To study landscapes is to study the communities that inhabit them, from coastal metropolises to underserved industrial zones. 7 subway line, we aimed to redefine and expand the role of landscape in interpreting the urban environment and to move beyond the static media of “report” to engage students and the public in dialogue about the built environment through social networking tools. At the start, we asked: What is urban nature? How can it be perceived and engaged by a broad cross-section of people? How do natural and urban systems coexist within megacities? In this free and downloadable podcast tour of urban ecology along the No. ![]() How do we make tools for others that enable new readings of our everyday environments? A project that democratizes the map, integrates new social technologies and includes countless fun excursions is the Urban Landscape Lab’s Safari 7, a platform from which to view, celebrate, research, and exchange ideas about urban nature. Lived, direct experience with the physical landscape and its long-term stewardship leads to better outcomes. To engage is not to just propose solutions but to increase the perception and understanding of place. Go for a dive with us, and read more about the Living Breakwaters Project here. SeArc Marine Ecological Consulting took a dive to assess these constructed ecosystems, and found that these environments and the areas around them host a much wider cast of maritime characters than simple sandy bottom habitat currently in the project area, including blue crabs, branching sponges, bryozoans, and clams. We found such references in nearby channel markers, built atop large submerged rock piles, like lighthouse bases and nearby piers. In our Living Breakwaters project, where we propose a protective network of breakwaters along the South Shore of Staten Island, we looked for nearby reference habitats that might help us understand the types of species that the breakwaters will attract and the localized habitat conditions they can create. The environment is constantly in flux, and to imagine new potential habitats it is critical to look not only at what exists on a site, but what life exists on reference habitats to inform our proposed designs. Our shorelines and seafloors are constantly under transition – oyster reefs have turned to sandy bottoms, marshes to silted sea floors, and beaches have shrunk and expanded. To design below the waterline, we need to know what lives there and why. SCAPE interns designed a shareable pamphlet that described the weaving process and invited others to design and monitor their own in-situ experiments. ![]() Over thirty volunteers thought it worth a try, and their many hands fabricated fourteen fuzzy rope panels, seven intertidal and seven subtidal, which were later installed at a SIMS Metal Management site in Brooklyn. This material, applied as vertical net structures along an industrial barge-mooring pier, was tested as a temporary underwater habitat near an active recycling facility. Fuzzy rope, a polypropylene material explored in the Oyster-tecture proposal, is a tactile cable used in the aquaculture industry to cultivate mussel colonies - it adds much-needed underwater surface area to depleted shorelines and a microstructure for habitat recruitment. For the Fuzzy Rope Weaving Evening, we welcomed friends, local business owners, and watershed activists to weave simple and replicable habitat panels in a participatory habitat building event. ![]() Urban Ecology invites participation in habitat design across all scales. ![]() See monitoring in action on our Facebook post of the project. While the installation has a maximum lifespan of five to seven years and is considered temporary, it reveals how even active industrial shorelines can function as critical parts of New York City’s coastal habitats, and how simple materials can be repurposed as habitat probes. The fully functioning barge mooring pier now supports a diverse and changing composite of aquatic life by June of 2013 the fuzzy rope panels supported between six and twenty blue mussels per linear foot and a host of associated species including green crabs, colonial and solitary tunicates, barnacles, amphipods, algae, and sea squirts. Monitored in collaboration with Michael Judge of Brooklyn College, the project installs fourteen community-made fuzzy rope panels and a series of ECOncrete tiles supplied by SeArc Consulting off the SIMS pier in Sunset Park, Brooklyn in March 2013. How can active marine industrial areas support underwater life? At the SIMS pier, our team developed a temporary in-situ design experiment to test this question.
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