Over the next two weeks, Next City will unroll short profiles of 77 people, places and ideas that have changed cities this year. Together, they make up our 2012 Disruption Index. Forefront subscribers can download the Index in full as a PDF, complete with beautiful designs and graphics by Danni Sinisi. Readers who make a $75 donation to Next City will have a full-color printed copy of the Index mailed to them.

Adaptive reuse is all about meeting new demands with existing resources. It takes both creativity and a sense for how needs and attitudes are changing, which is how David Belt turned a dumpster into a swimming pool. The New York-based real estate developer and his company, Macro Sea, ended up plopping their converted garbage haulers into various public spaces around the city over the past few summers, offering New Yorkers a new, if slightly quirky, way to cool down. In the process, Belt pushed the boundaries of reuse, recreation and how we use public space.

Now, he’s taking his ability to move the dial to a project that’s bigger and arguably more important: Resuscitating Brooklyn’s manufacturing epicenter. Belt and his team are behind a 161,000-square-foot complex of industrial and office buildings being developed in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, a project aimed at creating a “high-tech design and prototyping center” in the reemerging manufacturing zone that’s been bubbling up in the former heart of this industrial borough. Part of the Navy Yard’s $46 million Green Manufacturing Center’ project, the idea is to give designers and manufacturers access to the facilities and technologies they need to bring their designs to reality, and the spaces they can use to both incubate and grow their businesses. Between this new facility and his dumpster pools, Belt is on his way to becoming a master of reinvention.

Nate Berg is a writer and journalist covering cities, architecture and urban planning. Nate’s work has been published in a wide variety of publications, including the New York Times, NPR, Wired, Metropolis, Fast Company, Dwell, Architect, the Christian Science Monitor, LA Weekly and many others. He is a former staff writer at The Atlantic Cities and was previously an assistant editor at Planetizen.