Restoring nature in the city: Puget Sound experiences

Abstract

Restoring nature within American urban areas seems basic to sustainability both in theory ( Hough, 1995) and in practice ( Sustainable Seattle, 1993). In addition to applicable science, restoration of urban green areas requires two complementary efforts, (1) a plan or process to locate and to rank potential restoration sites and (2) an understanding of how restoration designs will be accepted, and therefore, maintained by nearby residents. The urban Puget Sound region of Washington state has a 10 year history of stream restoration to improve salmonid habitats. This discussion reports on two regional research studies, one dealing with planning (Liberty Bay), the other with restoration design (Urban Streams). The first project, Liberty Bay, studied the feasibility of combining existing physical and political/social data to locate and rank potential restoration sites using a geographic information system. The study area was a small (<4000 ha) urbanizing watershed surrounding a polluted shellfish bay. The Liberty Bay study demonstrate the feasibility and identified the limits of combining physical data with social and political information. The second study, Urban Streams, is an ongoing, multidisciplinary effort to evaluate the efficacy of regional urban stream restoration as to stream dynamics, biotic conditions and human responses. The human response part of the Urban Streams study has two components. One is to analyze visual preferences for stream restoration engineering techniques. Salisbury (1997)used photo-simulated images of a proposed design to survey preferences. Her results demonstrated that respondents could differentiate various restoration designs based on their visual texture (rough to refined) and had clear preferences for the `refined' scenes in this urban regional context. The other study direction is to identify and evaluate human behavior toward urban streams. Initial results of this effort show that the majority of observed behaviors toward urban streams is negative. This result is disconcerting given the fact that the Puget Sound region has a reputation for a high degree of environmental sensitivity.