While the world’s top scientists recently warned governments to take urgent action on global warming, a small group of Brooklyn students have designed their own plan for living with climate change.
The students look ahead 50 years to how rising seas caused from global warming might flood the Brooklyn waterfront neighborhood of Dumbo, in a small exhibit called “Dumbo Under Water” on display at a Brooklyn gallery this month.
“We are looking at the micro issues of global warming,” said Abhijit Shinde, 25, one of four urban design students who came up with the plan for a college project.
“We are looking at only one neighborhood, but it could be a lesson for waterfronts all over the world.”
Help from NASA
The students used NASA projections of rising sea levels from melting ice caps and responded by redesigning the buildings and landscape instead of evacuating the neighborhood, said Shinde.
The exhibit includes diagrams showing streets raised, buildings constructed on top of the Brooklyn Queens Expressway, an island made of recycled building material and connecting pedestrian sky bridges.
“You can’t resist the water, you have to work with it, and with that create a new landscape,” said Shinde, adding alternative energy plans in the exhibit included suspending helical turbines off the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges to generate power from running water.
While the exhibit is still small — it includes a small-scale model of the new neighborhood — Shinde hopes one of New York’s major museums might either display the exhibit or expand it.
The exhibit follows larger looks at the effect of global warming on New York, including the Hollywood blockbuster film “The Day After Tomorrow” and Al Gore’s documentary “An Inconvenient Truth,” which showed projections of how sections of downtown Manhattan would flood with rising sea levels.
