Drawing Light From the Urban River

It never would have dawned on me to write up a second story in as many days about New York City's rivers, but the themes in this second one resonate so harmoniously with the first, albeit constructed from a different vantage point, that I couldn't pass by the chance to write about efforts to encourage urban residents to be more mindful of the natural resource heritage of their city.

Earlier this week, we told you about the Amphibious Architecture project that involves buoys with lights that blink in response to activity in the subsurface, collection of water quality data by subsurface sensors, and the opportunity to log in and receive text updates of river conditions written as if they were sent by the fish themselves.

A recent design competition has produced a strong and sweeping vision of New York's rivers as a source of clean energy. Here, too, the wish in presenting the rivers as power source is to reclaim and reinforce the relationship between the community and the aquatic environments that gave rise to the city itself in the first place.

The notion is not so far fetched. There is currently power generation derived from tidal activity in rivers off of New York. The broader implementation envisioned by project participants from the New Jersey Institute of Technology and New York design firm GRO Architects would involve a series of floating docks outfitted with the equipment necessary for transforming the kinetic energy of the twice-daily tides into electricity.

While finding energy sources that help minimize reliance on fossil fuels is by itself an important goal across the country, an additional intent core to this design proposal is to raise community awareness of the rivers that flow through New York City as the vital and integral features that help define the place. A recent article and accompanying illustrations in Metropolis Magazine offer a more detailed discussion of the team's vision.

NJIT's Richard Garber, speaking to LiveScience, puts the design proposal into an appropriate community context:

"If you think historically, cities developed around waterways based on a need for trade. As trading changed, the need for water as a preexisting requirement for urban development went away. What's funny is that all of a sudden, water can become uber-important again in terms of development. Many times, you can stand on the corner of 42nd St. and Park Ave. in Manhattan and have no idea you're on an island, with the idea of the waterfront lost. A big picture goal here is that via clean energy, one can heighten awareness of the water."

Photo courtesy of NASA, via Wikimedia Commons