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Asphalt, Rails, and Rights-of-Way: Repurposing Underused Spaces for Nature and Recreation

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This in-person lecture is part of the Fall 2025 Sciame Lecture Series, "rePURPOSE."

Tamar Renaud is the New York State Director at Trust for Public Land, where she leads a team working to expand access to the outdoors by creating trails, revitalizing schoolyards, and protecting public land. With a background in public health and experience at Vital Strategies, the NYC Health Department, and the UN, she brings deep expertise in improving community health and the environment. She holds degrees from Brown and Johns Hopkins Universities.

"Asphalt, Rails, and Rights-of-Way: Repurposing Underused Spaces for Nature and Recreation": How can underused spaces like asphalt schoolyards, abandoned rail corridors, and paths under power lines be repurposed into welcoming places for nature and recreation? This session explores how Trust for Public Land works with communities and partners to transform land into public assets—combining design, engagement, and a commitment to outdoor access that supports public health and environmental resilience.

Suggested Reading: How our parks can mend communities.

"rePURPOSE" centers on the practice of adaptive reuse in the built environment. Repurposing, embedded in historical patterns of city building and for the most part discarded in the modern movement, is undergoing a remarkable renaissance. The lecture series invites architects, planners, developers, advocates, and engineers to present the technologies, designs, economic incentives, and policy changes that are needed to advance a substantively renewed and at-scale program of repurposing in New York and other global cities. The reuse of old structures is not a new idea. After the fall of the Roman Empire, for example, the Colosseum was repurposed for housing and workshops during the medieval period. Although reuse is understood as a convention that both requires and imposes minimal impact, rePURPOSE shines light on how the methodology might not be entirely benign, how it might in fact have real impact, and the ways in which it challenges and would necessarily disrupt the very conventions with which we typically assume it is aligned.

Of special, although not exclusive, interest is unpacking the relationship of repurposing to the climate crisis. Might historic preservation sit at the center of technical innovation? Are all older buildings valuable as climate mitigation assets, or will new uses, such as data storage in old buildings, undermine the LCA embodied carbon savings achieved? What rules, laws, and incentives are needed to sustain innovative approaches to meaningful reuse, and to what extent will a complete reform of preservation regulations and zoning frameworks be required?

The Fall 2025 Sciame lecture series will address the profound potential inherent in giving new life to old structures; employing adaptive reuse methodologies to impact environmental, economic, and cultural conditions by reducing waste and carbon emissions, lowering costs and raising property values, maintaining historical character, and preserving local identity.

All lectures are free, open to the public, and held in the Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture Sciame Auditorium. For live captioning, ASL interpretation, or access requests, please contact ssadean@ccny.cuny.edu.

This lecture series is made possible by the Spitzer Architecture Fund and the generous support of Frank Sciame ’74, CEO of Sciame Construction.

Sciame Auditorium (Room 107) 141 Convent Avenue New York, NY 10031

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