Transforming New York’s Harbor
New York’s harbor—one of the most significant natural harbors in the world—has a rich ecological and cultural history. At the crossroads of ecology, industry, and rapid development, its unique characteristics have enabled New York to become what it is today.
The Harbor has always been a place where human societies have been able to thrive by harnessing its unique geology and ecology. It enabled the Lenni-Lenape peoples to thrive through its shellfish abundance and varied coastline habitats, the Dutch to settle through a deep-water port in support of an era of shipping and commerce, and more recently a bustling metropolis to grow through modernization and global trade. Today, it faces threats of sea level rise, increasing precipitation, extreme heat, and affordability. Inspired by the past and anticipating the future, SCAPE is actively working to transform New York's harbor to meet the moment.
The Lenape people inhabited this landscape sustainably, cultivating crops in fertile soils, fishing in the surrounding waters, and harvesting oysters along the rocky shoreline. For them, this land represented the foundation for their entire way of life.
As part of a long lineage of changemakers ushering in this new era, SCAPE is helping to shape the future of New York’s harbor. We have worked in every borough and across every condition of NYC's waterfront, from the islands of Broad Channel to lower Manhattan, the edges of the Harlem River to the sandy shores of Staten Island. Throughout, we have pushed the boundaries of what the edge between land and water can be, introducing design ideas and resilience strategies that celebrate and reimagine New Yorkers' relationship with water.
Ecosystems as infrastructure
Our journey began with research and mapping in Jamaica Bay for the Gateway National Recreation Area, one of the most diverse and widely visited areas in the National Park System. Spanning the coastlines of Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and New Jersey, Gateway bears the marks of nearly every pressure a growing city can endure—from resource extraction and military use, to decades of disinvestment. Today, nearly 90% of the bay’s salt marshes—a critical storm buffer for over 2.8 million residents—are rapidly eroding and at risk of disappearing. Learn more about Gateway: Visions for an Urban National Park.
This early work envisioning Jamaica Bay as a thriving “cosmopolitan ecology” proposed a different model of public space grounded in stewardship and cultivated wilderness rather than a fixed division of city and nature. In this context, the muck becomes an amphibious garden of spartina biofilters, farmed oyster racks, and flounder colonies: a layered, functional landscape.
By reframing our understanding of infrastructure and the critical role landscapes play within cities, we underscore New York's responsibility to address global climate impacts for the next century.
“Viewing civilization and nature as one system, we have come full circle to a fully cosmopolitan ecology. Crucial within this paradigm is the understanding that all citizens share in the production of urbanity, in its making and remaking.”
Gateway: Visions for an Urban National Park
On video
Reviving New York's rivers—with oysters!
In this TED Talk, Kate Orff shares her vision for an urban landscape that links nature and humanity for mutual benefit.
Envisioning a new future
In 2009, we introduced Oyster-tecture as part of MoMA's Rising Currents exhibition. Oyster-tecture is an ecological infrastructure concept that envisions an active oyster reef stretching throughout Buttermilk Channel between Governor’s Island and Red Hook. The design proposes a living reef woven from "fuzzy rope" to support marine growth, generating a 3D landscape mosaic that attenuates waves and filters millions of gallons of harbor water through oysters, mussels, and eelgrass. The result is a watery regional park prefiguring the city's return to the waterfront as a sustainable strategy.
Oyster-tecture became paradigmatic of a shift in our understanding of the role of nature in cities in a climate-changed world. It broke out of the museum and expanded into multiple projects that are now core to SCAPE’s portfolio: pilots like Sims Pier at South Brooklyn Marine Terminal, and eventually large-scale infrastructure and landscape interventions like Living Breakwaters and the Gowanus Lowlands, both of which have resulted in built projects.
Responding to climate impacts
When Hurricane Irene struck in 2011 and Superstorm Sandy devastated neighborhoods in 2012, our team was well-informed about local conditions and ready to respond.
These storms exposed the city's overlapping vulnerabilities in sea level rise, flood risk, and aging infrastructure, and served as a wake-up call for New York.
This earlier research informed SCAPE's role as a key partner in Mayor Bloomberg's effort to develop a harbor-wide framework for risk reduction across all five boroughs. Through the New York Rising Community Reconstruction Program, the firm developed resilience strategies for four storm-impacted communities—Howard Beach, Broad Channel, Canarsie, and the Southeast Brooklyn Waterfront—combining fieldwork and community engagement to outline neighborhood-specific strategies for coastal flood protection and improved shoreline ecology.
Each of these efforts laid the groundwork for a revolutionary project that would ultimately capture and exemplify our integrated approach to coastal resilience and regeneration.
Implementation
Living Breakwaters represents a paradigm shift—a broad investment in nature-based infrastructure to help communities adapt to an unpredictable future. The rocky structures embody the layered approach thinking SCAPE has refined over decades: true resilience is an interwoven system of rigorous design, ecological health, and community investment.
Living Breakwaters reduces storm impacts and erosion along the low-lying coastal communities of Staten Island’s South Shore, where Superstorm Sandy caused catastrophic damage and loss of life.
Beyond the physical breakwaters, the project extends into the classroom to cultivate a generation of future stewards of the harbor. SCAPE developed an open-access Living Breakwaters Curriculum in partnership with Billion Oyster Project, introducing students to the project and their local ecosystems. After over a decade of design and construction, Living Breakwaters was completed in 2024. Read more about how SCAPE designs Learning Landscapes.
The ideas first explored through Oyster-tecture also informed the Gowanus Lowlands, a community-based vision for a restored public realm and open space network centered around Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal. The canal has a complex ecological history, shaped by centuries of industrial use that transformed a thriving tidal creek into one of the most polluted waterways in the U.S. The Lowlands vision resurfaces the historic hydrology of the canal, weaving ecological resilience and social equity into a cohesive park network.
These projects are just a few milestones in a much longer journey. Across the five boroughs, SCAPE’s decades of research continue to anchor our work. Inspired by design concepts proposed in SCAPE’s 2014 Deconstructed Salt Marsh proposal, Pier 6 at Bush Terminal reimagines a deteriorated pier in Sunset Park as a dynamic public landscape, reopening the waterfront to its surrounding community for the first time in decades. Rather than clear the emergent habitat that took hold along the pier’s edge, our design uses managed erosion to allow the shoreline to shift and adapt with rising sea levels.
The next generation of pilots
SCAPE continues to invest in research and development, generating innovative ideas and expressions of ecological infrastructure beyond individual projects.
At a citywide scale, NYCDEP's RISE (Resilience Interventions for Shoreline Edges), represents a generational step toward comprehensive coastal resilience planning. Since Sandy, New York has made considerable progress in building flood resilience but lacks a unifying framework to guide investment across its shorelines. Organizing the coast into shoreline management units, RISE establishes a shared basis for decision-making across the boroughs, gradually raising resilience standards across geographic contexts. Read more about Design for Climate Adaptation.
Working alongside our partners in government, non-profits, engineering firms, and ecology, we are active participants in both envisioning this epochal shift in the harbor, and in implementing its transformation. Growing from engagement in communities, and leading with landscape, we aim to foster the next generation of harbor stewards.
