A recent video on Urban Omnibus, featuring Garbage Land and Bottlemania author Elizabeth Royte, offers a glimpse behind the complex process of everyday garbage collection in New York City. Combining interview, animated graphics, and often poetic archival and present-day footage, the video tells a succinct story of one citizen’s look into the past, present, and possible future of municipal solid waste management. It’s a refreshing first-person perspective on a universal element of daily life for city dwellers.

The video is one of four in their City of Systems series, a suite of videos taking a behind the scenes look at some of the complex systems that enable New York City to function.

Boston Common, the oldest urban park of any major city in the nation

The Trust for Public Land recently published its annual report on urban parkland in the United States. The 2011 City Park Facts lists information for the 100 largest U.S. cities, serving as the nation’s most complete database of park facts.

The report includes data on urban park acreage, spending, staffing, and facilities. breaking down each city in categories such as “Acres of Parkland as Percentage of City Area” and “Total Spending on Parks and Recreation per Resident”. The report also provides snapshot “Top Tens” for the number of certain amenities per capita, like off-leash dog parks and basketball hoops.

Central Park easily maintains its title as the most visited city park in the country, with 35 million visitors per year. Battery Park, established in 1686, is the 7th oldest park in the country. New York City spends $158 per resident on its parks; Washington D.C., the biggest spender, allocates $375 per resident. NYC does not make any of the amenities top ten lists.

Earlier this month, the 2012 Land Art Generator Initiative (LAGI) ideas competition, in partnership with New York City’s Department of Parks & Recreation, opened with a call for large-scale artwork proposals with the ability to generate renewable energy for New York City. The design site: Freshkills Park.

Sustainable energy has been a key part of the conceptual master plan for Freshkills Park from the start. Currently the methane gas that is generated by the capped landfill is being purified and sold to a local utility in amounts capable of heating 22,000 homes. The competition addresses the potential for aesthetically-minded renewable energy generation above the landfill cap as well.

As the design brief notes:

The expansiveness of the design site at Freshkills Park presents the opportunity to power the equivalent of thousands of homes with the artwork. The stunning beauty of the reclaimed landscape and the dramatic backdrop of the Manhattan skyline will provide an opportune setting from which to be inspired, and it offers the perfect environment for a showcase example of the immense potential of aesthetically interesting renewable energy installations for sustainable urban planning.

Registration opened on January 1, and submissions will be received until July 1, 2012. A jury will then select the winning entry based on the judging criteria explained in the brief. The winner will be announced at an award ceremony in October, followed by a public exhibit of qualified entries. The monetary prize award ($15,000 First Prize, $4,000 Second Prize, $1,000 High School Edition Winner) will not guarantee a commission for construction; however, LAGI will work with stakeholders both locally (NYC) and internationally to pursue possibilities for implementation of the most pragmatic and aesthetic LAGI designs.

Registrants can download the competition design brief here. LAGI is also holding a High Schools Edition (age 19 and under) featuring a modified design brief document.

Two new green networks have recently launched that are making participation in sustainability in New York City easier and more accessible.

Change by Us, a website run the Office of the Mayor, allows New Yorkers to post a sticky with an idea for how to make the city “a greener, greater place to live” and has space for people to post information about their projects on the site.  They also have a blog that is a great resource for sustainability-related grants.

The City Atlas, a new NYC sustainability guide developed by CUNY Institute for Sustainable Cities, provides New Yorkers with a way to keep track of various events, ideas, and actions related to sustainability going on in the city.  A daily calendar provides the most up-to-date information on sustainability-related events, talks, and classes and their weekly publication, Atlas Beat, highlights all of the best events going on each week. The City Atlas also has articles about a range of current New York City sustainability issues.

Join us for our first tour of 2012 as we search for the birds of Freshkills Park along the site’s wetlands, creeks and meadows. This tour, like all of our bi-monthly birding tours, will be held jointly by naturalists from the Staten Island Museum and a member of the Freshkills Park development team. It will diverge from the normal tour route and will be traveled by both bus and foot. This tour is free, but space is limited, and registration is required; to reserve a spot email doug.elliott@parks.nyc.gov or call 212-788-8277.

Sunday, January 22, 2012
10:30 am – 12:30 pm
FREE | Meeting at Eltingville Transit Center

This Saturday evening a demonstration of PARK, the ever-evolving performance language developed through fieldwork conducted at Freshkills Park by choreographer Kathy Westwater, will take place as part the annual Association of Performing Arts Presenters Conference at the Gibney Dance Center in Manhattan. Over the course of several visits since early 2010, Westwater has organized a group of artists and performers for research and on-site study of the Freshkills Park site, culminating in some of the most unusual programs we’ve hosted at the park. The demonstration is free and open to the public.

The award is in honor of Clare Weiss (1966-2010), the Public Art Curator for NYC Parks from 2005-2009. It will be granted annually to one New York City-based emerging artist who submits the most compelling outdoor sculpture proposal. The location will change annually and will be determined based on the site’s visibility and proximity within a neighborhood underserved by public art.

A clear and compelling promotional video by the Dan Region of Towns in Tel-Aviv for their transformation of the Hiriya Landfill into a 2000-acre park focused on environmental sustainability.  Sound like a familiar type of project? The many folks involved in planning, building and educating about the site and the lessons it can teach have been great supporters of the Freshkills Park project.  It is exciting to have these twin projects moving forward simultaneously.

(via City Parks Blog)

Tuesday night’s talk at the Arsenal by Marty Bellew was a terrific history of landfills in New York City, culminating with the story of Fresh Kills.  The context of other landfills really brought home the outsize scope of operations at Fresh Kills–no other site in the city even came close to the same acreage and garbage volume.  We could hardly believe that the West Mound, now just over 200 feet tall, was originally projected to max out just past 600! And we were amazed to hear about successful searches for lost valuables among the many tons of garbage.  A very entertaining and informative evening.  Our thanks go to Marty and to the crowd who braved the weather to hear him and to ask some good questions afterward.

Marty’s presentation is available for download here (PDF, 8MB). You can also stream the entire audio of the talk, below, or download it directly as an MP3 (56 minutes, 53MB).