Customized Landscape Design: Recalling natural ecosystems to urban city
This project is the studio ‘Site Ecology Design’ in the 2019 spring semester at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD).
Work type: Individual Work Location: East Providence,RI Faculty advisor: Emily Vogler
Rapid urbanization in many places has been accompanied by biosphere deterioration due to industrial pollution. Moreover, many former industrial sites, or brownfields, were abandoned because of changes in economic structurer and the decline of traditional industries. This project locates in East Providence, Rhode Island, where it has been exploited and then left unused because of industrialization induced land-cover alternation. One emerging challenge is how to remediate hazardous contamination and revitalize this derelict land after urban sprawl.
The purpose of this project is to recover the natural ecosystem from brownfields and transform this marginalized place into a functional habitat. It is based on the spatiotemporal characterization of the existing ecosystem to create a customized assemblage of sub-ecosystems that are suitable to the chosen site. Customized ecosystems enable us to rebuild diverse and resilient ecosystems that not only preserve the landscape characteristics of these geographic locations, but also create a recreational conservation park for local residents. This project is intended to pursue a sustainable strategy through brownfields redevelopment, which is also adaptable to brownfields in other regions.
The natural environment in Rhode Island has lost its ecological diversity over the years, and it will continue to decline if there is no outside interference. Meanwhile, post-urbanization and industrialization left a considerable portion of the abandoned land.
This page shows various contamination exposures that were created by the manufacturing industry during industrialization. These contaminants, with no proper regulation, have been exerting adverse effects on this site.
