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At the New York Botanical Garden (NYBG), a team of scientists just published an interactive map that explores what all five boroughs of New York City looked like 400 years agoand you can search for your own block. The map, called the Welikia Project, was made by the NYBGs Urban Conservation team. It takes the city block by block, uncovering the history of flora, fauna, and Indigenous people that once lived in each area before it became an urban environment. The name welikia is borrowed from the Lenape people, who lived in whats now New York City for 8,000 to 10,000 years before European settlers; it means my good home. Viewers can use the tool to look at almost any area in the five boroughsincluding Grand Central, Yankee Stadium, and individual streetsto see what kinds of trees might have grown there, whether the area was host to any particular species of animals, and how Indigenous people may have used the lands resources. The project was spearheaded by Eric Sanderson, a historical ecologist and vice president of urban conservation strategy at NYBG who has studied New Yorks ecology for over two decades. Sanderson says the map has a range of uses, from helping New Yorkers feel more connected to their city to offering new insights to city planners and urban flood prevention experts. [Screenshot: welikia.org] A decades-long project Sanderson has been studying the historical ecology of NYC since the early aughts, after moving to the city in 1998 to work at the Wildlife Conservation Society. His years-long deep dive began while browsing through used books at The Strand: He came across a book full of historical maps of New York City. One particular mapthe British headquarters during the American Revolutionshowed Manhattan when it was a fledgling city at the very southern tip of the island. The rest of the map was hills, streams, wetlands, and beachesnot what we normally think of when we think of New York City,” Sanderson says. “So I georeferenced that map, and I started to think about how the streams and the wetlands and the beaches related to the modern geography of the city today. That initial spark of curiosity ultimately became the 2009 bestselling book Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City, which reconstructed the flora and fauna that once made up Manhattan. The book went on to become an exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York, a National Geographic cover, and a TED Talk. After that, I was kind of looking to go back to my conservation work, Sanderson says. And yet, people kept asking me: Aren’t you going to do Brooklyn? or, Don’t you live in the Bronx? or, Have you ever been to Staten Island? So I started pulling together pieces of information, doing more reading, and looking at historical maps. Eventually that led to [the Welikia Project]. [Screenshot: welikia.org] The Welikia Project Currently, Sanderson is working on another book called The Welikia Atlas and Gazetteer: A Guide to New York Citys Indigenous Landscape, slated for release in 2026, that maps the historical ecology of all five New York City boroughs. In the meantime, he and his team at NYBG have spent the past year and a half assembling the Welikia Project website, which compiles all of Sandersons new research into an easy-to-parse interactive map. Sourcing the historical map data to build a recreation of early New York presented a host of challenges. Whereas Sanderson had the British headquarters map as a touchstone for his Mannahatta work, he says this larger project was much more piecemeal. When we moved to the scope of the whole city, there was no one map that was very early and showed me all [the things I was looking for], Sanderson says. We spent a large part of the project just going to map archives, like the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library, and the British Library in England, as well as many others. In all, Sandersons team georeferenced more than 600 maps from the late 18th century to the late 19th century, analyzing hundreds of puzzle pieces to assemble an overarching view of the city pre-urbanization. Using this influx of data, they then built a digital map by layers, creating one layer illustrating all of the streams, another for the topography, another for the marshes, and so on until the bigger picture began to take shape. Another branch of the project entailed sifting through biological data, as well as plant and animal surveys, to understand the flora and fauna that would have inhabited the region 400 years ago. Then, Sandersons team used a kind of prediction tool called a Muir web to take both the topographical data and the biological data and produce an estimate of what the habitat most likely looked like on every NYC block. According to the map, Grand Central Station was once home to white wood aster plants and green frogs; Staten Island Mall hosted red-backed salamanders; and Yankee Stadium was a low salt marsh community inhabited by eastern gray squirrels and passenger pigeons. Future applications Sanderson says the Welikia Project could be used for a number of practical applications, from helping landscape architects understand the native environment to giving urban planners a better sense of the citys makeup. Currently, he’s working on a follow-up study to assist in urban flood planning. According to a recent study from the Regional Plan Association, as many as 82,000 housing units in and around New York City could be lost due to flooding by 2040, and that could double to 160,000 by 2070. Sanderson plans to map all of the places that were historically aquatic ecosystemslike streams, wetlands, and beachesin order to produce more accurate predictions of future flood patterns. For the everyday New Yorker, Sanderson hopes that the Welikia Project provides a chance to better understand the landscape that serves as their home. What I really want people to do is to zoom into their block where they live, and to see that it was a forest or a wetland, and to think about what that means for them, Sanderson says. For some people, I think that’s a testimony to how much the world has changed over the last 400 years. One of my colleagues said, somewhere between Mannahatta and Manhattan is the story of every place on Earth. In some ways, that is the case.
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Honolulu’s coastal Ala Moana Boulevard is a critical road in the Hawaiian capital, but it’s also a major hindrance. With six lanes of fast-moving traffic and few easily accessible crossing points, it’s effectively a hurdle between the city and its main public space, Ala Moana Park, and the broad beach there. Now, a stunning new pedestrian bridge has opened to make it easier to cross that rushing road. Winding its way from the edge of downtown Honolulu over the highway to a boat harbor and the corner of Ala Moana Park, the pedestrian bridge is an elegant piece of urban infrastructure, accented by artwork and connected to a series of paths cutting through a lush tropical landscape. It’s part of Victoria Ward Park, a two-phase publicly accessible open space connected to Ward Village, the 60-acre mixed use development that aims to redefine the urban realm in this part of the city. Developed by Howard Hughes, Ward Village is a blank slate development on former warehouse land that will add, over the course of decades, more than 5,000 units of housing, nearly 1 million square feet of retail, and more than three acres of public greenspace. Several condo buildings are fully occupied and many future condos are already pre-sold, representing more than $6 billion in revenue, according to Howard Hughes’ 2024 annual report. Beyond its Honolulu project, the company made more than $1.75 billion in revenue in 2024, according to Pitchbook. [Photo: courtesy Ward Village] Building a bridge to downtown Greenspace, primarily in the form of Victoria Ward Park, is a key part of the company’s strategy for luring residents and businesses, and turning Ward Village into a new model for urban development in Honolulu. “A goal for Ward Village is to make the overall neighborhood significantly more walkable, comfortable, and safe,” says Doug Johnstone, president of the Hawaii region for Howard Hughes. Born and raised in Honolulu, Johnstone says that while the city is full of world-class amenities, its urban realm can sometimes be lacking. “It’s inherently a little disjointed and difficult to get around,” Johnstone says. [Photo: courtesy Ward Village] That’s why the Ward Village developmentestimated to cost several billion dollars over a planned implementation period that runs through the 2030sset aside the space for the park, and spent a considerable amount of time coordinating with state and local officials to get the pedestrian bridge built. Costing a total of $17.8 million, the bridge is technically a project of the state’s Department of Transportation. It was mostly funded by a federal grant, and Howard Hughes helped pay for the 20% portion of the budget required from local sources, donating land, funding the bridge design and providing environmental documentation. “There’s a lot of folks wearing different hats that are trying to see it through, and making sure also it’s done well aesthetically and experience-wise,” Johnstone says. “It’s complementary to what we’re doing in Ward Village, but also something Honolulu can be proud of.” [Photo: courtesy Ward Village] Ocean-to-inland Making the bridge possible is the existence of Victoria Ward Park, which was designed by Vita Planning and Landscape Architecture. The first phase of the park covers 1.4 acres from the edge of Ala Moana Boulevard inland, and is now open. The second phase, covering roughly 2 acres higher inland and more nestled in the Ward Village development, will finish construction later this year. This ocean-to-inland connection became a guiding concept for the Honolulu park’s design, according to Don Vita, founder of Vita Planning and Landscape Architecture. “Going back and forth from the ocean up to the mountains is a very important cultural orientation in Hawaii and that’s exactly what we did with the configuration and the location of the park,” he says.
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E-Commerce
In the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic, Justin Bibb was living in a tight, one-bedroom apartment in Cleveland, Ohio. He couldnt open his windows because his home was an old office building converted to residential unitsnot exactly conducive to physical and mental well-being in the middle of a global crisis. So he sought refuge elsewhere: a large green space, down near the lakefront, where he could stroll. Unfortunately, Bibb said, thats not the case for many of our residents in the city of Cleveland. A native of Cleveland, Bibb was elected the 58th mayor of the city in 2021. Immediately after taking office, he took inspiration from the 15-minute city concept of urban design, an idea that envisions people reaching their daily necessitieswork, grocery stores, pharmacieswithin 15 minutes by walking, biking, or taking public transit. That reduces dependence on cars, and also slashes carbon emissions and air pollution. In Cleveland, Bibbs goal is to put all residents within a 10-minute walk of a green space by the year 2045, by converting abandoned lots to parks and other efforts. Cleveland is far from alone in its quest to adapt to a warming climate. As American cities have grown in size and population and gotten hotter, theynot the federal governmenthave become crucibles for climate action: Cities are electrifying their public transportation, forcing builders to make structures more energy efficient, and encouraging rooftop solar. Together with ambitious state governments, hundreds of cities large and small are pursuing climate action plansdocuments that lay out how they will reduce emissions and adapt to extreme weatherwith or without support from the feds. Clevelands plan, for instance, calls for all its commercial and residential buildings to reach net-zero emissions by 2050. For local leaders, climate action has grown all the more urgent since the Trump administration has been boosting fossil fuels and threatening to sue states to roll back environmental regulations. Last month, Republicans in the House passed a budget bill that would end nearly all the clean energy tax credits from the Biden administrations signature climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act. Because Donald Trump is in the White House again, its going to be up to mayors and governors to really enact and sustain the momentum around addressing climate change at the local level, said Bibb, who formerly chaired Climate Mayors, a bipartisan group of nearly 350 mayors. City leaders can move much faster than federal agencies, and are more in-tune with what their people actually want, experts said. Theyre on the ground and theyre hearing from their residents every day, so they have a really good sense of what the priorities are, said Kate Johnson, regional director for North America at C40 Cities, a global network of nearly 100 mayors fighting climate change. You see climate action really grounded in the types of things that are going to help people. Shifting from a reliance on fossil fuels to clean energy isnt just about reducing a citys carbon emissions, but about creating jobs and saving moneya tangible argument that mayors can make to their people. Bibb said a pilot program in Cleveland that helped low- to moderate-income households get access to free solar panels ended up reducing their utility bills by 60%. The biggest concern for Americans right now isnt climate change, Bibb added. Its the cost of living, and so we have to marry these two things together, he said. I think mayors are in a very unique position to do that. To further reduce costs and emissions, cities like Seattle and Washington, D.C. are scrambling to better insulate structures, especially affordable housing, by installing double-paned windows and better insulation. In Boston last year, the city government started an Equitable Emissions Investment Fund, which awards money for projects that make buildings more efficient or add solar panels to their roofs. We are in a climate where energy efficiency remains the number one thing that we can do, said Oliver Sellers-Garcia, commissioner of the environment and Green New Deal director in the Boston government. And there are so many other comfort and health benefits from being in an efficient, all-electric environment. To that end, cities are deploying loads of heat pumps, hyper-efficient appliances that warm and cool a space. New York City, for instance, is spending $70 million to install 30,000 of the appliances in its public housing. The ultimate goal is to have as many heat pumps as possible running in energy-efficient homesalong with replacing gas stoves with induction rangesand drawing electricity from renewables. Metropolises like Los Angeles and Pittsburgh are creating new green spaces, which reduce urban temperatures and soak up rainwater to prevent flooding. A park is a prime example of multisolving: one intervention that fixes a bunch of problems at once. Another is deploying electric vehicle chargers in underserved neighborhoods, as Cleveland is doing, and making their use free for residents. This encourages the adoption of those vehicles, which reduces carbon emissions and air pollution. That, in turn, improves public health in those neighborhoods, which tend to have a higher burden of pollution than richer areas. Elizabeth Sawin, director of the Multisolving Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit, said that these efforts will be more important than ever as the Trump administration cuts funding for health programs. If health care for poor children is going to be depletedwith, say, Medicaid under threatcities cant totally fix that, Sawin said. But if they can get cleaner air in cities, they can at least have fewer kids who are struggling from asthma attacks and other respiratory illnesses. All this workbuilding parks, installing solar panels, weatherizing buildingscreates jobs, both within a city and in surrounding rural areas. Construction workers commute in, while urban farms tap rural growers for their expertise. And as a city gets more of its power from renewables, it can benefit counties far away: The largest solar facility east of the Mississippi River just came online in downstate Illinois, providing so much electricity to Chicago that the citys 400 municipal buildings now run entirely on renewable power. The economic benefits and the jobs arent just necessarily accruing to the citieswhich might be seen as big blue cities, Johnson said. Theyre buying their electric school buses from factories in West Virginia, and theyre building solar and wind projects in rural areas. So cities arent just preparing themselves for a warmer future, but helping accelerate a transition to renewables and spreading economic benefits across the American landscape. We as elected officials have to do a better job of articulating how this important part of public policy is connected to the everyday lived experience, Bibb said. Unfortunately, my party has done a bad job of that. But I think as mayors, we are well positioned to make that case at the local level. Matt Simon, Grist This article originally appeared in Grist, a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Sign up for its newsletter here.
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