Re-seeing the Waterfront

Seattle is in the midst of a fierce debate about the future of its waterfront. It’s aging seawall needs to be replaced, a project the Mayor wants to take to the voters in a $241 million ballot measure. An elevated freeway — the Viaduct — that currently runs along the waterfront is structurally unsafe, and Seattle’s in the middle a long battle about whether and how to replace it, with the Governor currently favoring a deep-bore tunnel for a bypass freeway and others favoring switching to a model based on transit and the existing street grid instead. Several major upcoming projects at the Port of Seattle will remake the waterfront as well. On top of all this, rising seas are going to demand that extensive protective measures be built all along Seattle’s shorelines in order to protect low-lying areas from floods during storms and high tides.

So, Seattle’s going to be redefining its connection to the ocean, like many other coastal cities (just more so). Done really wrong, vast amounts of money will be wasted on infrastructure and development not resilient enough to handle the stormy century ahead. Even done “right” though, the sea walls and flood defenses we need could end up cutting the people of Seattle off from the sea on whose shores we live, while worsening the already serious ecological plight of Puget Sound.

One frequently proposed answer is building “soft” coastlines and habitat at today’s sea level: building rising beaches and planting sea grass and other restoration efforts. This may not be smart, given what we know about sea level rise and its risks: it may neither provide the long-term protections we need or the climate-adaptive restoration that reality demands.

At the same time, we do want to reconnect with the ocean as maritime people, so we don’t want a coastal Berlin Wall either. Whether that connection demands recreated salmon habitat we know is doomed to be submerged in short order, well, I don’t think so. But we could get more creative. We could use the entire waterfront as a sort of giant window into the marine world, providing observable flows (rainwater running off through green infrastructure, for instance) tools for making visible the invisible (art projects that illuminate data pulled from sensors, like the work Sabrina Raaf does, or a walking trail that follows the life cycle of salmon, or some sort of urban habitat wildlife encounter project (ala Natalie Jeremijenko) and efforts to flow the ecological reality underfoot into the augmented reality that is becoming urban life (imagine that every time an augmented view screen turned towards the sound, it revealed news about the seasonal life beneath the ocean’s surface, or that every sewer drain carried a tag about where its overflow dumped into the Bay). Perhaps, even, residents could in some way “play” the waterfront, helping different visions of our shoreline emerge through their actions and attention.

Some will say that we need that shoreline to be habitat, but I think efforts to make cities behave like nature can be misguided. The vast majority of a city’s impact happens outside its city limits, and often far more good can be done by changing a city’s footprint than trying to change its physical structure. I think a city full of citizens more deeply connected culturally to the waters of their home place is a much bigger win than a few hundred yards of incredibly expensive artificial habitat. Though perhaps you can have both.

The point being that we may be thinking both too literally about ecological connection and too timidly about climate adaption, and any real answer to both may demand that we change as much in our heads as at the water’s edge.

(image: creative commons, Beaster)

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(Posted by Alex Steffen in Biodiversity and Ecosystems at 3:15 PM)

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