Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Its parks, parkways, and playgrounds reflect evolving ideas about the need
to counterbalance the regimentation of urban life with outdoor recreation
and contact with nature. Recent improvements to air and water quality,
along with plans to restore species and habitat, underscore the growing
influence of environmentalism and ecological sciences.
Not every new idea about urban nature was transmitted into physical
form, however. Nor was every change to the local environment desired or
anticipated. Some reconceptualizations of Washington's nature were too
vague, too impractical, or too controversial to produce significant physical
results. Bureaucratic constraints, financial limitations, and political differ-
ences delayed the implementation of many proposals for decades or more.
Some significant alterations to Washington's ecology and topography were
both unplanned and unwelcome—most notably the siltation of the
Potomac that transformed the formerly robust river into a torpid, foul-
smelling mud flat by the middle of the nineteenth century. Dramatic feats
of civil engineering were required to restore the river to a semblance of its
original configuration, and landscape architects labored for decades to cre-
ate the waterfront parks and parkways that strike most modern observers as
fortuitous survivals of an earlier, more natural and authentic era in the his-
tory of the nation's capital.
Washington is by no means unique in this regard.The seemingly natural
elements of most American cities are products of prolonged and extensive
human interventions.The cultural construction of urban nature has ranged
from the creation of impressive showpieces such as NewYork's Central Park
and Boston's Emerald Necklace, with their elaborate displays of artistry,
botany, civil engineering, and sociological experimentation, to the more
mundane and often forgotten reconfigurations of topography and hydrol-
ogy that transformed heterogeneous amalgams of swamps, streams, hills, and
valleys into orderly and disciplined metropolises.The cultural construction
of urban nature reflects shifting intellectual fashions, changing recreational
patterns, base economic concerns, and broad-based technical and legislative
developments such as the evolution of metropolitan water and sewer
authorities, scientific research and legal statutes aimed at promoting clean
air and water, and appropriations to acquire, develop, and maintain play-
grounds and park systems. Zoos, botanical gardens, museums, research and
educational institutions, media productions, and outdoor-oriented busi-
nesses also contribute to the totality of urban nature, as do private landown-
ers, associations, and political groups. Everyone who ventures into a city's
