LAND AS THE RESOURCE - Low Impact Development and Sustainable Stormwater Management - page 52

water transport was the only mode possible. The urban centers that evolved over
the following three centuries began as communities totally dependent on inland
rivers as a source of both potable water supply and commerce. The exploitation
of raw materials from the interior of each watershed, first by clearing of wood-
land and then by cultivation, depended on water transport. As the population
moved inland, following the drainage network, raw materials moved downriver
to commercial centers arrayed along the coastline, from Boston to Charleston to
New Orleans.
The inland waterways served as the primary transportation corridors through
the early nineteenth century, when a brief period of canal building augmented this
system with connecting elements that paralleled rivers or even crossed watershed
boundaries. The river transportation network was enhanced later in the century
by numerous locks on the major rivers that allowed bulk materials, such as
coal and grain, to move from river center to center. These water highways were
soon augmented and in many situations replaced by the rail system that took
form in the mid-nineteenth century. This web of rails developed independent of
any hydrologic constraints and linked the inland communities with the coastal
cities, passing through many watersheds in the process. As the settlement patterns
moved westward, the original waterway-based communities along major rivers
were connected by rail, eventually binding both coastlines with a transportation
grid of steel rather than water. The movement of people and commodities by
wagon and horse did not replace the water and rail systems, but it did develop
transportation pathways that would form the basis of the present roadway system.
The sense of living in a river basin or watershed was quickly lost from the
American consciousness.
During the twentieth century in the United States, land planners, architects,
engineers, and developers focused their energies on the existing urban centers, and
envisioned a future land use pattern that, by and large, was limited to infill with
some regional growth along transit corridors. This land development pattern con-
tinued through the first quarter of the century (Figure 3-3), but following World
War II, the growth patterns literally exploded from the urban core (Figure 3-4), as
new families left the cities and relocated to suburbia, where the dream of “open
space” and modern living met the reality of commuting, traffic, and the sound of
lawn mowers on a summer's morning.
Those who were left behind (or elected to remain in the city) were faced with
increasing crime and decreasing property values. As the economic base changed
from urban centers surrounded by agricultural lands to a dominance of suburban
residential parcels whose occupants work in distant places, the patterns of land
development changed. Within the urban center a process of redevelopment was
initiated in the late twentieth century to keep the city vital, but as manufacturing
and retail moved out to the suburbs, so went the prosperity that had given life to
the cities.
The advent of the auto, of course, was the driving force that changed this
human dynamic. The patterns of development during the past half century have
followed the tire tracks of the highway (Figure 3-5), with residential, commercial,