Parametric Urban Analysis & Design: Integrating Flood Risk Mitigation Strategies, Socioeconomic and Industrial Heritage Priorities in the Gowanus Canal Area

Abstract

The threat of climate change, sea level rise, and the increasing risk of flooding is a severe challenge to coastal cities worldwide. The Gowanus Canal Neighborhood, located in New York City, is also among the places facing this issue and was investigated in this research. In addition to climate change, a second issue investigated that is poised to have an increasingly significant influence on the Gowanus Canal's future is the impending rezoning of this area by New York City's Department of City Planning.With substantial vacant or underused properties, of which a significant number of those have historic industrial characteristics, rising demand and value of housing, and the ever-present pressure of development, residents, stakeholders, and city officials have been engaging in a conversation together about how the land surrounding the Gowanus Canal should be used in the future. They consider that the neighborhood's existing socioeconomic, historical, and demographic context has been generally ignored at the expense of purely infrastructure solutions. In recent years, community planning initiatives were undertaken. The city's planning department has since begun the formal process of considering the results of this planning process in formulating a new zoning framework for the neighborhood. The outcomes of this process will dictate land use policies for the foreseeable future. To address this oversight and develop strategies that address all the above subjects, this research investigated how parametric tools, generally used for developing projects on an isolated lot and parcel scale or for creating masterplans in uninhabited areas, could be explored in already developed areas. Specifically, the research tested how the parametric interaction could generate a zoning that more adequately meets community's expectations in line with the environmental challenges in the Gowanus Canal area. Two sites with similar characteristics to the Gowanus Canal, both environmental, social, and economic, were studied. In addition, two studies addressing parametric tools' efficiency in developing strategies to mitigate the harmful effects caused by floods were investigated. Then, different parametric tools were tested to select the most accurate for the specific data types related to the site of Gowanus Canal. The research collected qualitative data, such as the community’s desire to create safer streets and improved access to employment opportunities, and quantitative data including topography and sea level rise indexes, of the Gowanus area. These were overlapped and compared, brought into a parametric model, to generate, through parametric analysis and simulations, proposals for a new zoning with resilient strategies optimizing responses to the existing challenges in the Gowanus Canal area. In the final stage of the work's development, it was revealed that the scale of the analysis of the Gowanus Canal was overly complex, both in terms of the number of social and economic factors, as well as in environmental aspects; for a better response from the parametric software yielding a proposal for coherent zoning, reducing the scale of the analysis was necessary—closer to parcel than district scale. For this, a perimeter was delimited in the center of the neighborhood. The reduction of the research area significantly improved control of the data inserted in the parameterization programs. After several iterations, a divergence in the parametric model’s functionality was noticed concerning the insertion of qualitative data. Its privileging the quantitative, to obtain more precise models for viable zoning the parameterization of qualitative was set aside for the benefit of the project. In conclusion, the research revealed both potentials of recent innovations in parametric software research and limitations of these; they currently are limited in their capacity to integrate qualitative (i.e., flooding, street pattern) data with quantitative data (social goals and heritage priorities). Furthermore, the Gowanus Canal, as a developed area full of infrastructure and which faces challenges related to sea level rise, served as a concrete site of inquiry to test the limits of parametric research applied to complex urban areas. Finally, the significance of this research is that it has revealed the need to further develop qualitative data translation methods and parameterization tools to allow the analysis and synthesis of contrasting types of complex data, such as social factors, to generate resilient and socially responsible projects in urban areas.