Zane Murray, Jane Lien, and I were recipients of the Michael Kalil Endowment for Smart Design Award, Student Interdisciplinary Team Grant, and we spent this summer doing research into how mass transit systems (specifically subways) and plant life both affect our urban environments and how they could be used together to make a larger, positive impact on the people who use the transit systems and the city as a whole.

Our goal is to complete a proposal for the New York City Transit Authority to use plants as part of an installation within the subway system. The location we will do the proposal for will be the Smith and 9th Street Station on the F line.

We started by investigating urban transit systems here in New York as well as in other large cities around the world. It was important for us to use ethnographic research techniques to determine how valuable a transit system was to the people who used it, what level of respect was provided to the system itself as well as to other’s that used the subway system, if small changes (such as obstacles or repairs) affected traffic patterns as a whole, and if there are any recurring themes that we observed.

We used an array of information gathering techniques, such as video, sound, and photography, as well as brief interviews with maintenance crews, security officers, and patrons of the subway systems.

Next, we began talking to experts in the field of plants, landscape architecture, and transit anthropology. We wanted to gain an understanding of the issues we would face (such as temperature, moisture, security, cultural attitudes, etc) when using vegetation in the subway system.

As an example, we did an interview with Anru Lee, Ph.D., a professor at John Jay here in Manhattan, and spoke with her about what affects subway systems (and urban infrastructure, in general) have on residents and people of a city as well as the impression left on others outside of that city space.

We started a Facebook information and fan page (Plant Transit) to create awareness of our project and use crowd-sourcing techniques (asking our international friends/community) to supply examples of plants and transit from around the world.

We put together some initial sketches of our proposal, and we are in the process of creating 3D renderings of our initial plans. Since the Smith and 9th Street station is the highest point of any transit station in New York City, we wanted to use it’s visual prominence to our advantage. We envision replacing the current stairs and escalators with a fully-enclosed arch that is filled with green vegetation, a watering system, and a lighting set-up that would provide not only a more pleasant transit experience but an architectural destination in Brooklyn.