Influential environment is a system that is hacked in the urban fabric of New York City designed to clean the wastewater in the block scale. The design reconstructs how water is treated and reused, bringing awareness of the process to the users, leading to a reduction of consumption of clean water and promoting a different way of relating to it.

The underlying design concept rejects the combined sewer system and instead rethinks the process as a whole, starting with how water flows and gets collected within individual apartment buildings.  
Firstly, wastewater is divided into three areas of treatment. It is then brought into community hubs that are inserted into existing buildings, where it is retained long enough to separate the sludge from the water. After leaving the buildings the wastewater moves into the cascading walkways where it is introduced into an ecosystem of plant life for filtration. It is a continuous path that is weaved through and around the existing urban fabric and creating public interactions. The by-products of the process are treated as well and are reused in the apartments as natural gas or fertilizers for community farms. The water paths are finally brought to the river line and then continue out to join with the water in the east river.