March 12, 2025 @ 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm
FBIP 2025 Seminar Series “WHERE’S OUR PARK?” PAST→ PRESENT→ FUTURE
Sea level rise, storm surges and cloudburst events. These threats are design challenges but also present an opportunity for innovative and engaging park design, while helping protect our waterfront communities.
Join Friends of Bushwick Inlet Park for a panel discussion with:
Stephen Whitehouse, BIP 86 Kent Ave landscape designer, urban planner, principal, Starr Whitehouse Landscape Architects and Planners
Dr. Marcha Johnson, landscape architect and ecological restorationist, NYC Parks & Recreation
Matthijs Bouw, Founder & President, One Architecture
All the panelists have extensive experience in designing spaces within the public realm to help mitigate increasing threats from atmospheric changes affecting human and landscape interaction with water. With them we will explore their work, including revisiting Stephen’s concept for BIP’s 86 Kent Ave, and design philosophy in considering future waterfront park manifestations in the face of these challenges.
Stephen Whitehouse is a landscape architect and urban planner whose diverse pursuits share a concern for the environmental quality and social vitality of places. He formerly served as Chief of Planning for the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation, where he managed the expansion of the USTA National Tennis Center in Flushing Meadows and launched the City’s Greenway system. Since co-founding Starr Whitehouse with Laura Starr, he has worked with public and private clients to create dynamic urban districts and engaging landscapes that connect people to nature.
Rather than focusing on a single aspect of the work, he’s always been most fascinated by the juncture points. “Natural systems, patterns of settlement, infrastructure – seeing all these come together to make a place is interesting to me, not just as abstract concepts,” he says, “but in terms of seeing good results at the end.” He describes his role in terms of junctures as well. “I’m the translator,” he says. “I serve as the mediator between the specialists and the public. I like communicating with people, and seeing things shaped by the creative interactions of people and institutions.”
His list of project involvement is extensive.
Marcha Johnson, PhD, ASLA is a NYC landscape architect and ecological restorationist with about 40 years of specializing in shoreline designs with high habitat value in all 5 boroughs, both as a professional and a pro-bono advisor/ volunteer. Marcha’s book, Coastal Change, Ocean Conservation and Resilient Communities, co-edited with Amanda Bayley and published in December 2016 by Springer, highlights ways to better understand and respect coastal landscapes, design spaces affected by sea level rise and storms and live more wisely along the water. She serves on the Advisory Board for Riverkeeper, and on the Technical Advisory Board Hudson River Park, and has presented her waterfront designs, ideas on conserving urban shorelines and themes from her book at local, national and international conferences. An adjunct professor in City College of New York’s School of Architecture since 1990, she teaches graduate courses in landscape architecture and sustainability.
Building upon her graduate school research as a Hudson River Foundation Fellow comparing the ecology and development of post-industrial waterfronts in NYC, Boston and Philadelphia, she co-led NY State-supported cooperative effort in 2010 called Designing the Edge. This initiative promotes waterfront design which improves water quality, nurtures aquatic life and offers people safe opportunities to engage with the water along urbanized shores. It resulted in a science and research-based revision of the Harlem River Park seawalls, and a second project – on the shore of Randall’s Is. using plants to reduce contamination in historic urban fill. Her projects including marsh restorations, porous gabion walls containing shells to attract a living crust of shellfish, “greenwalls,” a precast system of open stackable shelves that provides the stability of riprap with spaces for plants and a variety of other ecologically-supportive features.
Marcha’s philosophy about urban shoreline design is based on returning some of the value of floodplains to the shore, making room for the inward expansion of beaches and water edges, and recognizing that waterfront “disasters” are mostly related to building rigid structures in places that are subject to natural floods, sea level rise and storms.
For this presentation, she will discuss shoreline ecology in general and some considerations for Bushwick Inlet, but NOT her NYC Parks designs, as she is speaking as an individual not representing the City, or any of the other institutions with which she is involved.
Matthijs Bouw is a Dutch architect and urbanist and founder of One Architecture (est. 1995), an award-winning Amsterdam and New York-based design and planning firm. Bouw’s practice is known for its unique approach in which programmatic, financial, technical, and organizational issues are studied, communicated, and resolved through design.
In recent years, this approach has found an important application through a body of climate adaptation and resilience projects across the U.S. Bouw also directs the Urban Resilience Certificate Program for the University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design, where he is Professor of Practice and Rockefeller Urban Resilience Fellow.
Matthijs Bouw, founder and principal of One Architecture and Urbanism (ONE), will share lessons from leading large-scale resilience projects in New York City, Boston, and beyond. Drawing from his work on the Financial District and Seaport Climate Resilience Master Plan, the East Side Coastal Resiliency Project, and Climate Ready Boston, he will explore how comprehensive climate adaptation strategies can be applied at the scale of Bushwick Inlet Park. His insights will focus on integrating flood protection, ecological restoration, and public space design, offering a vision for how the park can serve as a model for urban resilience in North Brooklyn.