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” (non-atmospheric carbon storage) capacity within the urban landscape (Hoffman Brandt 2013). To say I “stopped worrying” about the carbon cycle is perhaps an overstatement. Writing this chapter was used as an opportunity to step back and reconsider urban carbon sink planning and design in light of a more fatalistic prioritization of climate change adaptation over preventive measures after Hurricane Sandy hit New York City in October 2012. City Sink was an optimistic call for city and suburban transformation across a spectrum of time-scales, from immediate sink in biomass to long-term-and slowcarbon sink in soil. The objective was to enhance the popular idea of the city as an urban ecosystem through building public awareness of the carbon cycle and not just emission control. This more nuanced understanding of the city as an ecosystem could increase the actionable intelligence of citizens as participants in processes of global climate change.
