Measuring the flow: green infrastructure grows in Brooklyn

• Our green infrastructure project connects a city agency with university partners.
• The agency has regulatory and economic mandates; the universities, academic mandates.
• The partial divergence of mission creates a manageable amount of creative tension.
• The project marshals academic expertise for both instrumental and conceptual ends.

A project underway in Brooklyn, New York exemplifies the investment of many US cities in ‘green infrastructure’ — combinations of technologies and vegetated areas that absorb and slow down the flow of stormwater from urban surfaces. The participants in this project include representatives of city agencies, academic institutions, and not-for-profit organizations, each with distinct but overlapping objectives. The agency partner is motivated primarily by regulatory and budgetary requirements; the university partners, primarily by the needs and prerogatives of academic research. To date, the result has been a collaboration that marshals university expertise for both instrumental and conceptual ends, i.e., it combines applied and fundamental research in a manner that aligns reasonably well with the missions of all of the collaborators.