A basketball court in Queens is doing two jobs at once.
Beside New York City Housing Authority’s South Jamaica Houses, two “sunken” basketball courts called Water Square were built as part of a flood mitigation system. Developed by Brooklyn-based landscape architecture firm Grain Collective, the courts store stormwater during flash floods while also replacing what the source described as once-derelict courts.
The courts sit on top of a $5 million drainage system designed by Grain Collective with engineers from Hazen and Sawyer and urban planning firm Marc Wouters Studios. The system stores stormwater in underground pipes, then filters it through bio-retention basins before slowly releasing it back into the ground.
Each court can hold up to 330,000 gallons of water, half the volume of an Olympic-sized swimming pool.
“[The court] becomes like a sponge, which basically holds the water as much as it can,” Runit Chhaya, principal at Grain Collective, told Fast Company. “It helps in not putting stress on the city storm system during a flood event.”
The project came after Hurricane Ida flooded New York City three years earlier, as the former Adams administration was still working out how to help residents rebuild and reduce damage from future disasters.
The Water Square courts were inspired by similar projects in Copenhagen and Rotterdam. Designers also said the 3-foot-deep “sunken” build allows the courts to support other uses, including movie nights and farmer’s markets.
At the time the courts were deployed, Mayor Eric Adams was still in office.
“Investments like these are a key part of public safety and affordability,” Adams said in a press conference about a year ago. “Every dollar we spend on flood infrastructure, we will save $7 in prevented damage.”
NYCHA’s South Jamaica Houses site gave the project team room to build flood infrastructure in a dense area.
“NYCHA is unique in having large pieces of property within very dense neighborhoods that provide the opportunity to mitigate stormwater overflows in a way that most properties do not,” Siobhan Watson, vice president of sustainability at NYCHA, told Fast Company.
Chhaya said the team had to be careful in how it presented the project to local residents.
“It’s very hard to go to these communities and just start talking about climate change and flood protection because they are thinking about basic needs, and we are talking about infrastructure they didn’t even ask for,” Chhaya explained to Fast Company. “So you kind of change the story, and it’s an honest story that, hey, it’s actually a win-win situation. You’re going to get an upgraded amenity.”
“The amenity becomes the engine through which you explain the extra [resiliency] benefits,” Chhaya added to Dezeen. “It’s by engaging with the residents that you build stewardship towards the project.”
Residents are now using the courts, according to Manny Martinez, president of the South Jamaica Houses Resident Council.
“The basketball court was a great addition to the community. It was done as a side effect, so to speak, to them putting in this water retention system,” Martinez told The City Reporter. “People are loving it.”
Grain Collective is also working on a similar playground redesign at another “cloudburst” site in East Harlem.
Current Mayor Zohran Mamdani recently announced an additional $43 million for the Bureau of Coastal Resilience, the city agency in charge of building more than 100 floodgates in Lower Manhattan.
“As climate change accelerates, so, too, must our efforts to protect our communities,” Mamdani said in a statement. “This investment ensures the bureau can keep pace with the billions of dollars in infrastructure coming online in the next few years.”
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