The WaterLine Project is the re-envisioning of our urban waterways as connective public park space; as one part floating active transit system complete with walking trails and bike paths and one part floating living bio-remediation wetland.  The system is accomplished through a modular and scalable kit-of-parts applicable to the ecological and trail based systems.

The Dilemma

The WaterLine addresses a local and global need to increase collective health and well-being, revitalize shoreline communities, and restore waterways.   

Once the main artery for the movement of people and goods; historically an essential element for the birth and growth of any city, the modern urban waterway has been largely abandoned.  Mid-century development patterns pushed freeways to the waters edge, exploiting the clear right of way as the most cost effective means of expanding transitways.    Hard edges, masonry embankments and steel sheet-piles, once built for industry and shipping remain; a sterile edge leaving scarce ecological habitat.  By their inhospitable nature, these blighted urban spaces are destined to remain vacant and polluted.  The WaterLine seeks to reclaim these areas for the displaced habitat and species, including homo sapiens.

In America, four of the leading five causes of death are directly related to obesity and lack of exercise. The fifth is accidents. 37.5% of the adults in America are obese (estimated medical cost of $150 Billion annually) and only 48% of the population meet the Center for Disease Control’s physical activity guidelines. Our infrastructure centers around the automobile, and workers have taken advantage of their speed and convenience by moving out of town, opting to commute by freeway. That trend is reversing as people look to urban centers as neighborhoods of opportunity, yet congestion, dangerous road conditions, and personal safety concerns conspire to have people drive often very short distances to work. By providing urban residents with beautiful, safe, direct, interconnected bicycle and pedestrian commute routes, The Waterline encourages folks to park their car and jump-start their metabolism instead.

Most of our nation’s and indeed the world’s greatest cities were built on the shores of a waterway. Our shorelines are by their very nature a place for reflection and solitude, recreation and exercise. People are drawn to the water and encounters with nature alleviate mental fatigue, improve cognitive function, encourage learning, lessen symptoms of Alzheimers, Dementia, stress, and Depression, encourage socialization in children and reduce symptoms of Attention Deficit Disorder. Unfortunately, our urban shorelines are ill-suited to provide these benefits. The Waterline will reverse the current downward spiral of misuse and blight by attracting people to these forgotten areas which will in turn attract investment and rejuvenation.  

Our urban waterways bear the scars of our industrial adolescence and outdated infrastructure.  Possibly the most troubling and ubiquitous source of pollution, untreated sewage, finds its way into our waterways, it is officially and oxy-moronically termed a “Sanitary Sewer Overflow”. Roughly 40,000 of these occur annually in the US, typically as a result of heavy rainfall.  Generally speaking, it is easiest to collect pollutants in areas where they are the most concentrated, and our urban waterways are exactly these areas. In conjunction with efforts to decrease future pollution events, The Waterline is designed to harness the power of Nature’s most prolific restorative forces, plants and bacteria, to jump start recovery.

The System

The WaterLine System is the creation of an off the shelf toolkit for designers, urban planners, and municipalities to apply to a range of modern urban challenges.  The traditional model for rehabilitating waterfronts involves modifying the hard built edge of a waterway, an approach that is expensive and disruptive.  By tackling the problem with a floating system, the physical intervention is minimal, while the impact can be almost immediate and far reaching.  When paired with the utilization of a modular and scale-able approach, the system can be quickly shipped, modified, and or interchanged; adaptive to changing needs.  For the public, components can be added or removed as demand and capacity necessitates, similarly bio-remediation elements can be transitioned and interchanged as the river is cleaned and ecologies mature.  This kit of parts approach allows for the design to be suitable for a wide range of challenges, from a missing urban link connector, to a remediator park and jogging trail, or a more extensive active transit corridor and wetland; the variety of response and capacity to adapt over time is limited only by the resourcefulness of the design team.  The success of the system will inevitably be linked towards not just the resolution of a singular issue, but the comprehensive layered response towards transit, ecological restoration, and urban rejuvenation.