City Eden (2007)

“let us give thanks for living in a world where we can break off bits and eat them”
Pagan prayer…no origin.

Michele Conception Bertomen, Architect
David Christopher Boyle, Poet

Ortega y Gassett has written that in all disciplines there exist nodal points, problems that appear to be insignificant but which, by their very nature have systemic value. We propose to enable existing public space, revealing common ground where water, earth, air, plants and community converge on the vertical surfaces of buildings.

Profound changes await us in the near future as growing seasons lengthen, weather patterns become extreme and global changes fragment existing communities and create new ones. In this situation, new forms of self empowerment are crucial as urban communities seek to engage the positive aspects of these transformations in order to survive.

Vertical surfaces, currently used only for light, air and egress have enormous potential to collect and deploy rainwater, to grow plants and food. In dense urban areas retention of water for the hydrological cycle[i], deployment of water for agricultural purposes, use of embodied energy in rain water, use of plants to improve air quality would immeasurably improve urban life and positively affect the relationship of dependence of the city with respect to its hinterlands. [ii]Building enclosures could be naturally insulated through the use of plants so as to mitigate power usage. Through transpiration, increased plant matter will clean air and reduce the carbon footprint of cities. This new landscape has potential to rejuvenate the social life of cities as they will become, like community gardens, sites of local political independence, communication and negotiation- a catalyst to transform the bureaucratically frozen city into a living metropolis, where people are the city.

Synopsis: Ownership of land is typically allocated two dimensionally, as if earth were a smooth surface parallel to the horizon. Yet the walls of buildings, which are but lines on a property map, abut common air, water and pollutants as surely as horizontal surfaces. And, even in moderately dense urban areas, the square footage of exterior vertical surfaces of buildings is greater than horizontal surfaces of the city. [iii]

We propose to re-conceive this territory as productive, arable ground. Through usufruct, ownership, rent or illicit cultivation, we propose to enable ordinary people grow plants on the vertical surfaces of existing and new urban structures to produce food, deploy rainwater constructively, mitigate storm flooding, help clean air and provide opportunities for new community.

Key words: jury-rig, water, rainwater, stormwater drainage, food, urban gardening, hydrological cycle, community gardening, local food, retrofit, upgrade, green insulation, usufruct, land, urban farms, vertical farms, vertical gardens, vertical trellises.

Convergent situations we wish to improve:
Community, family, garden:
My mother, her mother and her mother always had a garden. Each member of our family had specific garden duties and mine was “to mulch” as I was fond of cucumbers and delighted in finding new ways to serve them. Now that I live in New York City my husband and I tend a plot in the 6th Street and Avenue B Garden in the Lower East Side.

The act of gardening, together, allows the informal, yet directed form of social exchange that sustains community. Like doing laundry, cooking or washing dishes, gardening encourages a liminal atmosphere where important concepts having to do with collective life are aired (rather than discussed) within a space of shared goals. Gardening provokes a systemic understanding of the intertwined patterns of our ecosystem as people touch the meetings of plants, animals, earth, air and water.

Local Food:
I confess I am a bit obsessed with the potential of supplemental, local food in this uncertain time. My grandmother’s “Victory” garden provided sustenance for her, my grandfather, my great-grand mother and seven children through World War 2 and the Depression.[iv]

In an age where a hamburger might contain meat from all over the world, we can trust the tomato we have grown ourselves. Growing food is seasonal, reminding us of the cyclic nature of life on this planet. Garden food has more nutrients and tastes better.

I am not alone. Guerilla gardeners are ubiquitous, it seems[v]. I often spot small, clearly cultivated plots on public land and, just last week, discovered a sumptuous zucchini vine (already harvested) in a neglected triangle of land next to the BQE off ramp. But horizontal surfaces, suitable for gardening are contested spaces in dense, urban areas where we tend to use the ground for transportation or building footprints and rooftops for environmental conditioning equipment.

Storm drainage:
In New York City, all of these hard, horizontal surfaces- roads, sidewalks, rooftops lead to massive problems with storm drainage. Unfortunately, sewers containing biological waste are combined with the storm drainage. These combined sewers release untreated raw sewage into New York’s waterways about half of the time it rains- about 27 billion gallons per year.[vi]

The city has legislated stormwater mitigation: every lot must retain 80% of its water on site for four hours. Unfortunately this water is most often directed towards dry wells: concrete basins underground that allow slow drainage into the sewer mains[vii] rather than used to water plants, flush toilets, clean streets, etc.

Plant life: bio habitats, environmental conditioning and air quality
In a city it is easy to forget the intertwining of ecological systems so necessary to the health of our planet. Plants are our food before we become organic material to feed them. Plants host animals and provide bio-habitat continuity which contributes to the diversity of our planet: our greatest strength. They clean air through transpiration and retain valuable nutrients, including water, in their roots. Plants provide the ideal summer shading, insulating a building from the outside, so that ultra violet radiation never enters the interior during the summer months, and reducing power needs for air conditioning.

Solutions, implementation, financing:

Central to this proposal is that people who live and or work near a site appropriate it for their own. The means to do this must be inexpensive and simple to install and maintain. Our solution encourages common sense, on which past generations relied.

Existing building owners provide supports for floor area incentives.

Even if the area just outside your wall is public space, the wall, most likely, is not. However, all that is required is that the wall, as an element abutting public space, be supplied with a fastening method for a flexible scaffold to support containers of earth perhaps in return for additional floor area or tax rebates. [viii] Devices of this sort are common have been made even more possible with the invention of fasteners that leave a wall surface intact. [ix]

While fasteners would be owner- provided, the scaffold to hold plants and containers would be provided by the would-be gardener. Looking about the neighborhood we thought that an ideal, and appropriately jury-rigged solution for existing buildings would be to attach steel chain link fences to walls. Clinging plants and vines, apparently, love these ubiquitous fences. Their fabric like structure allows for a scattered fastening technique and, even, exterior maintenance since they can be climbed (on belay and with proper insurance, of course).

To hold soil and plants we propose locally produced, bio-degradable, semi-permeable baskets of woven grasses with provision for directing water (drip fronds, as illustrated). These would have to conform to specifications for loading and drainage but could assume diverse configurations. Flexible baskets would add less wind load on a building surface. They could be fastened to the chain link fence at multiple points. Losing soil and plants they could fall to the ground and cause minimal harm and pollution.

New buildings would be given street space on the upper floors, creating a layered public space.

Currently New York City allows buildings to extend a balcony, building ornament or trellis 18” over the property line abutting a street or public way: hence all of these tiny, unusable balconies common in new buildings where floor area is at a premium. Eighteen inches is not usable for growing in this situation but three feet would be ideal. And eighteen inches of that three feet, if given to inhabitants to use, would be within the public space of the street.

This would allow the City to require plant growth in this area, as it is within the public way, albeit above the walkable surface. This type of requirement already exists in the Zoning Resolution, which requires sidewalk trees to be planted and tended in exchange for the additional floor area under Quality Housing regulations.

A three foot terrace would greatly increase the value of an apartment, requiring no further incentive on the part of the City.

Rainwater storage and deployment
Currently New York City requires buildings to retain water on roofs or in dry wells beneath the ground. However, many buildings were built before this code requirement and retain no storm water at all. Water is directed most times from drainage points on the roof through the building to the cellar where it is joined to the combined sewer.

In existing buildings we propose to tap into the storm drain coming from the roof and re-direct the water to exterior plantings. In new buildings the trellis created to support plants could be designed to retain water and be linked, via piping, directly to the roof water runoff.


[i] De Billiers, Marq Water: the fate of our most precious resource Mariner, Houghton Mifflin, NY 2001 p. 30-45 the amount of water on our planet has almost certainly not changed since geologic times but 1) fresh water is renewable and 2) even though only 2.5% or 34,000 cubic kilometers is available, it is more than more than enough for every human on the planet. (1,700 cubic meters per year per person is considered sufficient and our presenet capacity is 8,000 cubic meters per year per person) Our problem is not that we do not have enough water but that it is mis-managed and in the wrong places- (population control is another discussion).
[ii] Ortega y Gasset Investigaciones Psicologicas (Madrid: Revista Occidente en Alianza Editorial, 1979)
[iii] Topologically, exterior building surface area in a dense, medium rise city breaks down thus: 46 % horizontal and 53% vertical.[iii] This gross calculation, based on six story buildings, means that the total growing area of vertical surfaces is slightly greater than all of the horizontal surfaces.. This calculation was based on 6 story buildings 72 feet high on a typical 200 foot by 400 foot block and 56 foot wide street, including the sidewalk.
[iv] Cuba survived the sudden absence of Russian fuel and goods with community gardens. See “the Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil” a documentary film produced by The Community Solution, a program of Community Service, Inc. and available at www.community solution.org.
[v] There is even an organization http://www.guerrillagardening.org/ celebrating “acts of illicit cultivation”.
[vi] www.riverkeeper.org
[vii] And even this might not work: according to some engineers the drain orifice required by the city is too large to stem the flow of water from drywell to sewer main.
[viii] or, more constructively when possible, a stoop area where additional plant could be grown and garbage and recycling could be protected as Jane Jacobs has suggested in Death and Live of Great American Cities.
[ix] Hilti