Reasserting the Place of Nature in Seattle’s Urban Creeks - Politics of Urban Runoff: Nature, Technology, and the Sustainable City - page 139

and anecdotal evidence suggests that residents have benefi ted from higher
property values.
In terms of hydrologic performance, the new street design reduced
impervious cover by 11 percent. Researchers from the University of Wash-
ington's Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering monitored
the drainage performance in 2001 and 2002 and noted that “the project
has the ability to attenuate all or almost all runoff over a fairly wide range
of conditions.” 53 Except for very heavy and infrequent rainfalls, the swales
are able to infi ltrate all stormwater runoff. Furthermore, stormwater fl ow
velocities downstream in Piper's Creek were reduced by 20 percent and
the system has withstood a number of signifi cant winter storms in sub-
sequent years. 54
There was initial concern by some SEA Street residents that the pro-
totype design was inferior to the traditional curb-and-gutter design and
thus did not constitute a genuine street improvement; there were also
complaints about the reduced number of parking spaces on the street. 55
However, the negative perceptions of the project have largely dissipated as
residents on the street (as well as adjacent streets) have begun to use the
right-of-way in new ways. 56 An SPU staff member notes, “From a social
perspective, the use of the street has changed. It has turned into essentially
a public walking space. People with kids and their training wheels per-
ceive it as a safe place to go for a walk. It's dramatic.” 57 SEA Street is not
merely an upgrade to the city's drainage network; it completely reinvents
the aesthetic and functional qualities of public rights-of-way. The project
serves the dual purpose of restoring the natural hydrologic function of
the urbanized watershed while increasing residents' understanding of the
natural processes in which they live. 58 It is a noteworthy example of what
landscape architects call “eco-revelatory design,” in which the goal is to
highlight the connections between the human and nonhuman through a
process of revealing and marking. 59
The reimagined streetscape restores some of the historical functions of
urban streets from times before streetcars and automobiles transformed
these social spaces into transportation conduits. Refl ecting on the impor-
tance of public spaces such as streets and sidewalks, environmental phi-
losopher Avner de-Shalit argues that “they represent the city, its culture,
its self-image, and its thick idea of the good more than anything else.” 60
Urban theorist Stanford Anderson goes further, interpreting streets as re-
lational spaces in the contemporary city: “The intermediate position of
streets in the environment, intersecting public and private, individual and
society, movement and place, built and unbuilt, architecture and planning,