Abandoned Infrastructure and New York's Evolving Coastline-PPT Presentation

PPT Presentation

Pdf Summary

Dr. Debra F. Laefer’s presentation examines how abandoned infrastructure and forgotten land uses shape New York City’s evolving coastline and urban environment. Although NYC has roughly 550 miles of coastline, managing its infrastructure remains challenging: modern sensors, cloud computing, and machine learning offer new tools, but effective planning also requires domain expertise and a complete view of what lies both above and below ground.<br /><br />The city’s subsurface holds layers of past uses and technologies, including hollow sidewalks, basements, coal and utility vaults, cemeteries, wells, streams, and remnants of water, sewage, gas, electric, steam, communication, and transportation systems. These features may be overlooked when their original purpose is forgotten. Historical maps and records can help locate them, but information about active utilities is also incomplete, inconsistent, and often restricted.<br /><br />The presentation highlights remote sensing and digital documentation as ways to improve knowledge of underground spaces. For example, scanning basements and other low-lying areas can add detail to flood models, which may produce different results when underground spaces are included. Better records can support safer construction, reduce delays and unexpected costs, improve facility design, and strengthen geotechnical investigations.<br /><br />Progress is hindered by fragmented data ownership, missing or undigitized records, incompatible mapping systems, security and privacy concerns, limited funding, and a lack of coordinated leadership. The presentation calls for collaboration among agencies, utilities, researchers, communities, and first responders, along with shared standards and practical data-sharing tools. Its central message is that infrastructure remnants are difficult to find once the activities that created them disappear; documenting them is essential to safer, better-informed urban planning.

Keywords

New York City coastline

abandoned infrastructure

subsurface mapping

urban planning

remote sensing

digital documentation

flood modeling

historical maps

utility systems

data sharing