ABSTRACT
City Sink: Carbon Storage Infrastructure for our Built Environment was an investigation into tactics for reducing the scale of climate change triggered by disruption of the carbon cycle by increasing the 'sink' capacity within the urban landscape. A Stronger, More Resilient New York published by the city's Special Initiative on Rebuilding and Resiliency in June 2013, was the primary frame of reference for the following reflections on applying the ideas in City Sink to adaptive planning and design. Ecosystems are not readily defined by spatial criteria. Ecosystems are more easily conceived as a set of interlinked, differently scaled processes that may be diffuse in space, but easily defined in turnover time. The SIRR presents tactical solutions to the challenges of climate change without acknowledging the systemic practices that instigated the disruptive phenomena in the first place. Material integrity tends to refer to the wholeness of a material component in relation to its potential for break-up and performance failure.
