Reasserting the Place of Nature in Seattle’s Urban Creeks - Politics of Urban Runoff: Nature, Technology, and the Sustainable City - page 136

Program would be a municipal approach to reveal the connections be-
tween nature and Seattle residents, even if the rehabilitation of urban
salmon populations was not a realistic outcome. The approach repre-
sented a unique form of environmental protection whose end goal was
public education and infrastructure improvement rather than biological
restoration and protection. Schell effectively translated the metropolitan
nature rhetoric from the late nineteenth century to fi t with emerging no-
tions of sustainable urban development while tapping into the growing
enthusiasm for urban creek restoration that began in the 1960s. Refl ect-
ing on the importance of urban creek restoration activities in Seattle, a
local journalist argues: “It turns the environment from an abstract ideal
to a stomping ground city people can see every day. Seattle's creeks are
potential refuges not just for salmon but for creatures that range from deer
and eagles to algae and aquatic insects. They are places of meditation and
retreat. They are outdoor classrooms. They are fi lters for runoff. They are
corridors for both hikers and wildlife. They are where we teach our kids
to pick a future.” 42
To initiate the Urban Creeks Legacy Program, Schell asked SPU staff
members to develop a pilot project that would reduce the impact of urban
runoff on receiving creeks. 43 SPU staff recognized that the City of Seattle
was almost completely built up and rather than focus on greenfi eld pro-
tection, the most promising opportunity for intervention lay in leveraging
the public rights-of-way that comprise 25 percent of the city's land area. 44
It was here, in the public corridors of the city, where SPU could apply its
technical expertise with municipal funding to rework the relationship
between Seattleites and nature. Rather than continue to rely upon the
conventional engineering approach of taming and controlling nature, this
was an opportunity to develop a new logic of urban drainage that traced
the problems and solutions of urban drainage back to the source. The
result was the Natural Drainage Systems (NDS) approach.
The NDS approach mimics the preurban forested condition as closely
as possible but does not adopt the aesthetic look of the forest. 45 Similar
to Low Impact Development and source control strategies mentioned in
chapter 2, the NDS approach involves strategies of infi ltration, fl ow at-
tenuation, fi ltration, bioremediation with soil and plants, reduction of
impervious surface coverage, and provision of pedestrian amenities. It
integrates expertise from civil and environmental engineering, landscape
architecture, ecological planning, and biology to reimagine the water me-
tabolisms of the city. The emergence of source control as an alternative
drainage strategy suggests that urban water fl ows should not be directed by