This talk looks at the challenge of the Sustainable Megacity through Sao Paulo’s experience as a city of 20 million people, with expansion that ranges from formal urban development to the informal context of huge slums. This work signalizes parameters for a city that is reinventing itself through eco-urbanism after the "expanding and exhausting" model of the 21st Century when the city grew by 27,000% in population and 40,000% in urban territory. Carlos Leite is an Architect and Urbanist with a Master and PhD in Urban Design from the University of Sao Paulo and a Postdoc from California Polytechnic University where he was Visiting Professor. He is Professor at the School of Architecture and Planning, Mackenzie Presbyterian University, Sao Paulo. He is releasing his first book: Cidades Sustentaveis, Cidades Inteligentes in Brazil (Bookman). He is principal at Stuchi & Leite Projetos:www.stuchileite.com

CUNY Institute For Sustainable Cities

Carlos Leite - Sao Paulo Sustainability Indicators: the Brazilian Megacity, from Formal to Informal Territories

This program is the first in a series designed to increase awareness and dialogue between residents and stakeholders of New York City and other communities in the Hudson Watershed. Recording of a panel discussion held at Roosevelt House, NYC on Wednesday, December 1st, 2010 - 1PM-5PM.

Green Infrastructure Event at Roosevelt House, December 2010

Session 4 Wed. April 28, 2010 Reviving the Estuary: Science, Politics, and Education Moderator: Dr. John Waldman, Queens College Speakers/Panelists Deborah A. Mans, Executive Director, NY/NJ Baykeeper Christopher J. Collins, Executive Director, Solar One Cortney Worrall, Director of Programs, Metropolitan Waterfront Alliance Murray Fisher, Urban Assembly New York Harbor School William Kornblum, Author, At Sea in the City: New York at the Water’s Edge In 1609, New York’s future waterfront was an arcadian shore of forests, wetlands, beaches, and sand bars, according to Eric Sanderson's book Mannahatta. That landscape is lost forever, but visions of a post-industrial, neo-natural waterfront are longstanding. In 1944, futurists Paul and Percival Goodman proposed that Manhattan "open out toward the water," lining its gritty waterfront with new parks. They were prescient: today the water’s edge of Manhattan is evolving from a "no-man's-land" into a "highly desirable zone of parks," in the words of writer Phillip Lopate. The newly designated "Manhattan Waterfront Greenway" is cobbled together from many bits and pieces like Battery Park City, Hudson River Park, Riverside Park South, restored Harlem River parks, and tiny Stuyvesant Cove Park––each with its own chronicle of past and present struggles among property owners, community groups, developers, politicians, planners, lawyers, and other stakeholders. Elsewhere in the city, Brooklyn Bridge Park, the Brooklyn Waterfront Greenway, Governors Island, the South Bronx Greenway, Pelham Bay South Waterfront Park, the Bronx River Greenway, and Gateway National Recreation Area are among many waterfront works in progress. The colloquium series will address selected topics and issues relating to what has been achieved and what remains to be done to continue the transformation of New York’s waterfronts.

Turning the Tide: Waterfront Parks: Reviving the Estuary: Science, Politics, and Education

Session 3 Wed. April 7, 2010 Seizing Opportunities: Waterfront Works in Progress Moderator: Dr. Melissa Checker, Queens College, CUNY Speakers/Panelists Robert Pirani, Regional Plan Association and Governors Island Alliance––Governors Island Kate Van Tassel, NYCEDC and Miquela Craytor, Sustainable South Bronx––South Bronx Greenway Ambassador William J. vanden Heuvel, Four Freedoms Park Nancy Webster, Acting Executive-Director, Brooklyn Bridge Park Conservancy Joshua Laird, Asst. Commissioner, NYC Parks and Recreation Background In 1609, New York’s future waterfront was an arcadian shore of forests, wetlands, beaches, and sand bars, according to Eric Sanderson's book Mannahatta. That landscape is lost forever, but visions of a post-industrial, neo-natural waterfront are longstanding. In 1944, futurists Paul and Percival Goodman proposed that Manhattan "open out toward the water," lining its gritty waterfront with new parks. They were prescient: today the water’s edge of Manhattan is evolving from a "no-man's-land" into a "highly desirable zone of parks," in the words of writer Phillip Lopate. The newly designated "Manhattan Waterfront Greenway" is cobbled together from many bits and pieces like Battery Park City, Hudson River Park, Riverside Park South, restored Harlem River parks, and tiny Stuyvesant Cove Park––each with its own chronicle of past and present struggles among property owners, community groups, developers, politicians, planners, lawyers, and other stakeholders. Elsewhere in the city, Brooklyn Bridge Park, the Brooklyn Waterfront Greenway, Governors Island, the South Bronx Greenway, Pelham Bay South Waterfront Park, the Bronx River Greenway, and Gateway National Recreation Area are among many waterfront works in progress. The colloquium series will address selected topics and issues relating to what has been achieved and what remains to be done to continue the transformation of New York’s waterfronts.

Turning the Tide: Seizing Opportunities: Waterfront Works in Progress

GreenHome NYC is pleased to announce their February 17 monthly forum, The Women of Green, at a location to be determined. In this 1.5 hour presentation, attendees will meet 12 women in the green field, established professionals who are trying and succeeding in changing the environmental movement. The presentation will be done in Pecha Kucha format, where each presenter is allowed 20 images, each shown for 20 seconds - giving 6 minutes 40 seconds of fame before the next presenter is up. This keeps presentations concise, the interest level up, and gives more people the chance to present. This is a forum for women (and maybe well-behaved men) to see the breadth of careers in the sustainable field that don’t involve what we like to call the green “bling” (ground source heat pumps, solar, wind, bamboo, green roofs, and the like). This will be held as the regular monthly forum meeting of GreenHomeNYC (www.greenhomenyc.org) an all- volunteer organization dedicated to helping people in the NYC region green their lives. It is being done in cooperation with Hunter’s CUNY Institute for Sustainable Cities; Admission is free but attendees can make a tax-deductable contribution to GreenHomeNYC at the forum. The Women of Green Chris Benedict, Chris Benedict, RA: Doing more with Less Catherine Bobenhausen, Veridian Energy and Environmental: Greening Professionals Erica Brabon, Steven Winter Associates: Health and Safety Mary Brennan, Community Preservation Corporation: Green Lending Annie Chadwick, Clinton Community Garden: Community Gardening Sharon Griffith, NYSERDA: 30 + NYSERDA and Weatherization Maureen Mahle, Steven Winter Assoc.: Green Design and LEED Certification Ariella Maron, NYC Department of Citywide Administrative Services: Greening a Government Charlotte Mathews, The Related Companies: Big and Green Tatiana Morin, NYC Soil and Water Conservation District: The water we waste Lesley Patrick, Hunter CUNY ISC: Trees or Global Warming

The Women of Green

Session 2 Wed. March 17, 2010: Waterfront Parks: Old, New, Green, Blue Moderator: Dr. Rutherford H. Platt Speakers/Panelists Amy Gavaris, Executive Vice President for the New York Restoration Project Dr. Vicky Gholson, Friends of Riverbank State Park Peter Mullan, Planning Director, Friends of The High Line Greenway Connie Fishman, Executive Director, Hudson River Park Trust Jeanne DuPont, Rockaway Waterfront Alliance, Queens In 1609, New York’s future waterfront was an arcadian shore of forests, wetlands, beaches, and sand bars, according to Eric Sanderson's book Mannahatta. That landscape is lost forever, but visions of a post-industrial, neo-natural waterfront are longstanding. In 1944, futurists Paul and Percival Goodman proposed that Manhattan "open out toward the water,” lining its gritty waterfront with new parks. They were prescient: today the water’s edge of Manhattan is evolving from a "no-man's-land" into a "highly desirable zone of parks," in the words of writer Phillip Lopate. The newly designated “Manhattan Waterfront Greenway” is cobbled together from many bits and pieces like Battery Park City, Hudson River Park, Riverside Park South, restored Harlem River parks, and tiny Stuyvesant Cove Park––each with its own chronicle of past and present struggles among property owners, community groups, developers, politicians, planners, lawyers, and other stakeholders. Elsewhere in the city, Brooklyn Bridge Park, the Brooklyn Waterfront Greenway, Governors Island, the South Bronx Greenway, Pelham Bay South Waterfront Park, the Bronx River Greenway, and Gateway National Recreation Area are among many waterfront works in progress. The colloquium series will address selected topics and issues relating to what has been achieved and what remains to be done to continue the transformation of New York’s waterfronts.

Turning the Tide: Waterfront Parks: Old, New, Green, Blue

Session 1: Wed. Feb. 24, 2010: "Opening Out Towards the Water"– The Big Picture Moderator: Dr. William Solecki, Director, CISC Speakers/Panelists Dr. Rutherford H. Platt, Senior Fellow, CISC Robert Yaro, President, Regional Plan Association Linda Cox, Executive Director, Bronx River Alliance Wilbur L. Woods, Director, Waterfront and Open Space Planning, New York City Department of City Planning Roland Lewis, CEO, Metropolitan Waterfront Alliance In 1609, New York’s future waterfront was an arcadian shore of forests, wetlands, beaches, and sand bars, according to Eric Sanderson's book Mannahatta. That landscape is lost forever, but visions of a post-industrial, neo-natural waterfront are longstanding. In 1944, futurists Paul and Percival Goodman proposed that Manhattan "open out toward the water,” lining its gritty waterfront with new parks. They were prescient: today the water’s edge of Manhattan is evolving from a "no-man's-land" into a "highly desirable zone of parks," in the words of writer Phillip Lopate. The newly designated “Manhattan Waterfront Greenway” is cobbled together from many bits and pieces like Battery Park City, Hudson River Park, Riverside Park South, restored Harlem River parks, and tiny Stuyvesant Cove Park––each with its own chronicle of past and present struggles among property owners, community groups, developers, politicians, planners, lawyers, and other stakeholders. Elsewhere in the city, Brooklyn Bridge Park, the Brooklyn Waterfront Greenway, Governors Island, the South Bronx Greenway, Pelham Bay South Waterfront Park, the Bronx River Greenway, and Gateway National Recreation Area are among many waterfront works in progress.

Turning the Tide: "Opening Out Towards the Water"– The Big Picture

Martin V. Melosi is Distinguished University Professor of History and Director of the Center for Public History at the University of Houston. He was born in San Jose, California, and received his PhD in History at the University of Texas in Austin. His primary fields of study are environmental history, urban history, and the history of energy. He is the author or editor of sixteen books and more than 80 articles and book chapters, including the award-winning The Sanitary City: Urban Infrastructure in America from Colonial Times to the Present (2000, 2008). In April/May, 2008, he was visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers in Paris. In 2000-01 he held the Fulbright Chair in American Studies at the University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark, and also has been a visiting faculty member at the University of Paris, University of Helsinki, Tampere Technological University, Peking University, and Shanghai University. In 2005 he was awarded the Ester Farfel Award at the University of Houston in recognition of career achievement in research, teaching, and scholarship. He has been president of the American Society for Environmental History, the Urban History Association, the Public Works Historical Society, and the National Council on Public History.

In the Wake of the Half Moon

Dr. William Solecki's research focuses on the urban environmental change and urban land use and suburbanization. Solecki is the Director of the CUNY Institute for Sustainable Cities and a professor in the Department of Geography at Hunter College, CUNY. He has served on several U.S. National Research Council committees including the Special Committee on Problems in the Environment (SCOPE). He currently is a member of the International Geographical Union (IGU) Megacity Study Group and the International Human Dimensions Programme (IHDP), Urbanization and Global Environmental Change Scientific Steering Committee. He currently serves (has served) as the co-leader of several climate impacts and land use studies both statewide and in the New York metropolitan region, including the New York City Panel on Climate Change, the Statewide Integrated Assessment for Effective Climate Change Adaptation Strategies (ClimAID) project, and the Metropolitan East Coast Assessment of Impacts of Potential Climate Variability and Change. He holds in degrees in Geography from Columbia University (BA) and Rutgers University (MA, Ph.D).

Dr. Cynthia Rosenzweig is a Senior Research Scientist at NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies where she heads the Climate Impacts Group. She has organized and led large-scale interdisciplinary regional, national, and international studies of climate change impacts and adaptation. She is a co-chair of the New York City Panel on Climate Change, a body of experts convened by the Mayor advising the city on adaptation for its critical infrastructure. She has co-led the Metropolitan East Coast Regional Assessment of the U.S. National Assessment of the Potential Consequences of Climate Variability and Change, sponsored by the U.S. Global Change Research Program. She is a Coordinating Lead Author of the IPCC Working Group II Fourth Assessment Report observed changes chapter, and served on the IPCC Task Group on Data and Scenarios for Impact and Climate Assessment. Dr. Rosenzweig's research involves the development of interdisciplinary methodologies to assess the potential impacts of and adaptations to global environmental change. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, she joins impact models with climate models to predict future outcomes of both land-based and urban systems under altered climate conditions. She is a Professor at Barnard College and a Senior Research Scientist at the Columbia Earth Institute.

Owen Gutfreund is an Associate Professor of Urban Affairs and Planning at Hunter College. Previously, he was on the faculty at Columbia University, where he taught urban history, urban planning, and international affairs, and served for many years as Director of the joint Barnard-Columbia Urban Studies Program. A specialist in urban history, Owen has published Twentieth Century Sprawl: Highways and the Reshaping of the American Landscape (Oxford University Press, 2004), and was one of the authors of Robert Moses and the Modern City: The Transformation of New York (W.W. Norton, 2007). He is an Associate Editor of the forthcoming 2nd edition of the Encyclopedia of New York City, and is on the editorial board of the Journal of Urban History. He is currently working on Cities Take Flight: Airports, Aviation, and Modern American Urbanism, a book about the impact of airports and air travel on American cities. Before earning his doctorate, Professor Gutfreund was a Vice President at the investment banking firm Lazard Freres & Company, where he worked in public finance, assisting states, cities, and government agencies in financing infrastructure projects. Professor Gutfreund’s areas of specialization, besides general American urban history, include transportation policy, suburbanization, sustainable development, sprawl, public finance, and comparative urbanization. He is a widely acknowledged expert on urban issues, and has appeared on PBS and NPR, in the New York Times and in other major media outlets. He has been invited to speak at Middlebury College, NYU, Columbia, University of Delaware, Ohio State University, the Municipal Arts Society, the Center for Architecture, the Brooklyn Public Library, and the New America Foundation. He has also presented his research to a wide range of academic groups, including keynote addresses to the Conference on the Small City and to the International Forum on Metropolitan Development (in Shanghai), and has been a plenary speaker for the Urban History Association.

Eric A. Goldstein is a senior attorney and New York City Environment Director at the Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc. ("NRDC"), a national, non-profit environmental organization. At NRDC, he has worked for more than twenty-five years exclusively on urban environmental issues, including air pollution, solid waste, drinking water and environmental justice. He gained nationwide attention in the early 1980's for spearheading the public campaign to reduce levels of toxic lead in gasoline. Over the past two decades, he has been intimately involved with public policy efforts to protect the New York drinking water supply via pollution prevention and watershed protection. Mr. Goldstein is co-author of award winning New York Environment Book and has written numerous studies and articles on urban environmental issues. In addition to his work at NRDC, he co-teaches the Environmental Law Clinic at New York University School of Law.

Rutherford H. Platt is Professor of Geography Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and also is Senior Fellow at the Institute for Sustainable Cities, City University of New York (CUNY). He directs the Ecological Cities Project, a program of research and outreach based in Northampton, Massachusetts (www.humanemetropolis.org). Dr. Platt holds a B.A. in political science from Yale and both a J.D. (law) and Ph.D. (geography) from the University of Chicago. He specializes in public policy concerning urban land and water resources. He is author/editor of many publications on cities, nature, and people, most recently: The Humane Metropolis: People and Nature in the 21st Century City and a companion DVD (University of Massachusetts Press and Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 2006). In 2002, he was honored as a Lifetime National Associate of The National Academies and he is listed in Who’s Who in America.

Betsy McCully is the author of City at the Water’s Edge: A Natural History of New York (Rutgers University Press, 2007). Spanning a billion years, the book offers a “deep time” perspective on New York, casting the city as a human habitat in the Lower Hudson Bioregion—a place shaped by powerful natural forces over eons and a place more recently reshaped by human hands. Her new book (now under contract with Rutgers UP) treats the environmental history of New York since colonial times, with particular focus on how New Yorkers have not only reshaped the city’s topography to accommodate their city, but also tried to address pressing environmental problems even as they were creating them (under contract with Rutgers UP). McCully began researching both books twenty years ago, and has amassed a wealth of materials drawn from libraries, archives, interviews, and years of “walking the terrain” of New York. She has given numerous talks on New York’s fascinating and complex natural and environmental history. An Associate Professor of English at Kingsborough Community College/CUNY, she coordinates an annual Eco-Festival, which won the 2008 CUNY Sustainability Award. She also maintains an educational website, www.NewYorkNature.net. When she is not writing, lecturing, or teaching, Betsy finds time to go birdwatching with her husband in the environs of New York City and beyond.

Rohit T. Aggarwala is Director of the New York City Mayor’s Office of Long-term Planning and Sustainability. This office was charged with the creation of PlaNYC A Greener, Greater New York, a comprehensive sustainability plan consisting of 127 separate initiatives to green New York City. Dr. Aggarwala is now charged with implementing the plan and supporting other efforts related to the sustainability of New York City. Under his leadership the City has begun implementing over 90% of the 127 initiatives in PlaNYC, including regulations to make the City’s taxicabs and black car fleets clean, planting a million trees throughout the five boroughs and overseeing the investment of $80 million a year to reduce City government’s greenhouse gas emissions. A native of Manhattan, NY, Dr. Aggarwala holds BA, MBA, and PhD degrees from Columbia University, as well as a Master’s from Queens University in Ontario. Prior to joining the Bloomberg administration for the City, Aggarwala was a management consultant at McKinsey & Company. During the Clinton Administration, he worked at the Federal Railroad Administration. Aggarwala is also the author of several articles on transportation policy and on the history of New York City.

Podcast of events from the CUNY Institute for Sustainable Cities.

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CUNY Institute For Sustainable Cities

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