Reasserting the Place of Nature in Seattle’s Urban Creeks - Politics of Urban Runoff: Nature, Technology, and the Sustainable City - page 128

urban corridor situated to the west of the Cascade Mountains. The City of
Seattle responded by initiating a comprehensive planning process, and in
1994 released its twenty-year vision, Toward a Sustainable Seattle . 19 The
comprehensive plan was based on values of environmental stewardship,
social equity, economic opportunity, and community, with an emphasis
on channeling development into urban villages and centers. The municipal
government then invited neighborhood organizations to develop their own
local plans to comply with the goals of the comprehensive plan. Almost
20,000 citizens participated in the development of thirty-eight neighbor-
hood plans over a period of fi fteen months in 1998 and 1999 to delineate
how each neighborhood would grow over the next twenty years. In short,
it was an unprecedented participatory planning effort. Although the neigh-
borhood plans were not legally binding, they required new development
proposals that were at odds with plan goals to go through a review and
revision process. 20
Not surprisingly, urban environmental restoration was a signifi cant fo-
cus of neighborhood planning efforts. Residents singled out creeks, parks,
and open spaces as places where nonhuman elements of the city resided
and as important places to restore and protect. In 1992, Mayor Rice
acknowledged the signifi cance of nature in the city in his introduction to
the two-year Environmental Priorities Program:
We must incorporate an ethic of environmental stewardship into everything we
do. Some people think that the words “urban environment” are a contradiction in
terms. I disagree. While our city is widely—and justifi ably—recognized as a leader
in urban environmental management, there are opportunities for improvement
and actions we can take that would make Seattle even more of a model for other
cities. . . . I consider environmental protection and enhancement to be an integral
piece of the overall urban agenda. It is not separate from our efforts to improve
our schools, our neighborhoods, our economy, our transportation system, and our
public safety—it is part of them. 21
Rice embraced a relational perspective that recognized humans and
the built environment as part of rather than separate from nature. He
understood the growing importance of urban creeks to those residents
who lived adjacent to them, singling out urban runoff as “perhaps the
most pervasive and diffi cult to control water quality problem” in Seattle. 22
Refl ecting on this time period, a municipal staff member notes, “There
was a tremendous amount of mobilization around particular creeks be-
cause they were local, they were literally their backyards.” 23 The creeks
would become a perfect place to direct the energies of self-governance and
reverence for nature.