Sponge Park: Nature-Based Infrastructure for Cleaner Urban Environments

Introduces DLANDstudio’s pioneering and award-winning Sponge Park concept for the regeneration of the notorious Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn.

Before there were sponge cities, there were sponge parks. Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal is the site of the Sponge Park master plan and pilot projects, instigating a widespread movement toward greater urban permeability. Designed by Susannah Drake and her former Brooklyn-based firm DLANDstudio Architecture + Landscape Architecture, their project was completed in 2016 and recognized with National AIA and ASLA Urban Design Awards and the inaugural Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian National Design Award for Climate Action in 2020.

The Gowanus Canal was the channelized reminder of a former freshwater creek and tidal marsh. Industrial use in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries left a legacy of heavy pollution in the soil and water. Historic industrial buildings lined the canal. Residential neighborhoods had limited opportunities to access the water’s edge. Sponge Park was conceived as a series of public urban waterfront spaces that slow, absorb, and filter dirty surface water runoff to clean contaminated canal water, reduce combined sewer overflow, and add open space in a park-starved neighborhood. Revealing the form, distribution, and size of natural ecological patterns in relation to the shape and patterns of infrastructure, neighborhoods, and political jurisdictions was a key component of the design.

This book introduces the Sponge Park in great detail with photos, illustrations, plans, and diagrams. It demonstrates the concept’s potential as a component of a larger vision for a new paradigm of coastal urbanism, upland adaptation, and right-of-way design in the twenty-first century. Sponge parks proactively address how to manage stormwater runoff from increasingly severe storm events and reduce detrimental impacts. It is a must-read for design students, architects, and academics as well as for elected officials, policymakers, and community activists.

Susannah C. Drake is associate professor at University of Colorado Boulder’s Department of Environmental Design and a founding principal of DLANDstudio Architecture + Landscape Architecture in Brooklyn. In 2020 her Gowanus Canal Sponge Park project won the inaugural Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian National Design Award for Climate Action.