies, it is used for a shelter.
