NYC

Huge waves batter the eastern seaboard of the United States, brought in by the approach of another superstorm; these occur with increasing regularity in the New York of 2100. Indeed, the East Coast is now one of the world’s hurricane hotspots. The residents of the outpost settlement along Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal, however, are ready. Storm-surge barriers are set up near the opening of the canal while secondary barriers lying at the water’s edge are inflated.

One last layer of defense lies in plant and artificial sponge islands. The park surrounding the canal is sloped and contoured in such a way that any water that overflows into it will collect in designated areas, away from the site’s most valuable buildings. Meanwhile, tidal turbines beneath the surface of the water gather wave energy at the soft-edge boundary of the designated energy park.

Mirroring the role played by Manila in the east, New York has become the storm energy capture center of the western hemisphere. The use of clip-ons to adapt Brooklyn’s building stock has been extensive. Some residences are maintained as housing for the city’s temporary workers, including historic brownstones, which have been modernized and adapted for vertical density with additional stories built above the original building, and with integrated wind-belt façades and green roofs.

Other, former residential or industrial buildings, have become interior greenhouses, recycling centers, and storage facilities. Lots that were previously empty or whose buildings were razed for recycling are now energy-generation fields—for harvesting solar and wind energy—or are used as part of a reforestation program that draws on trees’ natural abilities to absorb carbon. Vertical farms are now attached to the empty undercarriages of overpasses.

Many visitors from around the globe come to see the state-of-the-art technologies in Brooklyn’s outpost city, where a museum and visitor center welcome them. Offices house personnel who oversee the high-tech installations on the site. As ‘100-year floods’ now occur every 4 years, New York’s enormous subway system was not maintained. Instead, Superbuses and aboveground Maglev trains run on the old main streets. At the heart of the settlement is the new hybrid park that sits along the edge of the flooded Gowanus Canal.

Like most parts of the built environment in 2100, it serves multiple functions: giving inhabitants a chance to enjoy a beautiful parkscape at the water’s edge, generating renewable energy for the settlement, and providing a spongy buffer zone for the housing farther inland. Clean-energy installations lie farther up the canal.

The park itself is full of funnel windmills, which channel energy to generators while also gathering CO2 from the air.

These turbines, which are able to bend or even shut down in strong winds, are also produced for export in the factory on the other side of the canal. Residents work there as well as in Brooklyn’s windmill farms, in carbon-capture facilities (where CO2 is sequestered and converted into carbon fiber), and in energy-storage docks (where the site’s renewable energy is held in high-tech batteries, ready for shipment to the rest of the world).