Am I My Brother's (river)keeper? the Ripple Effects of a Community- based Stream Restoration

Abstract

Ask any group of students at University of Richmond why they chose UR, and someone will say, “It’s such a beautiful campus!” and every head will nod. The grounds consistently top rankings such as Princeton Review’s Most Beautiful Campuses. The university tour guides will happily share that the picturesque campus was designed by Charles Gillette to be built around Westhampton Lake on the land of a former amusement park, and that it is now listed on the National Register of Historic Places as an archetypal example of Collegiate Gothic architecture. Of course, that’s only part of the story. An ecological stream restoration in a long-ignored portion of campus is helping to daylight both the stream that runs through it and the hidden history that surrounds it (see Fig. 1). We describe how the project has tapped into faculty, student, and community interest and energy to do more than simply remove sediments and nutrients from an unhealthy stream. Using tenets of ecological urbanism (Mostafavi and Doherty 2016), we are actively defining a new hub on campus where conversations about the past, present, and future are occurring around a flowing waterway that embodies the many connections that have come to define the site.

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

10-2022

Publisher Statement

Public is a peer-reviewed, multimedia e-journal focused on humanities, arts, and design in public life. It aspires to connect what we can imagine with what we can do. We are interested in projects, pedagogies, resources, and ideas that reflect rich engagements among diverse participants, organizations, disciplines, and sectors.

Public is published twice a year by Syracuse Unbound, an imprint of Syracuse University Libraries and Syracuse University Press. ISSN 2326-2567 (online)

https://public.imaginingamerica.org/welcome/

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