Stad

This is the first episode of Future 400, a four-part podcast series marking the moment that the Dutch set foot on Manhattan 400 years ago: ‘New York Before New York’. We start by looking at New York before it was New York, hearing the voices of the people who already lived there: the Lenape.

When the Dutch colonists set foot on the island of Manhattan, four hundred years ago, there were already people living there: the Lenape. Historian Russell Shorto curated an exhibition for the New York Historical Society to tell the other stories about the town of New Amsterdam – and invited the Lenape to react with a powerful letter to an Unknown Ancestor. And Pauline Toole, New York’s Commissioner of Records, tells us about the wonderful stories of real live people of many faiths and nationalities living in New Amsterdam that can be found in the city’s 17th century archives. 

Listen to it here:

It is climate change that is sucking the Colorado River dry, or the fact that too many people have too many straws in its water? Actually it’s both, we learned during our yearly Harvard GSD Loeb Fellowship study trip that went to Denver, Colorado this year. So yes this is a big story. I touched on some of the pertinent issues in this article for the Loeb Fellowship website (pdf and images below).

In deze souterrain aan de Marnixstraat in Amsterdam ligt een laag water van een paar centimeter diep. Tegen AT5 zegt de bewoner, terwijl hij wijst naar zijn rubberlaarzen: ‘Dit zijn mijn nieuwe huisslippers’. AT5 vroeg aan mij: waar komt die wateroverlast vandaan? En wat doen we eraan? Kijk hier:

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. 

Listen to it here: