Pratt Center Project
Completed in 2010
Building Resilient CommunitiesGreening the South Bronx
Pratt Center played an integral role in helping the South Bronx bring environmental justice to the forefront of their community revitalization agenda.
Grassroots organizations in the South Bronx have made environmental justice a central part of their agenda for community revitalization. Pratt Center has been there with them from the beginning: providing mapping, architecture, and urban planning resources that have enabled the neighborhood organizations to build a greener, healthier environment in neighborhoods that have carried more than their fair share of the city's polluting facilities.
Sewage treatment plants, waste transfer stations, truck highways, wholesale markets, power plants, gas and oil depots - the South Bronx hosts essential infrastructure that not only allows the New York City region to function, but also leaves many Bronx neighborhoods with New York City's highest asthma rates and a diminished quality of life.
Pratt Center has provided technical services to the Bronx River Watershed Alliance and its member groups: the Point CDC, Sustainable South Bronx, Mothers on the Move, and Youth Ministries for Peace and Justice. Pratt Center has helped them:
- Build a greenway along the Bronx River and reclaim the waterway as a social, economic, and ecological asset;
- Plan and advocate to replace the underutilized Sheridan Expressway with a park;
- Develop and implement strategies for evaluating, cleaning, and reusing industrial brownfields through the state Brownfield Opportunity Areas grant program;
- Make sure the redevelopment of the Oak Park rail yard produces good jobs and a cleaner environment; and
- Turn an abandoned cement plant into a public park.
More on Pratt Center's South Bronx environmental work
Who worked on this
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Joan Byron
Senior Fellow
718-636-3468