grow:dc / harvest the city
harvest the city (aka crank my eco-hub)
The GROW:DC team was formed to compete in the History Channel’s 2008 “City of the Future Competition”. PRESS: Washington Post [link] and UVa Today [link] and more propaganda [link]
GROW:DC is a design collaborative and urban think tank based in Charlottesville, Virginia. The team is led by architects Jason K. Johnson and Nataly Gattegno (Future Cities Lab LLC), landscape architects Chris Fannin (HOK) and Julie Bargmann (D.I.R.T. Studio), and noted urban designer William Morrish. The team is consulted by urban ecologist Kristina Hill, environmental engineer Byron Stigge from Buro Happold Engineers New York and the designer Jeana Ripple (Studio Gang). The team is supported by the University of Virginia School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture. Assistants include David Malda, Karey Helms, Steve Brummond, Steven Johnson and Suzanne Mathew.
The GROW:DC team was formed to compete in the History Channel’s 2008 “City of the Future Competition”.
PRESS: Washington Post [link] and UVa Today [link] and more propaganda [link]
Technical Notes from Byron Stigge @ Buro Happold:
Some of the 10 acre pods will focus on the technical infrastructure delivery of energy generation and water treatment processes. If built today with best practice technology, these pods will generate 4MW of solar energy and 1MW energy from biogas. This would power approximately 3,000 homes. But we project both solar technology and residential energy demand to improve to a point where it is reasonable to believe these pods would power over 12,000 homes. Water treatment settling tanks, membrane filtration and microbial treatment processes are easily scaleable to serve a population of up to 100,000 people per pod (though less is just as well) and are located under the solar canopy. Sludge waste from the settling tanks (known as ‘cake’ to those in the business) is the primary input into anaerobic digestion tanks which convert the sludge to soil fertilizer, liquid fertilizer (liquor) and biogas (methane). Biogas can be bottled for redistribution for cooking and heating or it can be burned directly in the energy pod to generate electricity and heat. The solar canopy and the water treatment functions are well suited for pod stacking but the water treatment plant needs only 1 acre under the solar canopy.
Some of the 10 acre pods will focus on food production. An optimized, fertilized (organically), and heated farming pod can easily serve vegetables, grains and fruits for over 10,000 people for a year (no meat in my calc, sorry carnivores). Farming pods are likely to be more focused on fewer products for some economies of scale, but with enough human work input as many as 100 food products can be grown through the course of the year in one 10 acre food pod.
Some of the 10 acre pods will focus on water purification. Reed beds, polishing ponds and water fountains make up a matrix of final water cleansing in the pod and can serve the potable water needs for 5,000 households under typical demands of today. This may actually be the limiting reagent as supplying drinking water through biological processes takes a lot of space (and heat in the winter). But in an emergency situation, a water purification pod could serve water demand of over 50,000 people.
Of course a hybrid pod that contained all of the above infrastructure services is most ideal as solar energy feed water testment process, water testment process feeds agriculture process, agriculture process feeds composting process etc. All infrastructure systems are interdependent and the more they are pulled apart for economies of scale, the more unreliable and inresilient the entire system becomes. And a pod that contained actual living and working units and connected to other pods through regional transit would also maximize the integrated ’sustainability’ of the concept. But this might just be called a ‘city’ - Though it would be a city of the future.
“Who would ever suspect in the middle of the city . . . that you’re suddenly in a 100-year flood plain?” District Appeals Widening Of Downtown Flood Zone
FEMA Delays Plan to Require Stricter Codes, More Insurance
By Michael E. Ruane
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, January 24, 2008; B01
The Federal Emergency Management Agency has given the District more time to appeal new federal flood maps that would place large sections of downtown Washington in a hazard zone and result in stricter insurance requirements and building codes.
After receiving a joint letter from several city agencies, FEMA this month said it would wait until March 26 before giving final approval to the new maps.
District officials have expressed deep concern over the maps, which show a proposed new flood zone several blocks wide and extending in a broad crescent from the Lincoln Memorial to Fort McNair, in Southwest Washington.
The zone would include Federal Triangle, much of the Mall to the base of Capitol Hill and a large section of Southwest Washington.
The changes would dramatically expand what is called the 100-year flood zone, where residential flood insurance often is required and more-stringent building codes would take effect.
The flood maps, which are being updated in a post-Hurricane Katrina analysis, haven’t been updated since 1985, officials said. The hazard zone then was far less extensive.
City officials asked for the extra time, saying the map proposals took many people by surprise and carried large potential impacts.
“Who would ever suspect in the middle of the city . . . that you’re suddenly in a 100-year flood plain?” Harriet Tregoning, director of the District’s Office of Planning, said yesterday.
If the maps become official, residences in the zone with federally backed mortgages or with mortgages from federally backed banks would be required to have federal flood insurance, said Butch Kinerney, a spokesman for the FEMA directorate that administers the National Flood Insurance Program.
The annual cost of such insurance is about $600, he said.
Residences that are owned outright would not be required to have the insurance, he said, nor would commercial or government properties.
New buildings in the zone, however, would be required to be constructed above certain base flood levels, which vary throughout the area.
Officials have said projects such as the expansion of the Department of Commerce building and the construction of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture would have to be reviewed if the map changes are adopted because they would be partly in the new hazard zone.
The proposed new flood zones were drawn up after the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers reported last year that the so-called Potomac Park levees, which are designed to protect downtown Washington from Potomac River flooding, are inadequate. If the levees were brought up to standard, the map would be redrawn to shrink the size of the hazard zone. That, in effect, would minimize the number of residents who must get flood insurance.
The levee system consists of temporary and permanent barriers at four locations _ three on or near the Mall, and one near Fort McNair.
The corps objected mainly to the temporary levee erected across 17th Street near the National World War II Memorial.
That levee, which has been used only six times since the 1940s, consists of sandbags and Jersey barriers covered with a plastic membrane.
In a worse case, however, plans call for building an eight-foot-high earthen dike there made of dirt excavated from the grounds of the Washington Monument. That plan has never been implemented.
The corps, which designed the system decades ago, decided after a 2006 inspection that, especially at 17th Street, it wasn’t reliable.
“We don’t believe that the earthen dike is a dependable closure structure,” said Tony Videl, head of levee safety programs for the corps’ Baltimore district, which includes Washington.
“We believe that’s a high-risk thing to do during a storm event,” he said in a recent interview. “We’ve always wanted a permanent structure there.”
Consequently, the corps declined to certify the reliability of the levees.
Corps officials said repair of the levees would have to be paid for by Congress, which in the past has authorized $7.2 million for part of the project but never made the money available. No one knows what the total cost would be.
Videl said a more sophisticated “post and panel” barrier across 17th Street, which could be erected during a flood, would up the cost. The barrier is created when panels are lowered into place between posts that are inserted into holes dug in the street.
FEMA, meanwhile, is in the process of reexamining flood maps across the country in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. As a result of the corps’ findings, FEMA drew up new flood maps for the District as if the levees didn’t exist.
The maps were unveiled last fall, but they were not widely publicized until they were discussed at a Jan. 3 meeting of the National Capital Planning Commission. The commission wrote to the city suggesting an extension of the appeal period, which expired that day.
The District Department of the Environment, the city’s point agency on the issue, wrote to FEMA on Jan. 10 requesting the extension.
“The consequences of these proposed changes are extensive and will substantially affect many stakeholders throughout the City, both commercial, private, Federal Government and the District Government,” wrote George S. Hawkins, the department director.
“While we appreciate the need to modernize and make more accurate the actual flood zones, we need this process to occur within a longer timeframe and a more inclusive process,” he wrote.
