Tag: naveera arif

Amsterdam’s “Green” Light Festival

Art has always been a medium to spread a message, raise awareness, express your inner thoughts, and make a statement. The medium is diverse, ranging from traditional paintings and sculptures, to cinematographic interpretive videos. From late 2015 to early 2016, Amsterdam held a large scale light festival, with bright artworks made on the theme of “Friendship.” The event is held annually, with a different theme each year, and the whole city participates in it. The artworks are visible wherever you go, especially enthralling when taking the famous boat ride on the city’s canals. During this particular event, 35 site-specific artworks were displayed throughout the city and featured work from both local and international artists. Most importantly, the entire project ran entirely on renewable energy and 95% of the lights were low-energy LED lights (Lisa).

This event not only lit up the city and promoted the theme of unity and integration throughout the world, but also helped shed light to the importance of sustainability and “being green” in all the work we do, even in creating artwork. Through art, even if the light festival is not based on the theme of sustainability, it utilized sustainable practices to create these masterpieces. This allows for the artwork to raise awareness on the importance of protecting the environment and incorporating the idea of environmental protection into our daily living and infrastructure projects in the future.

Flood Protection Measures Finally Taken by Lower Manhattan

After Hurricane Sandy and the surfacing of the detrimental effects of how humans have changed the climate, it seems that New York City has finally understood the importance of taking precautions to one of its biggest storm water management problem: flooding. After Sandy had “absolutely devastated” Lower Manhattan, as described by the director of the Mayor’s Office of Recovery and Resiliency (Durkin), the city announced that it will be spending 100 million dollars to build a flood protection system, including levees, flood walls, and green spaces to soak up storm water through creation of parks. Similar measures are going to be carried out in the Lower East Side as well. The city is utilizing engineering firms and design teams to attempt to raise elevation levels along the coast and add the parks to not only help the flood issue but also to make it more neighborhood-friendly.

This project highlights the importance of understanding the mistakes humans have made by building their progress in industrialization without taking into account the effects it will have on the environment. The changes we have made in the climate are now becoming aware to us, especially in how it will negatively affect us. The rise in sea levels and stronger storms will exacerbate the flooding problem we already have in New York City Lower Manhattan, and now the city is making a stand to install precautions, even utilizing green infrastructure through the creation of extra parkland. Now that we are at the brink of actual catastrophe, we start to implement these changes and understand that the effects of the climate changes will be detrimental enough to “shut down the city” (Durkin).

The “Nature” of the Newtown Creek Watershed

The Newtown Creek Sewer Shed is known for the pollution that reigns supreme over the creek and prevents people from wanting to confront how humans have allowed for conditions to become so horrible. The city created the Newtown Creek Nature Walk, using the portion of the money given by the Department of Environmental Protection left for artwork after the creation of the treatment plant (Ruen). The Newtown Creek Nature Walk, through the irony of its own existence, presents humans’ mistakes and misjudgments regarding the treatment of the environment.

With a “brutalist” concrete pathway, the “nature” we see is that of the wastewater pools, a sewage treatment plant, and the large metallic buildings of our post-industrialist era, instead of pretty green forests and butterflies we would normally expect from a nature walk (Ruen). The water of creek is murky with visible rainbow swirls of oil when the sun is out. Grass is nonexistent; the only thing you can see is large slabs of concrete and gravel. This nature walk puts all of the effects we have had on our Earth on display for people to be confronted by the byproducts of careless industrialization that did not take into account the importance of the environment.

It inadvertently provides support for the idea of sustainability, in which the environment, society, and the economy, along with technology, work together to both help the earth and improve the well-being of humans. Maybe if we utilize the environment properly, the Newtown Creek Nature Walk can actually show nature as we would expect it to be.

Trip to Battery Park City

Being a New Yorker, I truly never get tired of walking around the city and my trip to Battery Park City was no different. I really do believe that New York City has the possibility to become substantially more sustainable and Battery Park City has already begun taking the first steps. As I walked around Teardrop Park and passed the Solaire building, I saw the great potential of using the systems already in place in these locations around the city. The Solaire Building’s bright solar panels, along with its reuse of treated black and grey water extended towards the park, all give a potential solution to the extensive CSO issues of our city. If these systems and technology are integrated into other buildings of New York City, we will be so much closer to creating a water integrated system that propels our city towards complete sustainability. Furthermore, I witnessed the large amounts of green space from the park and the streets made of cobblestones in hexagonal shapes around the area of the Solaire, giving the idea of permeable pavements and green infrastructure implementation in large parks, which can aid in the flooding issues that New York may experience more often in our future. If these ideas were implemented all around the city, we may be better prepared for the future effects of climate change. We would also be able to take care of our environment as well as solve the city’s problems on water control. All of these thoughts were racing through my head as I walked around and realized the extent to which Battery Park has demonstrated a proper model to be followed for the future of New York City.

As I continued touring, I came across the shiny red Balloon Flower and the 9/11 Memorial Fountain. The sculpture was surrounded by small fountains of water, all of which have the possibility of using treated black and grey water instead of potable drinking water. The same can be done for the large gallons that fill the Memorial Fountain day by day. Just by implementing water integrated systems into features of artwork in the city, it may be possible to raise more awareness of the need to become more water sustainable. Artwork has the ability to attract people and to deliver a statement or message to those who view and interpret it. If an added message of water sustainability is given through the artwork, then it is possible to attract people to learning about this necessary goal of the city. Artwork and raising awareness of important messages and goals have always worked hand-in-hand, and I do not believe this would be any different.

Mangrove Forests: A Path for Urban Sustainability in Asia

An important part of urban sustainability is being able to utilize all available resources in a way most beneficial to the environment, to society, and the economy. In Asia, mangrove forests, or plants including trees, palms, and shrubs and are found by swamps, riverbanks, and coastal areas in tropical or subtropical climates, have been unfortunately neglected and even destroyed for coastal development of cities. However, urban designers have begun to pay more attention to the usefulness of mangrove forests as natural capital, to not only help the environment, but also to utilize the resources these forests provide.

It was found that mangrove forests are actually carbon-rich environments that provide natural storm and monsoon protection, help prevent soil erosion, provide a habitat for many different species of animals, and absorb almost eight times more carbon dioxide than any other ecosystem. These facts present a compelling case to preserve mangrove forests, as many large cities in Asia have begun doing, including Shenzhen in China, Hong Kong, and Mumbai in India. City planners in these areas have created solutions to restore the lost mangrove forests, incorporate them urban planning, and properly protect them into the future. The change of practices of these large bustling cities gives us the perfect example of the importance of understanding and utilizing the resources in our environment to become more sustainable by helping the environment, urban society, and the economy from the benefits provided by mangrove forests. We would be wise to pay attention to the resources and natural capital we have in our environments that we must protect and utilize sustainably to aid our own urban areas in America.

Unsustainable Practices and Their Consequences

Most people do not realize the detrimental consequences of using unsustainable practices to obtain resources, nor do people view water as a resource to be protected and reused with care. Benoit Aquin’s photography series named “The Chinese Dust Bowl” emphasizes the importance of employing sustainable practices as well as to the scarcity of water as a resource. The pictures revolve around the widespread desertification in China, man-made deserts that are slowly expanding from over use of arable land, overgrazing, and increased drilling for water. Aquin presents shocking pictures of dry, cracked, and dusty land that highlight a lack of water through the haze and overall tan color present in all of the dusty, sandy pictures, especially since one of the reasons that the deserts were created was to find water by drilling into the ground. The dirt and heat of each picture can almost be felt by the viewer as they see the conditions that people are forced to walk, travel, and live in every day. People walk around with face masks, showing that the air itself is saturated with the dust from these man-made deserts that make it difficult to breathe normally. The desertification continues to spread and diffuse outward through wind and giant sandstorms, and it represents the most massive and rapid conversion of arable land into barren deserts.

The pictures that Aquin took push the viewers to focus on the importance of implementing sustainable practices into society, especially taking care of the environment as a necessary factor in the decisions made. They expose water as an important and scarce resource to certain places in the world, and implies the need to protect and preserve it. His pictures won the Prix Pictet, a global award dedicated to photography and sustainability, in 2008, a well-deserved reward for his presentation of the ecological damage humans inflict on nature through lack of sustainability and improper mindsets.

What Should Our Future Cities Look Like?

Even being in the year 2017, a year that represented “the future” in the past, humans continue looking forward to further improve and progress. One area that this thought process is employed in would be urban design. Architects, designers, and urban planners create plans for how our future cities should look like, taking into account the strive towards urban sustainability. ABIBOO Studio is an international design firm that focuses on innovation in architecture, urban areas, and interior spaces that allows for the integration of “arts, engineering, economics, sensorial experiences, and technology” (ABIBOO). In this article from ABIBOO’s Think Tank, Juanjo Ortega discussed the different aspects necessary to create an ideal future city, emphasizing urban sustainability as the key to the future. He presented a new strategy, hybrid urbanism, that offers programs for a city population involving projects to preserve natural landscape with architecture and urban planning that will help promote culture and the environment.

A couple of ideas and focuses presented by Ortega include buildings designed to clean the air through a series of green houses that work as filters and creation of terraces for collection of rainwater and agriculture or to bury organic residues to produce power, fertilizers and biogas. The main concept of his ideal future city is to have a “network of effective infrastructures in small areas with mainly touristic buildings where visitors and workers share the resources and the facilities” (Ortega).  The ideas he highlighted in this article involved solutions and innovations that will reform cities to make them more sustainable and more efficient for the future populations to come.

Using “Toxic Art” to Advocate Water Sustainability

Water sustainability can be carried out in multiple ways. John Sabraw is an artist that works with environmentalists and scientists to do research on streams polluted from abandoned coal mines in Ohio. He also works on making a fully sustainable art practice that produces eco-conscious art. His recent art pieces, called “Toxic Art”, were made from pigments created from the acid polluted mine runoff. These vibrant art pieces are not only beautiful to look at, but also brings awareness to the pollution of our world’s waters due to humans and industrialization.  Continue reading “Using “Toxic Art” to Advocate Water Sustainability”

Climate Change and Politics

Especially now, climate change has been an important and surprisingly controversial topic in today’s time, with large populations of people denying the existence of global warming and the harmful effects it will cause on our world. This issue has been an ongoing battle for years and years, since scientists noticed and began to understand the potential impacts of the alterations being imposed upon our Earth. However, politics and science do not always align in their opinions on what should be considered priority. Award-winning political cartoonist, Mike Keefe, created a cartoon for The Denver Post in 2010, one that continues to be relevant today, according to the decisions being made by our current political leaders.

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The Importance of Technology for Sustainability and the Environment

Cities around the world, including our own New York City, have been referred to as “concrete jungles,” one of the only real associations to nature given to cities, along with having to battle with pigeons as you commute to school or work. Despite having small designated areas reserved for nature in parks, the city itself remains largely grey. Naziha Mestaoui, a light artist, has created a powerful statement through her creation of the “One Beat, One Tree,” a technological light art piece, in which she projects virtual trees onto cityscapes and a new virtual tree will bloom with every heartbeat of the viewer. In her statement regarding this magnificent art piece, she said, “‘I wanted to create an art piece using technologies to connect us to this immaterial value of nature… If we want technologies to reconnect us to nature, we just need to create it’” (Frank). Her statement represents the need to use innovations and technology to reconnect us to nature and to remind the world of the importance of our environment.

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