City Sink is a design research proposal for a meta-park of dispersed landscape infrastructure to boost carbon stocks in biomass and through formation of long-term sequestration reservoirs for soil organic carbon in New York City and Long Island. City Sink research merges urban land-use lifecycles and the carbon cycle to describe a systemic response to elevated atmospheric carbon levels provoking climate change. The project is a model for reimagining urban landscapes as urban ecological infrastructure. A collaboration between The City College of New York. Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture and Oscar Riera Ojeda Publishers

• Foreword by Michael Sorkin
• Text by Denise Hoffman Brandt

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Contributors Biographies

Denise Hoffman Brandt is principal of Hoffman Brandt Landscape Archi- tects and a professor of Landscape Architecture at The City College of New York School of Architecture, Urban Design and Landscape Architecture. Her work focuses on landscape design as a means for environmental sustaina-bility, and she has been involved in numerous public design projects including the landscape plan for the Queens Museum of Art and the master plan of the New York Hall of Science, which received a Design Excellence award from the Art Commission of the City of New York. Hoffman Brandt has previously worked as senior landscape architect at Matthews Nielsen and as project landscape architect at Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates. She holds an MFA in Painting from Pratt Institute and a Masters in Landscape Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania. Denise Hoffman Brandt’s CITY-SINK is an investigation of our potential to catalyze urban carbon sequestration reservoirs, or sinks. Combating a common idea of the city as “unnatural” and reciprocally, that nature is “un-urban,” Hoffman Brandt reframes urban planting as an operative program rather than a scenographic device. Coincident with the launch of the Million Trees programs in New York and Los Angeles, CITY-SINK provokes and challenges these efforts to adopt a more environmentally productive framework for urban landscape transformation – one that understands trees to be functional organisms dependent upon complex environmental processes. According to Hoffman Brandt, the average life of a street tree is between two and ten years, which is a direct result of planting practices that treat trees as artifacts – isolating them from sustaining vegetative plant associations and constraining soil and hydrologic processes. Urban street trees are more like totemic objects than eco-system constituents. Without comprehensive planning and management, she argues, Million Trees has the potential to release more carbon through installation/management energy inputs and dead wood decomposition than it sequesters. During her fellowship term, Hoffman Brandt will develop and publicly disseminate a plan for the dispersal, deployment, and design of urban carbon sinks in New York City. She will locate opportunities in the city’s macro-scale infrastructural systems to infiltrate sinks throughout the metropolitan area, and she will use case studies of projects to generate sink typologies and local-scale tactics that work within the urban substrate to intensify carbon sequestration.

Michael Sorkin received his architectural training at Harvard and MIT and holds degrees from the University of Chicago and Columbia. He is the principal of the Michael Sorkin Studio in New York City. He is founding president of Terreform, a non-profit organization dedicated to research and urban intervention. He is president of the Institute for Urban Design; Distinguished Professor of Architecture and the Director of the Graduate Urban Design Program at The City College of New York (where he has taught since 2000), Professor of Urbanism and Director of the Institute of Urbanism at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna (1993 to 2000), and he has been a professor at numerous schools of architecture. He lectures around the world, is the author of several hundred articles, and is currently a contributing editor at Architectural Record.