Join us for a special Earth Day online Green Cities event: Kissena Cloudburst Hub on: Tuesday, April 22 from 12 -1p featuring guest speaker Andres Garcia with Karen Appell and moderated by CSU board member Fredric Bell.

Watch the video recording here.

“Cloudbursts,” defined as sudden, heavy pluvial storm events, are causing property damage and disruption to critical infrastructure in communities across the Northeast. The New York City Department of Environmental Protection (NYCDEP) is implementing a Cloudburst Program, employing adaptive stormwater management strategies in flood-prone communities. Using an innovative approach combining gray and green infrastructure to absorb, store, and transfer stormwater, these resilient projects will help to mitigate local flooding impacts in at-risk neighborhoods. One of the project areas selected as a Cloudburst Hub is in Kissena, Queens, encompassing an 845-acre neighborhood, with mostly of residential property surrounding Kissena Park & Kissena Corridor Park. The community has been plagued by flooding for decades, vulnerable due to its location in a historical riverbed, local low elevation topography, and sewer system surcharges. This presentation will include a description of the program origination through an idea-sharing agreement with the City of Copenhagen, outline the feasibility phase, and progress of the current final design phase, including anticipated flood risk reduction benefits once the project is implemented. The designs of both gray and green infrastructure strategies in the right-of-way and parkland areas will be detailed, as well as integration of this new infrastructure into the public realm.

Speaker: Andres Garcia, NYCDEP, Director – Stormwater Resiliency with Karen Appell, PE, AECOM, VP, Climate Change Lead

In his current role, Andres focuses on oversight and execution of the Green Infrastructure On-site program, leading the Cloudburst initiative and the Construction Oversight and Inspections group. For 25+ years, Karen has worked across the engineering, ecology, and landscape architecture fields to integrate resilient and sustainable design across infrastructure projects.

Moderator: Fredric Bell

Fredric (Rick) Bell is Adjunct Associate Professor at Columbia University where he also serves as Deputy Director of the Center for Buildings, Infrastructure and Public Space. He has also taught at the New Jersey Institute of Technology in Newark. Rick is a registered architect in New York and New Jersey and previously served as Executive Director of Design and Construction Excellence at the New York City Department of Design and Construction.

At DDC he was also Chief Architect and Assistant Commissioner of Architecture and Engineering. On leave from DDC, Rick served as Executive Director of the New York Chapter of the American Institute of Architects where he helped establish and animate the Center for Architecture on LaGuardia Place. After architectural studies at Yale and Columbia, he worked in offices in New York, France, and Switzerland. He has been an invited member of many juries at architecture schools in the US and for many architectural design competitions. A frequent lecturer at AIA, UIA, and other design conferences, he was on the advisory board of the inaugural NYC Architecture Biennial in 2020. Apart from his role on the CSU executive committee, Rick currently serves on the board of the Creative Exchange Lab and is a Commissioner of the Summit Environmental Commission. He is a member of the AIA, the Architectural League, the Urban Design Forum, and nycoba|NOMA. A Fellow of the AIA, Rick is also a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, conferred by the French Ministry of Culture and Communication.

Learning Objectives:

Participants will:

-Learn the definition and technical nature of a Cloudburst event

-Understand the origination of NYCDEP’s Cloudburst program in coordination with the City of Copenhagen

-Become more knowledgeable about stormwater flooding design strategies, innovations, and benefits, including a better understanding of the approach of using a combination of gray and green infrastructure strategies to reduce pluvial flood risk

-Learn about strategies for integrating new infrastructure into the existing public realm of a community

Sponsor Organization for Green Cities:

Consortium for Sustainable Urbanization (CSU), UN-Habitat, AIA New York, AIANY Planning & Design, the NGo Committee on Sustainable Development-NY, Habitat Professionals Forum for Sustainable Cities, Creative Exchange Lab (CEL), Global Urban Development (GUD), and the Columbia University Center for Buildings, Infrastructure and Public Space (CBIPS).