Politics of Urban Runoff: Building Relations through Active Citizenship - Politics of Urban Runoff: Nature, Technology, and the Sustainable City - page 179

The most visible element of Growing Vine Street is the Beckoning Cis-
tern, a ten-foot-tall, six-foot-diameter blue steel tank that tilts toward
Geise's historic building. The cistern is a hybrid of sculpture and infra-
structure, with “fi ngers” that reach out from the top to a downspout
on the building, mimicking the hand of Adam reaching out to God on
the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. 98 The building's occupants use the rain-
water collected in the cistern for their rooftop gardens. An earlier project
on the same historic building is the Downspout-Plant Life Monitoring
System constructed by Simpson in 1978. The existing downspout from
the building was inverted to create planters for native ferns, resulting in a
vertical landscape where none existed. One block closer to Puget Sound, a
more traditional stormwater project called Cistern Steps was constructed
in 2003, extending the P-Patch into the street with a set of marshy steps
(fi gure 7.2). Not surprisingly, there were diffi culties in navigating the com-
plex layers of municipal codes and regulations, but the team had an ally
in Mayor Schell, who felt that the neighborhood should receive ameni-
ties because it was accepting increased urban density to comply with the
state's Growth Management Act requirements. The municipal government
contributed $800,000 to the Growing Vine Street project and was assisted
by a volunteer team composed of artists, design professionals, developers,
and community businesses. 99
Like the Longfellow Creek Legacy Trail, the Growing Vine Street
project follows an ecorevelatory design strategy, using hydrologic fl ows
to bring community members together and to reveal the presence of nature
in the city. However, the highly urban context of Growing Vine Street was
devoid of predevelopment drainage patterns; thus, the design team was
given a clean slate on which to design new, albeit artifi cial, drainage pat-
terns. They understood that there was no possibility of salmon populations
ever repopulating the Belltown landscape and their project would have
only minor impacts on the drainage patterns in the city. The logic was
therefore aimed at social learning and heightened awareness of nonhuman
fl ows in a part of the city that is devoid of unbuilt conditions, following
on the goals of the Urban Creeks Legacy Program developed by Mayor
Schell and the municipal government. The Beckoning Cistern and Cistern
Steps also reinterpreted the public right-of-way to be more than driving
lanes, parking spaces, and sidewalks; it was a place for public interaction
and exploration rather than automobiles.
The aforementioned neighborhood-based drainage activities can be
understood as different forms of civic politics, with local residents using
environmental restoration as a means to emphasize different relational