Conway Urban Watershed Framework Plan

More than half of America's water bodies are unsafe for swimming, fishing, and as sources of drinking. Why? Because of unsustainable city building and poor farming practice. Beyond water quality problems, dysfunctional streams cause flooding and erosion of property, leading to neighbourhood blights. Not only can this be reversed, but repair of degraded urban streams can be a powerful agent for reinventing the physical environments of post-industrial cities.

This requires trans disciplinary collaboration between the fields of ecological engineering and urban design. The American city was uniquely premised on fusions of landscape and urbanism: a tradition with plenty of room for innovation.

However, watershed plans remain data-and-policy-driven documents with a singular interest in repairing waterbodies. They have little to say about the city and urban design. Conversely, urban planning has not codified the value of healthy ecosystems within which cities are built. In this age of the Anthropocene, when most ecosystems are human-dominated, resilient urban design must account for biological processes.

This book introduces watershed management into urban design with one simple demand: that every new development contribute to watershed stewardship, where infrastructure and building deliver ecological services in addition to urban services. The Conway Urban Watershed Framework Plan formulates a planning vocabulary for use among professionals and decision makers to engage this new design market.

Book Features:

• Encourages transdisciplinary communication between city planners, ecological engineers, and political decision makers, to help American cities develop and sustain healthy watersheds
• Addresses a widespread yet rarely acknowledged blight that affects waterholes across the States

184 colour images

About the Author

Originated in 1995 as an outreach centre of the Fay Jones School of Architecture + Design, UACDC has become a respected national authority in urban design and the shaping of the built environment.