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MIT NORMAN B. LEVENTHAL CENTER FOR ADVANCED URBANISM
FIGURE 1
Buffalo Bayou during the
INTRODUCTION
major April 2016 floods in
Houston with downtown in
Drivers for Change
the background.
PC: Elliott Blackburn, CC
American cities face interrelated threats to their water systems:
BY-NC-ND 2.0
stormwater pollution (causing impairment in 121,000 miles of the nation’s
rivers), flooding (costing $2.4 billion in 2014 alone), and water scarcity
(expected in 40 states within the next 10 years).1 [Figure 1] The increase in
these threats is partly the result of having lost half of the nation’s wetlands
since colonization.2 In some places, the loss is often dramatic: over 95
percent loss in Los Angeles County, and 30 percent in Harris County
(metro Houston) between 1992 and 2010 alone.3
Historically, the response to these threats has been to eliminate natural
systems and build costly engineered infrastructure predicated on the false
notion that nature could be predicted, controlled, and ordered. [Figure 2]
In doing so, the result has often been exacerbated risk in cities, instead
of the assured protection that was originally intended.4 As the mistakes
of the past amount to greater vulnerability, cities need a new paradigm
of water infrastructure that responds to the real patterns of nature, which
often remain unpredictable and uncertain in spite of our scientific and
technological advancements.
Today’s cities face unprecedented urban flooding that have led many
to rethink the role and value of soft infrastructures such as wetlands to
capture and treat stormwater. Cities are building constructed wetlands
for capturing stormwater, an infrastructure type that began in the 1980s
as a derivative of agricultural wastewater treatment wetlands created by
civil engineers.5 The wastewater engineering origin of the stormwater
wetland remains visible today in its utilitarian aesthetic and function.
Even as landscape architects have become more involved in such projects,
the design and physical manifestation of stormwater wetlands remains
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PROJECT PRIMERS
FIGURE 3 We will also explore ways to create a citywide wetland network that
Los Angeles GIS analysis of offers opportunities for recreation, resiliency features, economic activities,
stormwater infrastructure, water re-use, conservation areas, and raised real estate values. Finally, the
natural hydrologic network, research will be summarized and translated into design guidelines that
watershed boundaries, soil
will articulate the principles behind the optimal designs and how they
conditions, rainfall patterns,
floodplains, land use, operate at the metropolitan scale.
existing open spaces, and The project is based on the work of Professors Alan Berger and Heidi
vacant lands. Nepf in designing agricultural wastewater treatment wetlands for the
Pontine Marshes in Italy.10 The large-scale urban context of wetland design
and application to stormwater comes from Celina Balderas Guzmán’s
Masters thesis at MIT.11
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PROJECT PRIMERS
preferences for landscapes that look healthy and complex, but also orderly
and ‘natural.’16 Achieving these attributes requires more than attending to
the engineering performance of a wetland; successful wetland projects
need careful landscape design and regular maintenance to earn public
acceptance.
Furthermore, cities face a learning curve with operating and maintaining
landscape infrastructure. The skills, equipment, and knowledge required to
care for storm pipes and treatment plants is different than those required to
care for dynamic wetland landscapes. Cities have run on the former model
for many decades. Yet because no city yet relies on green infrastructure at
a large scale, little precedent or knowledge exists for the latter. Although
cities are interested in stormwater wetlands, they are also hesitant to build
such projects because of negative perceptions and the economic and
political risk involved with building a new infrastructural type.
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PROJECT PRIMERS
FIGURE 5
ADVANCED URBANISM MODELS Plan of Olmsted’s Back Bay
Fens in Boston.
Source: Olmsted Archives,
Principles & Theories
National Park Service
The overarching principle is the seamless integration between
landscape architectural design and fluid mechanics engineering, carried out
by the simultaneous development of hydrologic function, design ideation,
and recreational programming, in a replicable wetland cell. If successful,
urban wetlands can be used to address water resiliency issues and open
space needs of cities simultaneously in the age of climate-change induced
flooding.
Precedents
Currently, there are no precedents for wetland projects that demonstrate
the above principles. Wetland projects led by engineers, such as the South
Los Angeles Wetland Park, offer a conventional wetland design with a
perimeter trail. Although the performance of the wetland is closely tracked,
it does need to be supplemented with drinking water in the dry season,
which has made the project controversial. Wetland projects led by designers,
such as Turenscape’s large-scale wetland projects in China, offer a lot of
urban amenities and supposedly offer flood protection and water treatment
benefits, however, the performance of these wetlands is not tracked.
The closest precedent for this project is the work of Frederick Law
Olmsted in the nineteenth century, who brilliantly merged performance,
program, and aesthetics into his landscape projects, including the Back
Bay Fens in Boston and Central Park in New York City. However, there is
one important difference between the work of Olmsted and this project:
Olmsted hid the performative aspects of his landscape through his English-
derived naturalistic aesthetic.20 A new aesthetic can be found that is not
wholly imitating nature nor seeking to hide the performative functions of
the landscape. [Figure 5]
TaylorYard TaylorYard
to Downtown
to Downtown
Downtown
Downtown
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PROJECT PRIMERS
Endnotes
1 “National Water Quality Inventory: Report to Congress” (Environmental Protection
Agency, 2004), http://water.epa.gov/lawsregs/guidance/cwa/305b/
upload/2009_05_20_305b_2004report_report2004pt1.pdf; United States
Government Accountability Office, “Freshwater: Supply Concerns Continue,
and Uncertainties Complicate Planning,” May 2014; National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration, “United States Flood Loss Report- Water Year
2014,” n.d., http://www.nws.noaa.gov/hic/summaries/WY2014.pdf.
2 Thomas E Dahl and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Status and Trends of Wetlands
in the Conterminous United States 2004 to 2009 (Washington, D.C.: U.S.
Dept. of the Interior, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Fisheries and Habitat
Conservation, 2011), 16.
3 “The Greater Los Angeles County Open Space for Habitat and Recreation Plan”
(Greater Los Angeles County Integrated Regional Water Management Plan,
June 2012), 17, http://www.ladpw.org/wmd/irwmp/docs/Prop84/GLAC_
OSHARP_Report_Final.pdf; John S. Jacob et al., “Houston-Area Freshwater
Wetland Loss, 1992-2010” (Texas Coastal Watershed Program, n.d.), http://
tcwp.tamu.edu/files/2015/06/WetlandLossPub.pdf.
4 Jared Orsi, Hazardous Metropolis: Flooding and Urban Ecology in Los Angeles
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).
6 Ibid.; Andrew Karvonen, Politics of Urban Runoff: Nature, Technology, and the
Sustainable City (MIT Press, 2011), http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt5hhm9z.
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PROJECT PRIMERS
10 Peter Dizikes, “Using Plants to Purify Canal Water,” MIT News, April 7, 2010,
http://news.mit.edu/2010/italy-water-0407.
18 The two key federal sources are the State Clean Water Revolving Fund and the
Drinking Water Revolving Fund. Patrick Ambrosio, “President Proposes Cut
To EPA Funding for Fiscal Year 2015,” Bloomberg, March 6, 2014, http://www.
bloomberg.com/news/2014-03-06/president-proposes-cut-to-epa-funding-
for-fiscal-year-2015.html; OCFO US EPA, “FY 2015 Budget,” Overviews and
Factsheets, accessed January 25, 2015, http://www2.epa.gov/planandbudget/
fy2015; Ronald White, “Congress Slashes EPA Budget Again Despite Strong
Public Support for Strengthening Health Protections | Center for Effective
Government,” accessed January 25, 2015, http://www.foreffectivegov.org/
blog/congress-slashes-epa-budget-again-despite-strong-public-support-
strengthening-health-protection.
20 1. Anne Whiston Spirn, “The Poetics of City and Nature: Towards a New
Aesthetic for Urban Design,” Landscape Journal 7, no. 2 (1988): 108–26.
21 M.J. Vanaskie, R.D. Myers, and J.T. Smullen, “Planning-Level Cost Estimates
for Green Stormwater Infrastructure in Urban Watersheds,” 2010, 547–58,
doi:10.1061/41099(367)48; Carolyn Kousky et al., “Strategically Placing
Green Infrastructure: Cost-Effective Land Conservation in the Floodplain,”
Environmental Science & Technology 47, no. 8 (April 16, 2013): 3563–70,
doi:10.1021/es303938c; See the chapter “The Cost & Value of Constructed
Wetlands,” Balderas Guzmán, “Strategies for Systemic Urban Constructed
Wetlands,” 107–13.
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