RETROFITTING SUBURBIA - OPEN SPACE IN BELLEVUE, WASHINGTON, USA

This paper traces the maturation of Bellevue's urban pattern with part icular attention to open spaces and stormwater drainage. Several signi ficant events set the current course and led to a new interpretation o f the city-country continuum. The seemingly conventional suburban valu es of this community led the citizens to oppose dispersed commercial d evelopment and re-focus the community's development energies on the do wntown. More recently, re-zoning of the downtown area, development inc entives and design guidelines have been leading to a re-invention of d owntown following urban village models. The community resisted burdeni ng itself with the exorbitant costs of engineered drainage systems and gambled on a surface drainage system. In 1974 Bellevue adopted a surf ace drainage system originally out of financial imperative, placing it at the forefront of innovative stormwater management. Working coopera tively, stormwater engineers and parks planners are weaving a complex web of public open space that integrates the utilitarian public corrid ors of the city with older patches of park land. The maturing of Belle vue represents a new constellation of values and evolving settlement p atterns for the old suburbs. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.