Denise Hoffman Brandt's CITY-SINK is an investigation of our potential to catalyze urban carbon sequestration reservoirs, or sinks. Combating a common idea of the city as 'unnatural' and reciprocally, that nature is 'un-urban', Hoffman Brandt reframes urban planting as an operative program rather than a scenographic device. Coincident with the launch of the Million Trees programs in New York and Los Angeles, CITY-SINK provokes and challenges these efforts to adopt a more environmentally productive framework for urban landscape transformation—one that understands trees to be functional organisms dependent upon complex environmental processes. According to Hoffman Brandt, the average life of a street tree is between 2 and 10 years, which is a direct result of planting practices that treat trees as artifacts—isolating them from sustaining vegetative plant associations and constraining soil and hydrologic processes. Urban street trees are more like totemic objects than eco-system constituents. Without comprehensive planning and management, she argues, Million Trees has the potential to release more carbon through installation/ management energy inputs and dead wood decomposition than it sequesters.

During her fellowship term, Hoffman Brandt will develop and publicly disseminate a plan for the dispersal, deployment, and design of urban carbon sinks in New York City. She will locate opportunities in the city's macro-scale infrastructural systems to infiltrate sinks throughout the metropolitan area, and she will use case studies of projects to generate sink typologies and local-scale tactics that work within the urban substrate to intensify carbon sequestration.