Our approach to the renewal of this urban landscape is rooted in maximizing the performance of GREEN INFRASTRUCTURE SYSTEMS. In dense urban environs, streetscapes are an abundant yet underutilized stage for this performance. Where urban green infrastructure systems of mobility, community, water, and habitat interact, we find exciting opportunities for new urban forms. These places must succeed on multiple levels to constitute a healthy urban environment so we call them HIGH PERFORMANCE LANDSCAPES. To unleash their full potential we must also consider their perform-ative qualities in terms of how their actions or works are made visible and meaningful. We can build a hopeful AESTHETIC OF PERFORMANCE on a contemporary framing of the relationship among form, function, and ecology.

The first move is the PARK CREEK GREENWAY descending Park Slope from Prospect Park to the Gowanus Canal. Its defining element is an urban bioswale to treat and convey runoff from a curbless 9th Street (“thrown” to the north side) and surrounding buildings. Living roofs and stoop garden cisterns also contribute to the green and clean water strategy.

The second move is a series of URB BULBS along 9th. By exchanging parallel parking for back-in diagonal, outdoor rooms are framed for metropolitan living in the street. If curb bulbs are a single-purpose technique for traffic calming, urb bulbs are multi-functional elements for community activities—games, sitting, bike repair, etc. Pavement from the former roadway fills gabion seat walls. Porous paving and silva cells reduce runoff and allow large street trees to form a broad canopy. Here, safety grows from modal mixing and reduced speeds. Pedestrians are uninterrupted by curbs and bicyclers use sharrow lanes along with vehicles slowed by urb bulb traffic calming and mid-block crossings.

The third move is the MULTIWAY BIOVARD on 4th. Here we reprise the boulevard, originally developed to safely allow diverse vehicles to share the road at the dawn of the automobile age, to smooth the transition beyond the automobile. Recognizing that this is still a critical route for through traffic, the biovard buffers this flow in the middle and gives back the rest for local use. Here, low-speed traffic and parking can be flexibly reprogrammed for festivals and farmers markets without interrupting through traffic. Runoff flows to median bioswales. A bikestation under the overpass activates this underused space and creates a multi-modal hub.

The final move is the CONFLUENCE. Here, where the previous gestures interact, we propose an elevated intersection and a rain garden beneath steel grating. Pedestrians stay up at the sidewalk elevation while autos must slowly rise up onto this plateau. The geometries of thrown and crowned lanes express themselves in distinctive ascent wedges. The rain garden is a framed wetland where the biovard median flows join the Park Creek bioswale. Auto traffic keeps vegetation down below the grate in the heavily traveled bands, but reeds poke through in less frequented islands. Imagine a city where citizens could experience the performance of water and terrestrial life pulsing beneath their feet.