Rivertown: Rethinking Urban Rivers

Edited by Paul Stanton Kibel

The MIT Press, 2007, 216 pp., $22 paperback

Of the six riverfronts carefully examined in this book, the one with the most exciting prospects is the Anacostia — sometimes referred to as Washington, DC’s “other river.” Much less well-known than the Potomac, the Anacostia flows through eastern parts of the nation’s capital for seven miles — past public housing projects, poverty-stricken neighborhoods, and highways that impede residents’ access to the river.

After decades of pollution, the river is going to be cleaned up, and there are big plans for land near its banks. In 2000, Mayor Anthony Williams forged a partnership between the city government and federal agencies that owned land along the river. Eventually the partnership may generate as many as 15,000 new housing units in mixed-income development, without displacement of existing residents.

Other sections of the District have experienced a burst of housing, retail, and office development in the past several years, as Washington became a better-governed, more appealing city. The result, writes Uwe Steven Brandes, is that “the capacity of Washington to grow is now inextricably linked to recentering its growth in the coming decades around the Anacostia River.” Brandes, strategic adviser to the Anacostia Waterfront Corp., says development near the neglected river “has the potential to reunite the capital city economically, physically, and socially.”

Brandes’s chapter on Anacostia is one of the several case studies, by various authors, that make up most of Rivertown: Rethinking Urban Rivers. In each study, the writers present the history of a mistreated river corridor, examine planning that’s taken place over the decades, and lay out possibilities for the future.

In Salt Lake City, the focus is on City Creek, which was put into an underground culvert in 1909 to “protect the water supply and prevent accidental drowning.” Now a mile and a half of it is to be reexposed, reports Ron Love, a public works technical planner for the city. The “daylighted” section of the creek is to begin near a brownfield site that has been cleaned and redeveloped into 90 shops and restaurants, a planetarium, movie theaters, convention space, and 12 stories of condominiums. Ten thousand residential units are envisioned nearby.

In San Jose, California, the goal is improvement of the Guadalupe River corridor, which runs through downtown. In Illinois, Christopher Theriot and Kelly Tzoumis look at the Chicago River and Ship Canal, parts of which used to be so foul that people didn’t want to live nearby — a common theme with urban rivers. In recent years, several factors, including the closing of riverside industries and stockyards, have improved the water’s quality, and the river is increasingly lined with luxury residential development and riverfront trails.

The Los Angeles River in southern California is a particularly tough challenge. For decades the Army Corps of Engineers and the Los Angeles County Department of Public Works have viewed the river channel as little more than a device for controlling flooding and carrying discharges from sewage treatment plants. One Public Works official repeatedly refused to call it a “river.” To him, it was simply a “flood-control channel.” The obstacles to reviving it remain substantial, but if the ideas described by Robert Gottlieb and Andrea Misako Azuma are realized, the river corridor may yet transcend the limited purposes of Public Works.

One message of this book is that the Army Corps of Engineers continues to be a major problem, despite extensive exposure of wrongheaded things the Corps has done. The sharpest essay in Rivertown is by Melissa Samet, director of American Rivers’ Army Corps Reform Campaign. She writes: “The most intractable problem with the Army Corps’ planning process may be the agency’s overriding institutional bias for recommending large and environmentally damaging structural projects.”

Samet points out that instead of reinforcing levees at the edge of New Orleans after Hurricane Betsy in 1965, “the Army Corps planned an elaborate new system stretching miles into uninhabited wetlands” and used “the improved property valued from the wetlands drained by the project to justify the project’s significant cost (estimated in 1978 at $409 million).” The consequence, she says, is that “many of the wetlands that were developed as a result of the project became the eastern Orleans Parish neighborhoods that suffered the brunt of Katrina’s flooding.”

Clearly, reclamation of urban rivers is still not an easy task. But it’s essential that it be pursued aggressively. When urban rivers revive, so do the cities through which they flow.