PARTICIPATORY URBANISM CROWN HEIGHTS

PARTICIPATORY URBANISM CROWN HEIGHTS

The Crown Heights Participatory Urbanism project takes a landscape urbanism approach to rethink residual spaces adjacent spaces to the Franklin Avenue shuttle train towards a new public space network. The project is founded on the idea of creating a common ground for residents, business owners, governmental entities and local community organizations for a more plural public spaces in the context of a diverse emergent community in the Crow Hill/Crown Heights neighborhood.

New Website

www.manuelavilaprojects.com

ECO POD UNDER CONSTRUCTION

AWESOME ECO POD ARMADA

"Today, Awesome Foundation Boston is tremendously excited today to announce that they are awarding their November Awesome Fellowship to Lee Altman, an architect and urban designer working out of New York City." more: THE AWESOME FOUNDATION

Operative hydroSenus is a mobile buoyant pod for water monitoring and remediation. Combining high- and low-end technology, it operates as constructed wetland, aquaponic farm, monitoring station, and communication platform, addressing site-specific requirements. The project aspires to establish a mutually responsive interface between water and local communities, focused on water related concerns. OPERATIVE hydroSensus was submitted to the Buckminster Fuller Challenge by Jenny Chou and Lee Altman

Clean Around The Edges

"Clean Around The Edges" by Lee Altman has been published in MONU - Magazine ON Urbanism, in its' latest issue titled Clean Urbanism. "Clean Around The Edges" proposes to redesign open spaces in NYC Public Housing projects as intensive green infrastructure, and converting them into a new city-wide public space network.

Water Can Redefine the Suburbs

Designed for the automobile, suburbia’s concrete streets hold together individual properties, with boundaries drawn in the lawns, designating theirs from yours. Water doesn’t follow these lines. We propose reassembling suburban communities based on the varying scales of the watershed. Delineated through hydrology, existing suburban patterns can introduce new opportunities for civic responsibility, creating social capital in an environment that lacks sustainable community life. What is a watershed? We all live in a watershed, but varying points in the land flow into different sheds depending on the slope. Natural and manmade topography can then inform a methodology that reconfigures suburban community boundaries into varying scales: Regional Basins, Shed Committees, Sub Shed Boards. By modifying surface materials, spaces receive new roles in the water cycle: permeating, filtering, collecting; and suggest new programs for the residents: congregating, sharing, conserving. Acworth, Georgia was selected as a testing ground. The Southeastern Drought of 2007-09 affected nearly half of Georgia, prompting watering bans, forcing people to rethink their water use. Homeowners have drilled wells for groundwater, tapping a public resource in their back yard. In becoming part of a “shed community” households become accountable for their water use. Employing these sheds within existing suburbs reveals new relationships, redefining the boundary of neighborhoods, cities and countries.