INHABITAT: What is Street Creeks and why did you decide to start it?
Atema: Street CreeksTM is a gravity-based, low-tech, low-cost strategy I’ve developed with a great team to manage urban storm water and thereby prevent combined sewage overflows and reduce street flooding. Street Creeks emulates natural hydrological and biological systems as much as possible in dense urban environments to use storm water as the valuable resource it is, instead of mixing it with our sewage as we now do!
I started Street Creeks because I wanted to explore how to integrate ecology with human needs at an urban scale. As an architect I was trained to think across scales, from a door handle to a city, but in practice my work was focused on designing at the scale of offices and homes. I’d been hearing more and more about the notorious pollution of the Gowanus Canal and that seemed like a great local problem to solve. So at the beginning of 2011 I found a competition that was looking for solutions to urban-scale problems, and put together a team to see where we could go. We didn’t win, but we realized we’d come up with a strategy that seemed really viable but nobody had quite done before, so we kept going with it and it started building a momentum of its own.
INHABITAT: What are CSOs?
Atema: Combined sewage overflows, which occur when our combined sewer system (which combines residential and commercial/industrial sewage with storm water) gets overloaded. Whatever volume of this poop and rain cocktail the sewage treatment plant can’t handle overflows, untreated, into our waterways. This adds up to over 27 billion gallons of this cocktail dumping into New York City’s waterways every year…it’s a huge problem.