Revitalizing Urban Waterway Communities

Streams of Environmental Justice

Richard Smardon, Sharon Moran, April Karen Baptiste

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781315474953
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Ecosystems & Habitats
• Index: Biological Sciences

The revitalizing and restoration of rivers, creeks and streams is a major focus of urban conservation activity throughout North America and Europe. This book presents models and examples for organizing multiple stakeholders for purposes of waterway revitalization—if not restoration—within a context of fairness and environmental justice.

After decades of neglect and misuse the challenge of cleaning up urban rivers and streams is shown to be complex and truly daunting. Urban river cleanup typically involves multiple agendas and stakeholders, as well as complicated technical issues. It is also often the situation that the most affected have the least voice in what happens. The authors present social process models for maximum inclusion of various stakeholders in decision-making for urban waterway regeneration. A range of examples is presented, drawn principally from North America and Europe.

1Introduction

Urban waterway history and planning context

Richard Smardon

Introduction

We know that negative impacts from urbanization accumulate within watersheds as small tributary streams contribute higher peak flows and lower base flows to waterways downstream. As Platt points out, “Dozens (and possibly hundreds) of small urban watersheds in the United States and around the world … are the focus of multifarious “restoration” strategies under complex institutional arrangements” (Platt, 2006, p. 29). In many instances, as with our own Onondaga Creek in Syracuse, New York, the main channel has been straightened and “hardened,” moving higher flows faster through the settled areas without flooding. These same channels in many cases are lined with sanitary sewer overflows (SSOs) and combined sewer overflows (CSOs), which may dump raw sewage plus street drainage during storm events, thus severely degrading the urban waterway.

Many obstacles can interfere with the revitalization or restoration of urban waterways and what follows are examples of such obstacles. The urban creeks, streams and sloughs in need of revitalization are often within poor neighborhoods with highly diverse populations and across multiple jurisdictions. Some examples are Wildcat Creek in North Richmond/San Pablo, California (Riley, 1989a, 1989b); the Anacostia River in Washington, D.C. (Powell, 2010); and Onondaga Creek (Moran et al., 2013) in Central New York State (Figure 1.1). Local communities may not agree as to what should be done to revitalize these waterways; different agencies may hold conflicting priorities, e.g., flood control vs. water quality improvement vs. habitat restoration.

Figure 1.1Onondaga Creek walk linking Franklin Square to Downtown Syracuse

Source: Photo by R. Smardon

An incredible number of research and demonstration projects (Bernhardt et al., 2005) have attempted to restore segments and functions of small creeks, streams and bayous, but we maintain that a major challenge for the urban waterway restoration/revitalization is gaining consensus about what to do and how to do it. We learned this during the three years of working on the Onondaga Creek Revitalization Plan (Moran et al., 2013) in Syracuse, New York, and others have found this to be a major challenge as well (Moran, 2003, 2007, 2010; Platt, 2006; Riley, 1998). There are also equity issues in terms of who has historically been forced to live in high-risk floodplain or polluted water areas.

The term restoration implies speaking mainly from a biophysical restorative functional capacity, e.g., hydrology, water quality, aquatic and riparian habitat. Using the term revitalization implies social and economic improvement or revitalized creek neighborhoods with economically sustainable land use patterns as well as some level of biophysical restoration of the water body. Naturalization implies some degree of biophysical water body restoration.

The focus of this book is to explore social processes that are equitable to surrounding communities and can be combined with good environmental science to advance urban waterway restoration/revitalization. The few other books that address the subject include Ann Riley’s Restoring Streams in Cities: A Guide for Planners, Policy Makers and Citizens, published in 1998, and the American Planning Association’s Ecological Riverfront Design: Restoring Rivers, Connecting Communities (Otto et al., 2004). One of this book’s co-authors produced and co-wrote Protecting Floodplain Resources: A Guidebook for Communities for the Federal Interagency Floodplain Management Task Force (Smardon et al., 1996), and the book includes both participatory and agency driven processes for protecting riparian areas within floodplains.

The following sections of this chapter will review the history of urban waterway restoration, U.S. government programs, state and regional stream restoration activity and urban waterfront revitalization, and will make the case for equitable social models for urban waterway restoration.

History of stream restoration innovations and contributions

According to Riley (1998), one of the earliest documented stream restorations involved trees planted along water channels dug in the Euphrates and Nile River valleys in 3000 B.C. Water plants were used for nature-based recreation in both Persian and Roman cultures in about 1000 B.C. The Mayan civilization in Mesoamerica implemented water canals and water retention structures for food production and transportation circa A.D. 1000 (Smardon, 2006, 2009). Water features were used in the Mediterranean cultures of North Africa, Spain and Italy circa A.D. 1200.

According to Riley (1998), stream engineering techniques were first developed in Europe in 1662. Planners moved to using water in landscape design in the 1600s to 1800s. Italian landscape designers utilized decorative water features in garden design, which spread to France and England (1600–1700). English landscape designers used streams, lakes and ponds in pastoral landscape design (1700–1800).

Frederick Law Olmsted, America’s first landscape architect, incorporated urban waterways into garden and greenway designs in places like the Fens in Boston and the Genesee River Gorge in Rochester, N.Y., between 1860 and 1880 (Fabos et al., 1968). Later, village and rural improvement societies and women’s clubs developed beautification programs that started in New England and spread west to California (Riley, 1998).

Environmental awareness of the use of water in landscape design surfaced in George Perkins Marsh’s book Man in Nature, which addressed human impact on the environment, including streams. In 1870, the American Fisheries Society was formed and started fisheries restoration work in streams. Teddy Roosevelt assembled Congress, governors, scientists and outdoor sportsmen in 1908 for the White House Conference on Natural Resources, which begat both the Natural Resources Commission headed by Gifford Pinchot and the North American Conservation Conference with Canada, the U.S. and Mexico in 1909. In 1914 the Hetch-Hetchey was a proposed dam site in Yosemite Valley when activists like John Muir spurred the beginning of the U.S. environmental movement. In 1922 the Izaak Walton League, a group long concerned with maintaining high-quality fishing streams and conservation in general, was founded in the U.S.

The evolution of single use to multiple uses of streams and rivers began in the 1930s,when Hugo Schiechtl pioneered soil bioengineering techniques and the Institute of Fisheries Research was established at the University of Michigan for stream habitat improvement research (Riley, 1998). W.C. Lowdermilk (Assistant Secretary of the Soil Conservation Service) toured Europe around the same time and discovered stream restoration techniques such as Schiechtl’s. In 1933 Aldo Leopold published his book Game Management explaining the concept of carrying capacity, which could be related to riparian habitat areas.

Gilbert White’s 1942 dissertation Human Adjustments to Floods attributed flood losses to acts of humankind and led to work on flood management as a field (Platte, 1986; White, 1960, 1969). In 1964, Phil Lewis at the University of Wisconsin proposed multiple-use river corridors, which led to the greenway concept. Ian McHarg published Design with Nature in 1968, which proposed physical design determinants as a series of mapped overlays to guide future development and resource use. Roy Mann also published his book Rivers in the City in 1968, which celebrated attributes of rivers in European and North American cities. The NGO American Rivers was founded in 1968, and continues today as a major advocacy organization for river protection and restoration.

The 1980s brought the revival of stream restoration in North America. The President’s Commission on America Outdoors was held in 1987, and Charles Little’s 1990 book Greenways for America signaled the beginning of the greenway movement in the U.S. The Coalition to Restore Urban Waters was established in 1993 and pushed for a National Watershed Restoration Act, which was not passed by Congress until 1996. In 1998, the Federal Interagency Restoration Working Group (which includes all major federal agencies concerned with water management) produced Stream Corridor Restoration: Principles, Processes and Practices, a compendium of all types of stream restoration information. That same year Ann Riley also published her book Restoring Streams in Cities: A Guide for Planners, Policy Makers and Citizens.

The 1990s brought urban ecology into the fold of stream restoration as well with Anne Spirn’s book The Granite Garden. This more holistic systems approach stressed the notion of ecological services provided by streams, including water purification, flood attenuation, microclimate moderation, nutrient flows and aquatic and riparian habitat maintenance (Everard & Moggridge, 2012). The 1990s also saw increasing use of Rosgen’s geomorphic stream classification, which can be used to rebuild streams in a more natural pattern without causing harm from downstream flows. In 2005 the National River Restoration Science Synthesis (NRRSS) databases were created, which synthesize 37,099 river and stream restoration projects (Bernardt et al., 2005).

Rosgen, with little formal training in restoration science, promoted his natural channel design (NCD) classification and restoration process (Rosgen, 1994) throughout the U.S. from the 1980s to the present. His NCD process has been adopted by many U.S. federal agencies such as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the Natural Resource Conservation Service, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the U.S. Forest Service. Some research scientists have criticized Rosgen’s approach as too formulaic but have not offered an alternative other than more detailed studies. The so-called “Rosgen wars” have been documented by Rebecca Lave (2012) and Lave et al. (2010).

The 1990s to the early 2000s saw the advent of the urban stream daylighting movement, promoting the physical daylighting of buried urban streams to allow sunlight access and biophysical improvement of water quality and habitat attributes (American Rivers, n.d.).

This is a brief history of stream restoration innovations in terms of concepts, publications and other contributions. The following section will look at government programs that supported or hindered stream restoration/revitalization.

Historical chronology of government programs

The 1800s to early 1900s in the U.S. saw the early jurisdictional development of U.S. government agencies, which were beginning to be more and more involved with water resource management. In 1802 Congress established the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACOE) to do surveying and military construction work. In 1824 Congress gave the USACOE a civil works mission involving waterway navigation management, and in 1879 the Mississippi River Commission was established to address basin-wide navigation and water management issues.

By 1898 the U.S. Forest Service had actually started watershed conservation practices and the Bureau of Reclamation was established with the 1902 Federal Reclamation Act. As previously mentioned, Teddy Roosevelt convened the Conference on Natural Resources in 1908, which begat the Natural Conservation Commission in 1909—the first national agency to address natural resource conservation in coordinated fashion. In 1927 Congress expanded the USACOE jurisdiction with the Rivers and Harbors Act and there was limited acceptance...