Alle Podcasts

In this 10th and last episode of Water Talks, I meet Rohit Aggarwala, the Chief Climate Officer of New York City and the commissioner of the city’s Department of Environmental Protection. He is deeply invested in using storm protection measures to not just build walls, but to make the city a better place for the people who live there, to give the city what he calls ‘a livable waterfront’. I spoke with him about the city’s sewers, about making the city more resilient with measures ranging from seawalls to rain gardens, and about the water around New York, which has gotten so clean that there are even dolphins swimming in it. But we can’t yet eat the oysters that grow there.

Rohit trained as a historian and worked as a journalist and as a consultant at McKinsey before going to work for former Mayor Bloomberg as the head of the office of long-term Planning and Sustainability. 

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Landscape architect Kate Orff has her own studio, Scape, and is a professor at Columbia University in New York. Time Magazine called her one of the 100 most important people of 2023. She coined the term ‘Oyster-Tecture’, a method of using oyster shells to create ‘living breakwaters’ that not only help clean the water of New York Harbor, but also will help calm the waves during the next superstorm. 

This is the Big Five, the companion series to the podcast Water Talks, with five one-on-one longer interviews with some of the extraordinary speakers from the main episodes. You can hear her in episode 4 of Water Talks, ‘Too Dirty’. The podcast Water Talks was made during the New York Water Week and the UN Water conference in 2023.

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Matthijs Bouw is a Dutch architect and urban designer who has lived in New York now for eight years. With his studio One Architecture and Urbanism he is working on ‘The Big U’, ten miles of infrastructure around the tip of Manhattan. His designs not only protect the island from storms, but also provide the local communities with valuable public space. Matthijs is also a professor of climate resilience at Penn University and the first Rockefeller Urban Resilience Fellow at the Rockefeller Foundation.

This is the Big Five, the companion series to the podcast Water Talks, with five one-on-one interviews with some of the extraordinary speakers from the main episodes. You can hear Matthijs in episode 2 of Water Talks, ‘Too Much’. I spoke with him on the occasion of the New York Water Week and the UN Water conference in 2023.

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Russell Shorto is an American writer and a historian, my predecessor as director of the John Adams Institute in Amsterdam and the author of ‘The Island at the Center of the World’, about New York in the seventeenth century when it was the Dutch colony New Amsterdam. He recently founded the New Amsterdam Project, under the auspices of the New York Historical Society. For this podcast he walked me through 17th century New York – or rather, New Amsterdam – and told me about the city’s intimate relationship with the water around it.

This is the Big Five, the companion series to the podcast Water Talks, with one-on-one interviews with some of the extraordinary speakers from the main episodes. You can also hear Russell in episode 2 of Water Talks, ‘Too Much’. This is the longer version of my interview with him during the New York Water Week and the UN Water conference in 2023.

Listen to it here: