Streams In Cities Research Articles

"Slum Clearance" in 1890s Wellington

In 1892, a remarkable map of Wellington was completed. Stretching from Thorndon in the north to Berhampore to the south, and taking in the teeming inner-city areas of Te Aro and Newtown, the remnants of Māori kāinga, the town belt, the Basin Reserve, the prison, "lunatic asylum" and hospital, reclamations and every street in between. The map, drawn by engineer and surveyor Thomas Ward, is actually 103 maps, drawn on A1 sheets. On the map, the exact footprint of every single building in Wellington is recorded every commercial building and house, every garden shed and outdoor toilets. Bay windows and verandahs are carefully drawn. Data is recorded for every building, including how many rooms it contains, what the roof and walls are made of and how many storeys it has. Legal titles are exactly mapped, as are the city's streams and even the street lights. Once complete, one full pristine set of the maps was set aside and preserved intact. Another set of the maps was updated regularly, for approximately the next ten years. For that decade, we can follow every change in the city, down to the smallest detail such as the replacement of slate rooves with corrugated iron, but also bigger-scale work such as the reconfiguration of whole streets.
 The Thomas Ward map is a touchstone for the history of our city. It is used every day by Wellington's archaeologists and historians. Wellington City Council provides the map online as an digital overlay over modern satellite images of the city, allowing us to compare the city of 1892 to the city of today. A well-known feature of the history of Wellington in the 1890s was the outbreak of typhoid and other diseases in the inner-city, a result of overcrowding and lack of clean water. To combat this, a number of "slum clearances" were ordered by the city council, resulting in whole streets of working-class houses being demolished. This paper, a part of a much larger project, will examine some of the stories shown in the two sets of maps, with a particular focus of the changed landscape of the inner-city brought about by this "slum clearance" work of the 1890s.

Política urbana da cidade de Ponta Grossa/ PR: a ordenação do solo urbano e a sua relação com os recursos hídricos

Na cidade de Ponta Grossa a dinâmica entre ordenação territorial e questão ambiental é peculiar, pois conta com 170 km de arroios no perímetro urbano e grande parte está canalizada, indicando a lógica de desenvolvimento pretendida. Sob a perspectiva crítica dos estudos urbanos, este artigo descreve e analisa o percurso dos arroios da cidade e seu entendimento perante a legislação urbana municipal. Por meio de pesquisa qualitativa, aliada à pesquisa bibliográfica e documental com o uso de legislações e mapas, demonstrou-se que os arroios da cidade não se destacam na legislação urbana e ambiental do município, impactando no desenvolvimento urbano.

Deforestation and sewage effects on aquatic macroinvertebrates in urban streams in Manaus, Amazonas, Brazil

In the last few years, awareness in developed countries has increased regarding the importance of urban watercourses as essential natural resources for human well being. Macro- invertebrates have been used as bioindicators to complement physico-chemical evaluation of water quality after environmental perturbations. The city of Manaus is closely associated with the Amazonian rain forest and with its dense hydro- graphic network. Any perturbation, such as deforestation and/or water pollution in the city's streams, therefore causes changes in the local ecosystem as the population increases. In this study, 65 streams were sampled in October and November 2003. Samples were taken from stream- bed sediment in the center of the channel and litter/sediment at the edge of the stream. Defor- estation, total Nitrogen (TN), total Phosphorus (TP), depth, width, electrical conductivity, tem- perature and dissolved Oxygen (DO) were mea- sured. A total of 115,549 specimens were collected, distributed among 152 taxa. Oligocha- eta, Chironomus, Psychodidae and Ceratopogon- idae were the taxa with the greatest frequencies of occurrence and the highest total abundances. Higher deforestation, TN and TP were correlated with lower DO and greater electrical conductivity, pH and water temperature. Deforestation, TN and TP were not associated with water velocity and stream width. Depth was the only variable