Freshkills, New York City
History of the site
The Fresh Kills landfill site covered 890 hectares in the New York City borough of Staten Island. The site was originally a coastal salt marsh, which hosted an opulent wildlife.
Prior to 1934, it was acceptable to dump garbage at sea. Robert Moses, the “master builder” of the mid-twentieth century responsible for New York’s urban development policies, established Fresh Kills landfill in 1947, as a temporary solution, at a time when disposing of waste at sea was forbidden. The landfill, one of the world’s largest sanitary operations, was initially proposed as a temporary solution to New York’s growing need to rethink waste disposal in the context of an exponential rise in consumption following the Second World War.
Moses proposed a plan to develop a residential, recreational, and industrial area on Staten Island and use the dumping on soft marshland to prepare the soil for this development—eventually the temporary solution became a fifty-year one.
By 1955, it was already the biggest landfill in the world and remained so until its closure in 2001. At the peak of its operation, in 1986, Fresh Kills received 29,000 tons of residential waste per day. In 1991 it was the only landfill to receive New York City’s residential waste. The four mounds on the site comprise approximately 150 million tons of solid waste. The landfill remains the world’s largest man-made structure.
The Freshkills Park project
In 1996, as the result of strong community pressure, a bill was signed into law to cease the landfill activity by 2001. A master planning process was established to turn the site into public parkland, reclaiming its original ecosystem and biodiversity.
In 2001, the landfill received its last barge of garbage: the rubble from the World Trade Center. Then the mounds were covered with a thick impermeable cap. The transformation of the vast, reclaimed urban landscape started in 2006. In 2012, part of the former Fresh Kills site opened as a park. Planned as the largest park in New York City, it has a surface area of around 2.5 times that of Central Park.
Engineered soil
During a ten-month operation to prepare the site and keep the surrounding area safe from hazardous materials and gas emissions, 1.2 million tons of material waste was screened and sifted. A layer of clean soil at least a foot deep (30.48 cm) was added to protect the site and control erosion.
Nowadays, Freshkills Park looks like a wild grassland, but in reality it is a highly engineered landscape. It is predicted that decomposition will take thirty years, and so the site is monitored closely by a sophisticated system built underground to collect and treat the by-products of waste decomposition. Methane harvested from the site powers local homes.
Community
Freshkills Park is an ongoing project that addresses a concern for sustainability and aims to establish interaction among people and nature in a metropolitan context. The park is designed to grow in response to both nature and evolving community needs.
Education in renewable energy systems, such as solar, wind, water, and methane, is a highly valued component of the project.
Manufactured nature
This example of an extensive area of restored natural systems pushes us to question the threshold between the man-made and the natural.
The nature that now covers Freshkills Park is “manufactured nature,” built out of the artificial mounds that grew during the height of dumping activity and the more recent restoration of the original ecosystem through a planting scheme of local species. The seeming wild prairies that cover the Freshkills landscape are “domesticated nature.”
Anthropogenic landscapes
What is interesting to highlight in the Fresh Kills case—as for other similar sites—is that the landfill activity led to the creation of an anthropogenic layer. The landfill mounds at Fresh Kills are the result of fifty years of dumping household waste.
If the Anthropocene concept claims that we are redistributing the resources of our planet, we witness in this case study how, through actions of such dimension, we are creating urban mines. Manufactured material waste is piled and compressed. We are leaving a trace by modifying the substance of soils and altering the topography, reshaping landscapes. This example highlights the long-term impact of human activity on a geological scale.
As a designer dealing daily with materials, I see the Anthropocene as an advent of new matter. We are manufacturing soil and potential new minerals and, so far, we can wonder to what extent sites such as Fresh Kills are the ground floor to the future resources of our planet.
It is interesting to observe how the planning authorities and the public are transforming the use of and engagement with this landscape. However, the waste management of New York City is an issue yet to be solved, having simply been displaced. The population of New York City now exceeds 8 million people and the trash produced is currently diverted to special waste drop-off sites, recycling centers, and several out-of-town dumps.
