Natural Systems

The city of Los Angeles acts as a natural flood basin where the surface flows that come from the Santa Monica and San Gabriel mountain ranges travel across the city to reach the Pacific Ocean. This natural system experiences an occasional 100 year flood, where water reaches extreme levels. In 1938, the city experienced the… Read more »

This event was deemed Southern California’s deadliest flood of the 20th century and was the catalyst in channelizing the river systems within Los Angeles County.By 1938, the “wild west” character of Los Angeles was quickly disappearing due to the rapid pace of urbanization. The population in Los Angeles grew rapidly from 1900 to 1930; there were 102,500 residents in 1900, and by 1930, the census counted 1,238,048 residents. In historic photos from this time, supplied by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, large river beds make up the landscape, formed by the natural paths of the water. Up to this point, few concrete channels had been built and methods of erosion prevention such as gunite banks, pipe and wire, rock paving and rock mattresses were commonly used to tame the rivers.

During early March of 1938, five days of continuous rain fell on Los Angeles. Erosion controls that were in place could not hold the high level of water coming from the mountains. In downtown Los Angeles, Broadway Avenue became a small lake and truck beds were strapped on top of motorboats to carry workers in and out of the area. The Academy Awards were postponed for a week due to excessive flooding. It was unlike anything the city had experienced before.

In the two decades following the 1938 flood, the concrete channelization of the rivers was a major infrastructure project that altered the ecology and identity of the waterway systems. The transformation, documented by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, depicts the phasing of the waterways becoming a single use infrastructure system, which was designed for the sole purpose of discharging stormwater as quickly and safely as possible.

These images show a vast infrastructural and natural water system heavily ingrained within the urban environment. The majority of the time, the channel sits idle, absent of vegetation and a barrier for neighborhoods. Preventive flood measures are necessary yet can there be a more sustainable solution?

In analyzing the potential for multifunctional infrastructures, understanding the natural systems like the flood cycles of the Los Angeles watershed, is an important first step to finding real solutions.

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Posted by YingYuHung
in Landscape Infrastructure
on 30 July, 2012

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When dry, the banks of Houston’s Buffalo Bayou offer open air, green meadows and winding waters for crowds of people to enjoy along with gorgeous skyline views of downtown. While primarily designed to accommodate floodwaters, the large meadows that are formed between the lower and upper bayou banks also host thousands of people during festivals… Read more »

Buffalo Bayou has the distinction of being Houston’s main geographical reference point. Upon Houston’s founding, the city grid was formed to respond to Buffalo Bayou’s circuitous route as the shipping corridor in and out of Houston. While cargo boats no longer travel up Buffalo Bayou and into the city, it remains a major corridor for vehicles and a connection between downtown and urban neighborhoods west of Downtown.

As a major urban park space, Buffalo Bayou attracts residents and visitors every day as they jog, walk dogs, sit by the water or picnic along the water’s upper banks. The bayou’s flood water path sits untouched by development, leaving a long linear park within Houston’s core urban fabric.

As SWA creates the park’s second phase from Sabine Street to Shepherd Drive, frequent flood events are a major consideration. However, they are not a deterrent. Despite the normal rise and fall of the bayou’s waters, the park will go on.

Water will always be an attractive feature for city dwellers, whether it’s a muddy winding bayou, a brackish harbor, or a roaring ocean. With this in mind it seems only natural that Buffalo Bayou acts as a key gathering place for Houston. When dry, the banks of the bayou offer open air, green meadows and winding waters for crowds of people to enjoy along with gorgeous skyline views of downtown. The setting is a unique combination of natural and city features within Houston’s sprawling suburban landscape.

The large meadows that are formed between the lower and upper bayou banks host thousands of people during festivals and holiday celebrations. During the first weekend of June one such festival took place on Eleanor Tinsley meadow. Attendance at the Free Press Festival was estimated at 92,000 people over the course of the weekend. Part of the reason this site was chosen is because the upper banks of the bayou form a natural amphitheater for the festival’s three main stages. Luckily, rain stayed away that weekend and the bayou did not wash the music away. Thousands of festival-goers got to enjoy Houston and relish the diversity of people and musical taste resident here.

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Posted by Jenny Janis
in Bayou By Us
on 12 July, 2012

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Houston, “The Bayou City,” has had a tense relationship with its bayous and their floodplains. As with any city with much of its development in the floodplain, flooding is always a very real risk — and it isn’t just an infrastructure problem. It is a PR problem. [This post originally appeared on the American Planning Association’s Kid’s… Read more »

[This post originally appeared on the American Planning Association’s Kid’s Planning Toolbox blog]

For starters, the term “one-hundred-year flood” is misleading. It implies that there will be 100 years between events, and to many people this doesn’t sound so risky. Secondly, FIRM maps that show the line are not easy for the average citizen to comprehend — and they aren’t readily available.

To most people the flood line is invisible — and out of sight, out of mind.

Water levels, however, can be seen even after the flood. As waters recede, the floating fragments and trash are deposited in a single line at the elevation of the flood: the debris line. This line gave me an idea.

We could make a debris line that show the 100-year flood line and open Houstonians’ eyes to the very real danger of living in the flood plain. So over the course of the next year, I’m organizing two events, “Trashed” and “Flash Flood” that do just this.

The “Trashed” event, which will take place in spring 2013, is a month-long art installation that will illuminate a stretch of the 100-year flood line running through bayou-adjacent parks and an urban neighborhood.

Where possible we’ll indicate the line itself. But where the line wanders onto private property, we’ll use tree flags on trees, signs and light posts on near-by public property to show the water level of a 100-year flood, indicating just how far underwater these businesses, homes and public spaces will be.

The centerpiece of this installation uses garbage collected from the bayou itself to create a man-made debris line. We’ll pin approximately one mile of this trash directly on the 100-year flood line through the parks and open spaces of the site.

The “Flash Flood” event, which will be held in the fall of 2012, intends to remind people of the unexpected nature and severity of a 100-year flood. This event is aimed at the next generation, because we think young people can be very effective at spreading information. Once kids understand a concept, they take it home and teach it to their families.

Flash Flood goes deeper than just showing the line. We’ll start by making presentations about bayous and floodplains to 7 public K-12 schools in Houston’s White Oak Bayou area. In addition to explaining how bayous and floodplains perform as the region’s natural infrastructure, we’ll also show them how they can affect the way stormwater is managed and reduce flood risks by making changes at home — like adding rain barrels, swales, permeable surfaces and other soft features that can hold the water back from the congested waterways.

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Posted by MattBaumgarten
in Bayou By Us
on 1 June, 2012

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Experiencing severe coastal storms has always been part of living near the sea; however, current planning models and infrastructures are putting residents in positions equivalent to placing their heads in the sand. On September 13, 2008 Hurricane Ike struck the upper Texas coast, wreaking havoc on infrastructure and washing away entire communities. In response, SWA teamed with the University of Houston for Rice University’s SSPEED (Severe Storm Prediction, Education and Evacuation from Natural Disasters) Center to identify a system of solutions that equally considers structural and non-structural strategies.

The focus was to protect where appropriate and promote land uses resilient to environmental forces, where the viability of the landscape is an indication of effective, sustainable shields to flooding.

Hurricane Ike still narrowly missed the modeled “worst case scenario,” where storm waters would track up the densely populated west shore of Galveston Bay and into the heavily industrialized Houston Ship Channel. Labeled only as a category two storm by wind speed, Ike surpassed all inundation damage predictions for its designation and changed the lives of millions of people.

This one event, in a region populated by 6.5 million residents and frequented by hurricanes, sparked a sorely needed reassessment of historic storm preparedness . The first major proposal was the “Ike Dike”, a continuous dike to be built across the bay. This proposal came with high costs and potential for great environmental degradation. Once completed, the monumental dike would promote a false sense of safety, exponentially increasing the original post-Ike rush to rebuild and develop and exposing millions more to future risk in the still environmentally fragile bay. Before long, the concept was deemed a “moral hazard”.

What are needed instead are new approaches to effectively and sustainably protect and develop our modern coastlines by the integration of land use and necessary infrastructures.

The Coastal Resilience project aims to identify reasonable planning solutions to respond to Galveston Bay’s frequent tropical storms, hurricanes, and coast shaping forces. Currently, there is no clear understanding of the level of risks along the coastline, and even in the presence of clear information, it is human nature to underestimate high-level risks that occur infrequently. As a starting point, suggested non-structural responses included: improving and strictly enforcing building codes, hardening public infrastructure to be protected to a 100 year surge level, removing flood and wind subsidies in unprotected areas, buyout storm damaged properties after an additional flood, full disclosure for all future purchases, flood depth signage in all unprotected areas, better communication tools like readily available storm surge maps, and alternative land uses such as the creation of a national recreation area.

Structural or levee building opportunities sought to protect highly populated and culturally significant areas such as building an earthen levee that can protect against a 500 year return frequency (including a wave protection factor) to encourage development in the protected area. The resulting plan also identified an opportunity to tie the coastal defense infrastructure into the natural topography by rebuilding an existing roadway to specifications offering the desired 100 year flood protection and creating marshes, coastal dunes and waterfront parks to help heal the bay, promote habitat development, absorb the storm surges and sustain and protect the coastline. With this approach, isolated ‘pocket’ levee systems would only be needed in areas of existing high value development like the Houston Ship Channel. The great expense of land acquisition for post-disaster buyouts would be minimized and few populated areas would be excluded from protection. This would afford some development opportunities and also promote agriculture, recreation areas, eco-tourism and carbon sequestration opportunities outside the identified zones of protection.

This project identifies several responses to this reoccurring event and plans for the health, safety and welfare of the Galveston Bay region, subject to severe environmental forces. Each measure taken would be evaluated to maximize both the economic benefits to the local community and the potential for enhancement of the environment.

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Posted by The Coastal Resilience Team
in Landscape Infrastructure
on 19 March, 2012

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“Ecologistics,” the continuous and sustainable development of Rugao’s port-city interface near Shanghai the world’s busiest cargo and container port cluster, promotes a regional port-city alliance for the area and integrates global logistics with local ecology. In this three part series, we will focus on the history and evolution of ports and the specifics of Rugao…. Read more »

The name “Rugao” means “get on high ground and watch sun set by water”. This romantic connection to its land is embedded in the history, culture and life styles of its people. The design intention of the port is to preserve and promote authenticity in the contemporary urbanization of Rugao’s port-city interface. The very core is an urban ecology that connects people to its land. This urban ecology is informed by the movement of water and composed of two land typologies. All the other urban components are allocated based on this land-water framework.

Land use prototypes gradually transition into each other from west to east from high-density tower clusters, to medium-density town home complexes, to low-density villa islands. Linear forest parks run along east-west waterways, connecting different neighborhoods and merging into regional parks by wetland lakes along major roads. The “urban wedge” land typology maximizes south facing slopes for solar exposure in high density areas toward the west while the “resort island” maximizes water frontage to achieve high property value in low density areas to the east.

Rugao has a strong agricultural heritage and a close tie to its river, visible in the parallel agriculture fields following the water flow, bending and running toward the river edge. The design of the port is inspired by Rugao’s natural ecological pattern with the idea of introducing an ecological system which captures, treats and uses water from the sky and the river to create a variety of natural environments as urban infrastructures as well as amenities. This natural ecology is composed of three water systems: a roof water collection and storage system, a surface storm water runoff treatment system and a river water treatment system. This system promotes interconnected water typologies including swale, harbor, pond, wetland, canal and lake, which support various habitats and recreational uses. Collectively this open space system forms the framework of urban development.

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Posted by QiuHongTang
in Urban Ecologies
on 27 January, 2012

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Hidden from view in our day-to-day lives there exists a pattern and beauty much larger, much more comprehensive. From space these patterns reveal themselves as deep blue braided rivers and rich green plains, wetland patches, desert reds and yellows; all moving, all seemingly going somewhere. Amongst all our deep understanding of the natural sciences, and its relationships and complexity, there exists a simple beauty to it all. A secret that can only be revealed when we take a step back, and marvel at the tremendous scale of these natural systems.

When we design at a scale comparable to the vastness of these natural systems, the need exists to express as the earth does. When we design cities of 50, 100, or 1,000 square kilometer regions, we need to think as the earth does. There is an art to her work that needs to be present in ours. I am continually inspired by this interconnected beauty; a mosaic of oils and pastel that we can only hope to emulate in a small way. And so there must be an art to our ecology, both urban and natural. The two combined can form city patterns that can strive to achieve all those civic benefits that we speak so much of; be it interconnectivity, multiplicity, sustainability, and the like. We need to paint our cities as much as we plan them, aware that there is more to life and civicness than a land use plan and orderly density tabulation.

Our most beautiful cities were not afraid of an idea; be it Paris and her grand boulevards struck across its densely populated neighborhoods, or the genius of a simple but large park providing escape for the citizens of New York. Let us plan in bold strokes, weaving the natural and man-made into new urban forms worthy of the landscape they inhabit. Let our ideas guide us at any scale, from the smallest dwelling to the largest of all, planet earth.

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