The third in a series of place-based urban workshops, part of our “City Environments around the Globe” initiative, is planned for New York City. Pandemic travel restrictions have delayed the start of this workshop, but we look forward to holding it soon.
City Meets the Sea: the landscape of nature on New York’s Shifting Coastline
This workshop will convene an interdisciplinary group of faculty and students to investigate the social and ecological dimensions of New York City’s shifting coastline. It is the third of a series of three place-based workshops that are united under the Comparative Urban Environments initiative, a collaborative research and teaching project by researchers from NYU New York, NYU Abu Dhabi, and the Rachel Carson Center for the Environment and Society at LMU. Comparative Urban Environments is an active response to the recently instituted partnership between NYU and LMU.
Having completed two place-based workshops – one in Abu Dhabi (February 2019) and one in Munich (October 2019), this third workshop will convene the group to examine New York’s shifting coastline. We will think historically about the city’s contemporary coast, first by tracing its contours prior to urban settlement, and then by following the contemporary coastal path created over centuries of planned in-filling and port development. We will then turn our focus to the coast of the present and future, marked as it is by post-Hurricane Sandy redevelopment and future planning for coastal resilience in the era of climate change.
A key aspect of contemporary and future coastal development in New York City is an interconnected network of planned green spaces, many designed specifically for their potential resilience value in anticipation of future coastal storm events. The central objective of the New York workshop is to identify social-ecological questions that form the basis for long term interdisciplinary research, teaching, and application. A secondary objective is to establish a basis for comparative studies between urban ecology dynamics in the three sites, New York, Abu Dhabi, and Munich. The theme that ultimately unites our comparative thinking is Cities Making Nature: Uncertainties in Urban Environmental Futures and the Unexpected Natures they Generate. This theme looks for the ways that urbanization and city growth result in the proliferation of unintended ecological and social developments, sometimes confounding our expectations of the automatically destructive effects of city growth.