What would it be like to radically change our method of transporting waste in our towns and cities. This was the question posed by Architect Juliette Spertus and the design company Project Projects in May 2010 when they arranged the month-long exhibition “Fast Trash: Roosevelt Island‘s Pneumatic Tubes and the Future of Cities” on Roosevelt Island. The technique of transporting waste in underground pipes was virtually unknown in New York when the exhibition opened.
Since 1975, Roosevelt Island, located in the East River between Manhattan and Queens, has collected all the waste from its now 14,000 inhabitants using an automated waste collection system. The purpose of the exhibition, which presented an overview of the infrastructure in the context of the history of the district, was to show that service infrastructure can play an important part in the development of cities. It also sought to inspire new ways of thinking about how towns and cities manage waste.
The exhibition portrays the history of the Envac system on Roosevelt Island by examining important events in the island’s development. At the same time, it describes important milestones in the development of waste collection in New York. In one of the exhibition’s documentary films, Tom Turcic, the director of engineering for Roosevelt Island concludes: “There were a lot of utopian ideas that the island was to embody; AVAC was one of the brilliant ideas.”
Plenty of attention in the media
The exhibition was part of the 40th anniversary celebrations for the general plan of the island and was sponsored by the Roosevelt Island Operating Corporation (RIOC), public benefit company that administers the island for the State of New York, and Envac, which built the vacuum system in the middle of the 1970s. The exhibition attracted a lot of attention in the New York media, and also helped speed up discussions on how the district should develop. Jerry Sorgente, the supervising engineer from the city’s waste collection autohority, is used to working behind the scenes, but looking around the exhibition he admited that Roosevelt Island’s vacuum system is now on the map.
International symposium
Parallel with the exhibition an international symposium on pneumatic waste collection and urban planning, consponsored by the Wagner School of Public Service at New York University, gathered urban planners and managers from Europe and Canada to discuss their experiences with New York public officials. In contrast to many European towns, the vacuum system has not been developed in the USA since its introduction in the 1970s. Urban development in North America has above all led to the lateral extension of its towns and cities, and therefore investments in infrastructure have given high priority to suburban expansion. Nevertheless, in recent years doubts have been raised about the relatively uncontrolled geographical growth and increasing focus has turned upon inner city development.
However, there are not many differences to speak of between the challenges faced by American and European towns and cities in terms of source separation, lack of storage space for containers and receptacles, problems of accessibility etc. Consequently, the exhibition on Roosevelt Island should result in greater interest for this type of modern infrastructure solutions, including in New York.
For the first time this year island installations were opened to the public in conection with the Open House New York, a citywide event which is arranged each year for one weekend in October.