Politics of Urban Runoff: Building Relations through Active Citizenship - Politics of Urban Runoff: Nature, Technology, and the Sustainable City - page 178

acres of land; today, it is the largest municipally run community gardening
program in the United States. 91
An exemplary urban runoff project attached to a community garden is
Growing Vine Street, just north of the central business district and next
to the Belltown P-Patch. Since the mid-1970s, environmental artist Buster
Simpson has used the Belltown neighborhood as his canvas, creating proj-
ects to inspire urban residents to take responsibility for their surroundings.
He has been described as an “agent provocateur” or “trickster” because
he opens up the city to environmental fl ows that urban residents often
fail to acknowledge. 92 Simpson's political outlook is heavily infl uenced by
Seattle's participatory turn in local governance during the 1970s and this
outlook is embodied in his art projects. Refl ecting on the underlying moti-
vation for his work, Simpson writes, “Interventions and temporary proto-
types provide a visible and engaging presence for ideas. This helps keep
the community engaged for a time when collective consensus is needed to
support more ambitious projects.” 93
In the 1980s, Simpson began to collaborate with Belltown community
activists to preserve their community garden space and a series of historic
cottages on an adjacent property. Part of this work involved extending the
community garden out onto Vine Street, a sloping downtown street that
looks out on Puget Sound. Simpson found an ally in Carolyn Geise, a lo-
cal architect who owns a historic building on the street and together, they
championed the Growing Vine Street project in 1996. Simpson describes
the approach to the project as: “defi ning the word 'green' in relation to en-
vironmental sustainability rather than to traditional landscaping. This part
of the city was plumbed to dispose of rain from roofs and hard surfaces
through an antiquated combined sanitary and storm system. We proposed
to redirect this urban watershed and keep it at the surface as an asset
rather than a liability to be fl ushed out of sight. We have put the city on
notice that we see gray water and brown water as the next opportunity.” 94
Simpson and Geise framed Growing Vine Street as an urban laboratory
for stormwater solutions in which greening of urban infrastructure could
be accomplished in conjunction with fostering local community cohesion.
Refl ecting on their design philosophy, Geise writes, “Our motto was, store
the water, enjoy and play with the water, irrigate with the water; do not
just send it down a black hole to get rid of it.” 95 Likewise, Simpson writes
of creating a “crack” or “fi ssure” in the impervious Belltown landscape
to bring stormwater fl ows back to the surface. 96 He writes, “Rather than
fi ghting the infrastructure, we let it reveal itself by working with the exist-
ing conditions and taking the path of least resistance.” 97