Politics of Urban Runoff: Building Relations through Active Citizenship - Politics of Urban Runoff: Nature, Technology, and the Sustainable City - page 174

and technical, with community action resulting in a new form of relational
politics that is distinct from conventional landscape architecture practice.
In Austin, civic politics related to urban runoff are nascent at best. One
of the most fully developed examples is the Country Club Creek Trail, a
project birthed from a municipality-led neighborhood planning project
in the early 2000s. Building on the momentum of the rational planning
activities, a small group of residents in the East Riverside and Oltorf
neighborhoods of southeast Austin began meeting in 2004 to plan and
construct a hike-and-bike trail that would follow Country Club Creek
and connect the green spaces in their neighborhood. The group received
donations of materials and money from area businesses, the Austin Parks
Foundation, and Keep Austin Beautiful, and as of January 2011, about
one mile of trail had been built by volunteer labor. The municipal govern-
ment has maintained a limited role in the trail project, helping to acquire
a recreational easement for the project and to remove trash collected
by volunteers. 77 At this point, the project is simply a trail, but it has the
potential to open this neglected urban space to alternative notions of
human/nature relations while engaging residents in political activities that
are deliberative and constructive.
In contrast to Austin, Seattle offers several examples of community-
based projects that forward a civic politics of urban runoff. Two of the
most notable of these projects are the Longfellow Creek Legacy Trail and
Growing Vine Street, both of which are described in detail in the follow-
ing paragraphs. These projects demonstrate the potential for urban water
to catalyze new forms of political organization that embrace a relational
perspective of urban nature while involving very different forms of citizen-
ship, governance, and expertise.
Since the early twentieth century, Longfellow Creek has served as the
primary spine for urban drainage in the Delridge neighborhood of West
Seattle. After World War II, the stream channel was straightened and ar-
mored to make way for single-family residential development; today, the
overall impervious surface coverage of the watershed is 52 percent. 78 About
half of the watershed is served by a combined sewer network and the other
half consists of separated or partially separated sewer networks and infor-
mal ditch-and-culvert networks (the latter two networks discharge directly
into the creek). There is little high-quality instream habitat in Longfellow
Creek due to encroachment of development on the riparian zones, and
signifi cant portions of the creek have been routed through underground
pipes, including the headwaters (to make way for a shopping center in
the 1950s) and the mouth of the creek (to accommodate industrial and