Victoria Marshall and Brian McGrath at Gwynns Falls Park, 2002.
Photo: Steward Pickett
|
Urban Design Working Group
Since 2006, the BES LTER Urban Design Working Group (UDWG) has been located at Parsons The New School for Design, where its principal investigators Brian McGrath, Associate Professor of Urban Design and Victoria Marshall, Assistant Professor of Urban Design have been working on an atlas of the Gwynns Falls Watershed which maps and analyzes the spatial heterogeneity of this urban watershed according to the HERCULES landcover classification system developed by Mary Cadenasso, Steward Pickett and Kristen Schwarz (2007. Spatial heterogeneity in urban ecosystems: Reconceptualizing land cover and a framework for classification. Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution 5: 80-88.). Additionally, Brian McGrath has been a co-principal investigator and Mateo Pinto, Jacinto Padin Obina and Victoria Marshall of urban-interface have been urban design research consultants on Feedbacks between Complex Ecological and Social Models: Urban Landscape Structure, Nitrogen Flux, Vegetation Management and Adoption of Design Scenarios as part of the National Science Foundation's Biocomplexity program on the coupled feedbacks between human and natural systems. Finally, in collaboration with the Faculty of Architecture at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok and Landscape Ecologist Danai Thaitakoo, McGrath has been comparing BES science-based water management systems with indigenous systems in Thailand.
HERCULES update
(Figures 1-12)
The Urban Design Working Group (UDWG) members Brian McGrath, Victoria Marshall and Phanat Xanamane first developed a matrix showing the array of possible HERCULES patches (Cadenasso, M.L., S.T.A. Pickett, and K. Schwarz. 2007. Spatial heterogeneity in urban ecosystems: Reconceptualizing land cover and a framework for classification. Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution 5: 80-88.). The matrix consists of patch "family" clusters which are arranged from left to right from built to vegetated dominated and from top to bottom from homogenous to heterogeneous in terms of landcover mix. (Figure 1) Figure 2 illustrates a forest (coarse vegetation) dominated patch, Figure 3 illustrates a grass (fine vegetation) dominated patch, Figure 4 illustrates a bare soil dominated patch, Figure 5 illustrates a pavement dominated patch, while Figure 6 illustrates a building dominated patch. The graph in Figure 7 extrudes the number of patches in the Gwynns Falls Watershed within each family. In modeling the prevalence of certain landcover patch types in the Gwynns Falls Watershed, the UDWG has created a landcover "signature" for Gwynns Falls. Figure 8 illustrates the presence of coarse vegetation patches greater than 75%, Figure 9 illustrates the presence of fine vegetation patches greater than 75%, Figure 10 illustrates the presence of building dominated patches between 50 and 75%, while Figure 11 illustrates the co-presence of building and pavement dominated patches between 25 and 50%. Figure 12 illustrates the how various landcover patches interact with the topography of Gwynns Falls in vertical sections cut transversally through the watershed at four BES water gauging locations.
Figure 1
|
Figure 2
|
Figure 3
|
Figure 4
|
Figure 5
|
Figure 6
|
Figure 7
|
Figure 8
|
Figure 9
|
Figure 10
|
Figure 11
|
Figure 12
|
Feedbacks between Complex Ecological and Social Models: Urban Landscape Structure, Nitrogen Flux, Vegetation Management and Adoption of Design Scenarios
The Urban Design Working Groug (UDWG) has been modeling urban design scenarios for three neighborhoods in the Baltimore region as part of a Biocomplexity research grant on coupled human and natural systems. The research team, consisting of Steward Pickett , Larry Band, Mary Cadenasso, Morgan Grove, Brian McGrath, Mary Washington, Don Dennis, Peter. Groffman, and Austin Troy, worked with the urban-interface team of Mateo Pinto, Jacinto Padin Obina and Victoria Marshall. Figure 13 illustrates the feedback loop tying together the ecological, hydrological, social science and design researchers in the project superimposed over a topographical map of Gwynns Falls. Three neighborhoods were selected by the team in order to understand the interactions of nitrogen flux with landscape structure and management with proposals for design scenarios which introduced new water and vegetation management options based on neighborhood preferences; Baisman Run and Dead Run in Baltimore County and Harlem Park in Baltimore City. Figure 14 locates the three neighborhoods on a key map and illustrates the different building densities in relation to block morphology and direction of stream (buried or surface) flow.
Figure 13
|
Figure 14
|
A detailed photographic survey by McGrath and Pinto (Figure 15) compares the relationship between house, yard and street in the three neighborhoods. Using Bing on-line aerial photography, the team identified three scales of intervention to work at which operate within three realms of social organization: individual property parcel, shared backyard space, and the municipal infrastructure of streets and parks (Figure 16). From that a matrix of existing problems and best management options was created (Figure 17).
Figure 15
|
Figure 16
|
Figure 17
|
Baisman Run (Figure 18 and 19) is a 381 hectacre watershed which is 80% forested, but contains unsewered residential land use in the headwaters (BES Core Data, 2009). Springfield Farm Court is a s-shaped meandering road which winds down from Falls Road over two hillocks to a cul-de-sac at the edge of Oregon Ridge Park. The Park encompasses a forested tributary stream leading to Jones Falls, flowing parallel to Interstate 83 to downtown Baltimore before emptying into the Inner Harbor. Large houses on four acre lots line Springfield Farm Court, and several small tributary streams are preserved through riparian setback regulations. However, upon closer inspection, the streams are incised deeply into the soil and are not producing the mucky, slow pools filled with organic litter which provide so many ecosystem services in a forested headwater area. The wide street and large residential driveways rush rainwater to catch basins which feed directly into flashy, fast moving streams. The system cannot retain the nitrogen exported by the residential septic systems (Cadenasso et. al, 2008, Pickett et. al, 2007).
Figure 18
|
Figure 19
|
Dead Run (Figure 20 and 21) is a tributary to the Gwynns Falls -- a watershed parallel to the Jones Falls. Much closer to the center city, Dead Run consists of much denser and older suburbs of ranch houses on small lots on curving blocks with neighborhood parks. Gilston Park Road is a typical street in the neighborhood, and it winds down steeply, then flattens as it curves down to Westview Recreation Area where a stream is exposed in a small forested area adjacent to recreation fields. In the residential blocks of Dead Run, the streams are buried, and only exposed in the parks. But unlike Baisman Run, here there is a sanitary infrastructure separate from the storm water system. American suburbs built before Clean Water Act of 1972 regulations took effect consistently buried streams, but often created neighborhood parks. In these older suburbs close to the city line, Elmore and Kaushal find more than 50% of the historical headwater streams have been buried . (Elmore, Andrew J. and Sujay S. Kaushal, 2008, Disappearing headwaters: patterns of stream burial due to urbanization", Frontiers in Ecology 6(6): 308-312).
Figure 20
|
Figure 21
|
In the West Baltimore neighborhood of Harlem Park, (Figure 22- 26) the percentage of stream burial is 100%, and the vast majority of rain water is channeled directly into the Bay. This area is part of storm water subcatchment called Watershed 263, which, like Gwynns Falls, empties into the Middle Branch. Both the Middle Branch and Inner Harbor empty into the Patapsco River, and eventually Chesapeake Bay. The Harlem Park neighborhood is named for the 19th century residential square at its heart. Additionally, As part of the Model Cities Program, in 1966, a series of midblock parks were constructed in place of demolished alley housing. Here open space consists of playgrounds, residential squares, and vacant lots are the only open spaces in which to incorporate open water streams. It is only through new community greening efforts creating rain gardens in vacant lots and school parking lots, retention tanks in new construction, and proposals for historical stream day-lighting and green roofs that offer the possibility of returning this area to a water and nitrogen retention zone. Students at Columbia University's Urban Design Program worked in collaboration with the BES over many years to propose multiple ways to create a spongy absorbent environment for this and other neighborhoods in West Baltimore. (Brian McGrath,V. Marsahll, M. L. Cadenasso, J. Morgna Grove, S.T.A. Pickett, Richard Plunz and Joel Towers, 2007, Designing Patch Dynamics, New York : Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation of Columbia University.)
Figure 22
|
Figure 23
|
Figure 24
|
Figure 25
|
Figure 26
|
Comparing BES work with Indigenous Water and Vegetation Management Systems in Thailand
Bangkok, Thailand (Figure 27) sprawls in the vast delta of the Chao Phraya River. The river has many tributaries from Northern Thailand where centuries of indigenous practices have been documented by anthropologists such as Shigeharu Tanabe. Tanabe documented the muang-fai (weir-canal) system of agricultural village water and rice cultivation management near Chiang Mai (Figures 28 and 29), while in the nearby district of Lampang, a Royally inspired project of dam and weir construction help restore the environment of a deforested village. (Figures 30 and 31). Much can be learned by integrating scientific and indigenous knowledge that are both after common goals of linking human and natural dynamics to develop resilience urban and rural systems globally.
Figure 27
|
Figure 28
|
Figure 29
|
Figure 30
|
Figure 31
|
|
