Imagine if all the leftover spaces beneath highways, bridges, and subways were better lit and creative repurposed. The B3, designed in collaboration with Method Designs, invites people to explore a network of interesting and different spaces, transforming the city into a landscape of hidden discoveries and unexpected moments.

The Brooklyn Bridge Biodiversity Park promotes a more effective cycle of education, health and biodiversity in the following ways. Direct exposure to nature is essential for healthy childhood development. B3 provides an outdoor classroom space for 57 public schools within a 5 mile radius. Rates of obesity are rising rapidly in New York City. 14% of adults in lower Manhattan are obese. There are no climbing venues in lower Manhattan within a 1-mile radius of B3. The activation offers a cardiac climbing and civic space to improve inner city health and vitality. Animal species repopulating our cities require habitat to ensure their survival in the new urban wilderness. B3 provides over 1000 new nesting and feeding sites.

 

The design proposal looks to re-appropriate an underside infrastructural space where previously unmatched urban activities can create a new infrastructural hybridization.Here, urban ecological habitation and outdoor rock climbing will be synthesizedRappelling, belaying, bouldering, and traversing, will be situated amongst green walls and nesting sites.

 

B3 was published in By The City / For The City: An Atlas of Possibility for the Future of New York for the Institute of Urban Design and Urban Design Week 2011.