Sanitation and Urban Design
The maintenance of cities depends on trash collection. Systematically transporting waste is a complex task that relies on logistical and mechanical infrastructure, but despite its critical role for urban spaces, garbage removal is usually treated as a technical issue rather than a question of design. However, the capital investment and administrative coordination required for installing a pneumatic waste system brings the design process to bear on municipal sanitation strategies. Examples of this are the model neighborhoods of Roosevelt Island and Stockholm’s Hammarby Sjostad—designed to improve quality of life and environmental impact, and Macau’s Hac Sa Wan and Barcelona’s Gothic Quarter—redevelopments aimed at revalorizing the existing urban fabric. This comparison of cities is a point of departure for reconsidering the relationship between garbage, urban development, and community responsibility.
New York City: Roosevelt Island
In New York City a network of garages, transfer stations and heavy-duty compacting trucks plugs into city roadways. 2,230 trucks stop at virtually every address (and 25,000 litter baskets) along their routes, navigating traffic and pedestrians to collect garbage from the sidewalk.
The New York City Department of Sanitation collects only residential and institutional garbage, leaving businesses to contract independently with private carting services. After collection, commercial and residential waste travel similar routes, using the same transfer stations and ultimately arriving at the same landfills.
With the closing of the Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island in 2001, the City shifted from barges to land-based transfer stations, concentrated in neighborhoods already home to other industrial activities. To spread the impact in all five boroughs and reduce truck miles traveled, the City Council approved the 2006 Solid Waste Management Plan (SWMP) consolidating all garbage transport to modernized marine and rail transfer stations.
Roosevelt Island’s AVAC system was installed during the island’s redevelopment in the early 1970s. After the first phase of development was complete, all new residential buildings were required to plug into the tube network. The AVAC system now extends from the Octogon apartments to Southtown. The system was originally conceived to process all the community’s waste, including hospitals and storefronts. Ultimately commercial waste was kept out of the system and private carting companies service businesses as they do elsewhere.
The AVAC facility collects between 10 and 13 tons of waste from Roosevelt Island’s 12,000 inhabitants and two schools. The system was installed before New York City’s curbside recycling program was in place so it only collects refuse. Building managers transport residents’ recyclables and bulk items separately to containers in the AVAC facility yard. Approximately four times a week the AVAC engineer on duty calls the Department of Sanitation garage to pick up full containers to send to transfer stations.
Barcelona: Gothic Quarter
Barcelona is the only city to win the Royal Institute of British Architects Gold Medal for architecture. The jury for the 1999 prize described Barcelona as a model of best urban practice and cited urban regeneration projects like the 1992 Olympic Village, which sends its waste underground via pneumatic tubes. Based on the success of this experience, in 2002 the Barcelona city council required that all new developments incorporate vacuum collection, with the cost of installation shared between property owners and developers and the City.
Barcelona’s Gothic Quarter is dense network of narrow streets and medieval buildings covering 550 acres in the center of the city. In 2004 a public benefit corporation created to upgrade buildings, infrastructure and services in Barcelona’s historic city center incorporated vacuum collection in two of the four historic districts. When all the networks are complete, 75,000 people in the Gothic Quarter will use tubes for their trash.
Without room to store trash cans, residents and businesses have always walked their garbage out to collection containers on the street, and the new vacuum inlets have merely replaced refuse and organics containers. In Barcelona organics are collected as a separate waste stream and converted into biogas. Recyclable paper, packaging and glass, which don’t smell and don’t accumulate as quickly, are still collected by truck. Both commercial and residential trash are collected in the pneumatic system’s street inlets, but inlets for businesses have larger openings and are controlled with key access.
Stockholm: Hammarby Sjöstad
Sweden installed the first of many pneumatic systems for residential refuse in 1966. One of the most recent is Hammarby Sjostad, a mixed-use development on a brownfield site, designed for the City’s 2004 Olympic bid. During the master planning process, the City invited utility companies and government agencies to design infrastructure to take advantage of the synergies between energy, waste, water and sewage systems on the 500-acre site.
In Stockholm, private contractors collect garbage for the municipality and the City assesses residents a waste handling fee. Hammarby’s property association pays for the installation of the pneumatic system and the City compensates them with very reduced fees. In turn, the association pays for the maintenance and operation of the system.
Hammarby will have 25,000 residents when it is completed in 2016. Citywide, 175,000 people or roughly 20% of the population are served by vacuum collection, and the City Council is currently reviewing a plan to retrofit the historic city center. If approved, pneumatic systems would serve almost half the city.
Macau: Hac Sa Wan
Macau is one of two Special Administrative Regions (SAR) in China and the most dense urban region in the world. A half million people live on 11 square miles of land in the Pearl River Delta, 40 miles south of China’s other SAR, Hong Kong. Macau remained under Portuguese control until 1999. The city is a tourist destination with a UNESCO historic center and casino resorts.
Rapid economic growth in the last two decades has meant more people, more consumption and more garbage. Before regulated solid waste management began in 1985 garbage was left in the streets. Municipal collection was still new when Macau officials became aware of pneumatic systems for waste collection at the 1998 World Expo in Lisbon. In 2009 the municipality retrofitted Hac Sa Wan, a district of modern high-rise apartment blocks north east of the city center. Residents of this district’s 19,000 apartments now deposit their garbage in street inlets for pneumatic collection. The government absorbed the cost of the system, designed and operated for the City by a private contractor. Additional pneumatic systems are in the planning phases.