Living City Brooklyn Gowanus takes a holistic, or whole systems approach, to the regeneration of existing urban neighborhoods, several blocks at a time. We partner with the Gowanus Canal Community Development Corporation (GCCDC) and other local organizations to identify and address neighborhood needs – with a focus on block scale energy and resource efficiency, water and storm water issues, and community connectivity within the Gowanus region of Brooklyn. Dominated by light industry that has surrounded the canal over the past two centuries, the community is challenged to overcome the stigma of severe pollution that industrial uses have left behind. The area contains a mixture of traditional Brooklyn brownstone housing and century-old and newer commercial brick buildings. Gowanus offers meaningful opportunities and interesting challenges around storm water retention and reuse, green roofs and urban agriculture, and deep building energy retrofits and district wide energy production.

It is our mission to help cities and communities develop a new paradigm to remake our existing urban landscape. We begin by baselining and analyzing existing conditions to help LCBG achieve its longer-term goals and document our success. Our research and data driven approach involves process documentation and measurement of project impacts to create a scalable and replicable framework for use in future localities.