Project Entry 2017 for North America
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Urban watershed framework plan, Conway, AR, USA
Cities are fragmented whereas ecosystems are continuous. The framework plan addresses water management problems in the 42mi2 (108 km2) subwatershed through four city-water interface strategies developed in the plan. Pixelated, nested, clustered, and connected interfaces are configured according to prevailing opportunities shaping downtown, suburban, exurban, or rural territories.
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Urban watershed framework plan, Conway, AR, USA
One of six adaptive infrastructure components constituting the framework plan, lake restoration involves soft and hard infrastructure, and mobile technologies to enhance lake ecology. To satisfy anglers who desire lake flooding, and waterfront property owners who do not want flooding, islands are created to normalize water flow, flood storage, and aeration while creating new habitat for fish and fowl. A portfolio of floating bio-mats and habitat islands expand useful waterfront.
Last updated: March 21, 2017 Conway, AR, USA
Developing sponge city
More a rhizomatic plan than a master plan, soft infrastructural retrofits are value-added to conventional hard engineered infrastructure to remediate the city’s five polluted and flood-prone headwater streams. The Urban Watershed Framework Plan’s adaptive infrastructure components include green streets, water treatment art parks, urban eco-farms, conservation neighborhoods, parking gardens, lake aerators, vegetative harvesters, floating bio-mats, and a city greenway to improve riparian corridors. They combine the six ecologically-based water treatment technologies to create new rain terrains. Given funding challenges, political will, and complexity, the plan operates evolutionarily through modulated retrofits that are incremental, contextual, redundant, and successional, the vocabulary of resilience.
A transferable urban design vocabulary for resilience
The project’s design tools and planning vocabulary provide communities with a transferable resilience framework to restore urban watersheds though urban design. The challenges in implementing resilience or risk-based decision-making in urban systems include the lack of a common language of assessment, and design and management for the characteristics that makes those systems resilient. We need a language of resilience design and management that aligns with the language of city ordinances and policies. The plan employs the Ecosystem System Services Concept and the 17 ecological services provided by healthy ecosystems to improve the ability of communities to remedy stressors that adversely affect the resilience of urban systems.
Design that enables stakeholders to steward urban watersheds
The three-year collaborative planning process with the City was supported by resources and technical assistance from Metroplan (Central Arkansas’ regional planning authority) and Arkansas government agencies including its Game & Fish Commission, Natural Resources Commission, and Department of Environmental Quality. Additional funding came from the Arkansas General Assembly, Lake Conway Property Owners Association, and area institutions like the University of Central Arkansas that built demonstration projects. A critical capacity-building goal involved founding of the Lake Conway-Point Remove Watershed Alliance in 2015. LCPRWA is a multicounty stakeholder coalition with elected officers and bylaws to administer water management projects and the plan throughout the larger watershed.