Restoring nature in the city: Puget Sound experiences

Restoring nature within American urban areas seems basic to sustainability both in theory (Hough, 1995) and in practice (Sustainable Seattle, 1993). I n addition to applicable science, restoration of urban green areas requires two complementary efforts, (1) a plan or process to locate and to rank pot ential restoration sites and (2) an understanding of how restoration design s will be accepted, and therefore, maintained by nearby residents. The urba n Puget Sound region of Washington state has a 10 year history of stream re storation to improve salmonid habitats. This discussion reports on two regi onal research studies, one dealing with planning (Liberty Bay), the other w ith restoration design (Urban Streams). The first project, Liberty Bay, stu died the feasibility of combining existing physical and political/social da ta to locate and rank potential restoration sites using a geographic inform ation system. The study area was a small (<4000 ha) urbanizing watershed su rrounding a polluted shellfish bay. The Liberty Bay study demonstrate the f easibility and identified the limits of combining physical data with social and political information. The second study, Urban Streams, is an ongoing, multidisciplinary effort to evaluate the efficacy of regional urban stream restoration as to stream dynamics, biotic conditions and human responses. The human response past of the Urban Streams study has two components. One is to analyze visual preferences for stream restoration engineering techniq ues. Salisbury (1997) used photo-simulated images of a proposed design to s urvey preferences. Her results demonstrated that respondents could differen tiate various restoration designs based on their visual texture trough to r efined) and had clear preferences for the 'refined' scenes in this urban re gional context. The other study direction is to identify and evaluate human behavior toward urban streams. Initial results of this effort show that th e majority of observed behaviors toward urban streams is negative. This res ult is disconcerting given the fact that the Puget Sound region has a reput ation for a high degree of environmental sensitivity. (C) 1998 Elsevier Sci ence B.V. All rights reserved.