Growing & Greening New York at MCNY

Museum of the City of New York
Growing and Greening New York
Friday, March 27th at 1pm
(RSVP Today! 10 Free Tickets Available)

Today 8 million New Yorkers daily get up, go out, and live their lives. By the year 2030, there will be a million more people living in New York City. And the city will have undergone a great transformation, becoming cleaner, greener, more responsible, and more robust--if the projections of PlaNYC2030 are correct, and if we take action on them now.

Growing and Greening New York: PlaNYC and the Future of the City, will make the complexities of greater environmental sustainability in New York City vivid, compelling, and understandable by bringing environmental concerns to life on an individual, human scale. Organized in terms of a typical day in the life of a New Yorker, the exhibition will explore six essential areas addressed by the Bloomberg Administration’s ambitious five-borough plan for sustainability by 2030: water; transportation; energy; open space; land; and climate change. The exhibition will feature architectural models, interactive displays, diagrams, renderings, photographs, hands-on examples of new materials, videos, and more, many of which have been created expressly for the exhibition.

Growing and Greening New York will consider issues, problems, and challenges facing New York while also documenting solutions proposed by architects, urban planners, scientists, industrial designers, engineers, as well as by non-profit organizations, advocacy groups, and other entities involved in the process.

The exhibition will take the visitor through the course of a day-7 a.m. through 2 a.m.-and link routine activities with information documenting their collective impact on the environment, while also offering alternatives for making these actions less harmful to our world and highlighting innovations that will lead to greater sustainability by 2030.

The complexities of the water system and strategies for reducing the impact of water use on the environment, for example, will be documented in the section of the exhibition that corresponds to 7 a.m., when many New Yorkers shower, prepare breakfast, and brush their teeth. Mass transit and traffic congestion will be addressed in the "8 a.m." area of the exhibition, in which the city's extensive subway system and its role in reducing vehicular traffic will be highlighted as an inherent urban advantage in the struggle to achieve greater sustainability.

The massive environmental impact of the city's commercial buildings will be documented in a section of Growing and Greening New York that will correspond to the 11 a.m. hour, in which forward-looking "building green" projects will be explored. Here, plans for new construction will be spotlighted as will innovative and beneficial solutions for existing structures. Further along-and later in the imaginary day, at 3 p.m.-the exhibition will focus on parks and the importance of open space, not only as a source of respite, but because of its healthful impact on water and air quality. Consumption will be spotlighted in the 6 p.m. section, where the advantages of buying local and buying green will be illustrated, as will strategies for reducing the city’s waste.

The 8 p.m. hour (in the context of the exhibition) will return the visitor to the home, where individual choices such as how to furnish a home, what type of lighting to use, and which appliances to buy will be linked to such global issues as solid waste, water quality, and climate change. The nighttime hour of the exhibition, 2 a.m., will showcase-while the city sleeps-an overview of environmental issues facing cities around the world. At any given "moment" in the exhibition, selected PlaNYC initiatives will be discussed and linked to larger environmental issues, updating visitors on the advantages and challenges of the proposals as well as on their current status.

PlaNYC2030 is an ambitious blueprint for New York City as it confronts the prospect of continued population growth and the urgency of protecting the city’s natural environment to improve urban life. Its 127 proposals range from planting more trees to designing better power plants to cleaning up brownfields to building new parks and housing across the five boroughs. Together, they suggest how the city might plan for growth while confronting issues of livability and global climate change.

Growing and Greening New York and PlaNYC will pose vital questions: How must New Yorkers change to make a sustainable future possible? How will the daily lives of all New Yorkers, and those who visit New York, be affected by sustainability initiatives at home, in the workplace, and in many of our public and recreational spaces? What might a more sustainable city actually look like?