Oyster-tecture: How Oysters Can Help Build Resiliency into Staten Island and Beyond

By Adam Weschler

February 16, 2018

“The island is destroyed” is the official statement on the ground in Puerto Rico following the September 2017 Hurricane Maria. If you were to walk around the island, you would find buildings in shambles, trees uprooted, and roofs and walls smashed beyond recognition. Downed power lines and flooded infrastructure make electricity scarce and clean water rare.

This is just the surface level devastation caused by Hurricane Maria’s 150 mile-per-hour winds and raging floodwaters. Providing short term aid and simply ensuring access to basic necessities has proven challenging. This does not even begin to address long term recovery and redevelopment challenges for the severely indebted island, leaving people wondering if Puerto Rico will ever be the same.

An innovative way to limit the impacts of storms like Maria lies in the ideas of landscape architect Kate Orff. In 2011, Orff introduced a concept on the TED stage that had the potential to change the way we think about design, urban spaces, and resilience. She calls it “oyster-tecture,” a portmanteau of  “oyster” and “architecture.”

Orff proposed to artificially build a living oyster reef in the New York Harbor with a “woven web of ‘fuzzy rope’ that supports marine growth,” to dissipate the energy of waves and to clean millions of gallons of harbor water. This a solution that could be implemented along other coastal areas and island nations, like Puerto Rico, to mitigate the impact of coastal storms.

As we continue to ignore climate science, storms are getting more intense and occurring more frequently. This will be exacerbated by sea level rise, which could increase by as much as one foot by the 2030s.

Storms like this are threatening coastal communities. Despite this threat, sea coasts are becoming increasingly urbanized; to date, 14 of the world’s 17 largest cities are located along coasts. These cities could house up to 61 percent of the global population by 2030. We are becoming a “city planet” as environmentalist Stewart Brand likes to say, a planet in which 80 percent of human populations live in cities.

Since September 24th, two Category 4 and two Category 5 hurricanes have ravaged the Atlantic - all in the span of about four weeks. Vermont State Climatologist Lesley-Ann Dupigny-Giroux stated in a recent video that “to have that many [Category 4 and 5] hurricanes moving through the same region, affecting the same land-masses, and getting up to the highest strength that’s possible … usually means that there’s something that’s changed in the entire system.”

Furthermore, this hurricane season could become the most expensive in history. The damages caused by the hurricanes that hit the mainland US, Harvey and Irma, may cost more than the infamous Hurricane Katrina and three other major hurricanes did in 2005. Two storms this year might have double the economic impact that four storms did in 2005. This is not normal.

New York City, one of the world’s largest cities, is no stranger to devastating storms. Superstorm Sandy landed in 2012, causing $19 billion in damages and killing 43 people throughout the city (23 in Staten Island, which was one of the most affected boroughs). People understood something had to be done to improve the resiliency of coastal cities.

In response, President Obama issued an Executive Order in December 2012, creating the Hurricane Sandy Rebuilding Task Force. The Task Force, through the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), then launched Rebuild by Design: a design competition that challenges designers from around the world to think of innovative ways to address the difficulties of rebuilding and increasing resilience in affected areas.

Orff seeks to mitigate these problems through her New York-based landscape architecture firm, SCAPE. Her firm was waiting for the right opportunity to implement oyster-tecture on a more impactful scale. In 2014, SCAPE was selected as one of six finalists of the Rebuild by Design competition with their “Living Breakwaters” design.

As a result of SCAPE’s pioneering work, New York State was awarded $60 million in funding through a HUD disaster recovery program, in order to implement the project on the Tottenville shoreline on the south shore of Staten Island.

The Staten Island Living Breakwaters Project has three primary aims: risk reduction, ecological enhancement, and social resiliency.

The project would reduce risk by implementing a three-quarter of a mile long linear system of partially submerged breakwaters between 730 and 1,200 feet from shore. The breakwaters would attenuate wave energy, protecting the shoreline from erosion and damages to nearby buildings and infrastructure.

The breakwaters will be partially comprised of bio-enhancing concrete to support oyster spat (juvenile oysters) growth, while enabling a more biodiverse habitat for fish, oysters, and other aquatic organisms, such as lobsters. Finally, the project would engage the on-shore community to help increase awareness of risk, empower citizens, and work with local schools to educate future leaders in waterfront management.

Although oyster-tecture is a new concept, oysters are no stranger to New York City. New York was once considered the world’s “oyster capital,” with the Hudson River estuary supporting 220,000 acres of oyster reefs in 1609. In fact, oyster reefs once covered 25% of the New York Harbor.

By 1906, all the oysters in the harbor had been eaten, the reefs were dredged up or covered in silt, and water quality was far too poor to support regeneration of the oysters. Hurricane Sandy showed that this local removal of oysters has proven to be devastating.

Oysters are amazing creatures. They were the keystone species and ecosystem engineers of the New York Harbor, providing habitat for other species while building their own reefs. Furthermore, oysters are capable of providing important ecosystem services in the region by filtering water, providing food, and dissipating the energy of bombarding waves. In their former glory, the city’s oysters could filter the entire harbor within a matter of days.

A key piece of this puzzle is the oysters themselves. SCAPE has partnered with New York Harbor Foundation’s Billion Oyster Project (BOP) to actively restore the oysters. By its namesake, the BOP is an “ecosystem restoration and education project” that aims to restore one billion live oysters to New York Harbor.

The BOP has worked with over 50 schools and thousands of local students to restore the oysters, by raising juvenile oysters on land and constructing artificial reefs upon which the oysters will live, while providing authentic, place-based science education focused on oysters. To date, the BOP has restored twenty-two million oysters in the New York Harbor, but is not stopping there.

To engage the Tottenville community, SCAPE has envisioned “Water Hubs” at various points along the shore to engage the community and provide physical and visual access to the water. These Water Hubs are public centers that would host various educational and recreational programs, while promoting stewardship of and engagement with the surrounding environment. The Water Hubs are the pinnacles of this project, investing community members in the management of their shorelines and in making sure that the city is prepared for future storms. We now know there will be more storms like Sandy, but the question is, will we be ready?

The Living Breakwaters project is still in its final design stages, but once finished will be an example to coastal cities around the world of how to incorporate resiliency and redundancy into their built environments. The design of the project is expected to be complete by the middle of 2018, and construction is expected to be completed by 2020.

Oyster-tecture is already being implemented in other parts of the country, including completed  projects in Louisiana and South Carolina. In terms of scale though, neither compare to SCAPE’s project in New York.

In this era of climate change, no idea is too visionary. We need urban designers, such as Kate Orff, to be able to think boldly and creatively to build the cities of the future, and indeed, the sustainable world we all so desperately envision.