Restoring Swede Hollow

Jason Kingcase study, city, creeks, cultural, daylighting, design, history, infrastructure, places, projects, watersheds1 Comment

An interesting project in St. Paul, Minnesota emerged in this Star Tribune article “Work could begin soon to bring St. Paul’s Phalen Creek back to the surface,” which highlights the mix of ecological and cultural benefits of urban stream daylighting. Through a focus on both the benefits to wildlife habitat and ecosystem function and the connection of cultural heritage for native people and early immigrants to the area, it shows a rich story that is told through multiple lenses to provide solid rationale for daylighting projects.

One major idea of daylighting is visibility. As mentioned in the Star Tribune article, this is a typical case of burial of creeks for development, but like many other areas, the perceptions have shifted and the value of historical waterways are being restored. A big part of that is pointed out by Ramsey-Washington Metro district watershed project manager Paige Ahlborg, watershed project: “Another benefit is just restoring a community’s connection to the water,” Ahlborg said. “Seeing it makes it harder to do things that harm it. We still have a number of people who think that ‘if I put something down the [storm]sewer drain, it will be treated.'”

The history of places is expressed in place names. From the Capitol Region Watershed District site, some history on the current name: “Swede Hollow on the City of Saint Paul’s East Side is a historic immigrant neighborhood dating back to the 19th century. This lowland valley includes a portion of a stream from Phalen Creek to the Mississippi River. After housing was removed following the turn of the century, the city created Swede Hollow Park and placed some of the stream flow in a storm sewer pipe to complete its path to the river.”

Image of Phalen Creek burial in the 1920s. – via Minnesota Historical Society

As is the case with most places, the story and names is often told in European terms (i.e. Swede Hollow). The creek name as well comes from Edward Phalen, one of Saint Paul’s original colonists, who settled on the banks of the creek in 1838. Prior to this arrival, the history of place stretched far earlier as referenced in the Lower Phalen Creek Project, a native-led project:

“This creek served as a corridor for the Dakota people who lived here, as they made their way up the chain of lakes by canoe to White Bear Lake – one of many areas where they gathered wild rice.”

The daylighting has both ecological and cultural benefits. In the Star Tribune, Lower Phalen Creek Project Executive Direction Maggie Lorenz, who is both Dakota and Ojibwe, mentions: “[Phalen Creek] is an essential part of the community — it will bring more natural habitat and it means more opportunities for recreation and stormwater management. And, from a cultural perspective, we are really interested in restoring the land and taking care of the land according to our traditional teachings.”

While the goal is to extend daylighting all the way to the Mississippi River, one the first legs connects from Lake Phalen and Maryland Avenue as shown in this enlarged plan, highlighting the ecological benefits, including fish passage and enhanced in-stream habitat, establishment not just of the creek but adjacent floodplain wetlands to provide resilience and habitat for amphibians, and upland prairies that provide native riparian habitat supporting birds and pollinators.

“Consultants at Inter-Fluve, Inc. produced this visual to represent the proposed location, general design elements, and predicted habitat benefits of a restored stream channel of Phalen Creek at the Lake Phalen / Maryland Avenue project site.” via Lower Phalen Creek Project

A ton of additional information is at the LPCP site, including graphic summary of the project is found in a brochure that connects the dots between the cultural and ecological.

Brochure for Daylighting Phalen Creek – via Lower Phalen Creek Project – click here for full size PDF

Header Image: “Rendering of a daylighted creek provided by Capitol Region Watershed District.” via Lower Phalen Creek Project

22 December 2021 22 December 2021

Landscape and Memory

Jason Kingarchaeology, art, city, creeks, daylighting, design, history, maps, new york, projects, streams1 Comment

A project from artist Cristina Iglesias (see a post of some of her previous work here) again dives into the idea of hidden hydrology, this time in New York City. Entitled Landscape and Memory (referencing the title of one of my favorite books by Simon Schama), the work unearths a buried stream in Madison Square Park.

From The Architect’s Newspaper: “Manhattan is crisscrossed by streams and rivers that have since been buried but continue to flow, flooding their banks and the basements above when it rains. For Landscape and Memory, Iglesias will exhume an impression of Cedar Creek, which once flowed beneath where the park now stands today.”

From the Madison Square Park Conservancy, some more info: “Nodding to historian Simon Schama’s major 1995 volume of the same name, which surveyed the history of landscape across time and terrain, Landscape and Memory is informed by Iglesias’ research into the history of the site. For the project, Iglesias located and studied antique maps that documented the water flow beneath Madison Square Park, where the Cedar Creek and Minetta Brook once coursed for two miles before flowing into the Hudson River. With nineteenth-century industrialization, streams like the Cedar and Minetta were buried underground to create additional land for building sites, underground drains, or sewers. Through Landscape and Memory, Iglesias renders this buried history visible again, inviting viewers to contemplate centuries of transformation of urban sites that were once natural.”

Excited to hear more about this and see more images, as the sketch is a bit… sketchy. You can check out the full press release here for more info. Based on some of her previous work it will be wonderful in execution. The work will be installed from May 23, 2022, through December 4, 2022 so those in New York City go check it out and report back.

03 December 2021 07 December 2021

Evolution of Hidden Hydrology

Jason Kingarchaeology, city, climate, creeks, design, history, infrastructure, maps, oregon, places, portland, projects, research3 Comments

After bit of a break I’m hoping to write more frequently on all things Hidden Hydrology. For some context, in this time away I have been researching more deeply Portland’s Hidden Hydrology, delving into archives for stories of my local disappeared streams, buried creeks, and filled wetlands around the metropolitan area. I’ve also compiled a composite map of Portland spanning the 1850s through the 1900s to piece together the most complete version of the hidden hydrological layers that existed pre-settlement. I’ve kept up doing research more informally in the broader and mostly sharing on Twitter and Instagram, which are both simpler media for messaging, but also seem lacking in depth that more expansive writing can capture. While it may be true that blogging is no longer a viable medium, I feel a need to write more deeply, and more often, and more personally about my home, my history, and my places. This will hopefully lead to writing more broadly as well in journals, and culminate in my ultimate goal — to write a book (or more than one) on hidden hydrology.

A few recent thoughts, ideas that I take with me into the next journey.

WATER STORIES, HUMAN STORIES

The origins of my interest are documented on the site here, including a strange and wonderful Portland map by Metro, the inspiring academic work of one of my landscape architecture idols, fiction and place-based non-fiction from a local legend, and Mannahatta’s deep eco-hydrological historic mapping. These inspirations and the subsequent research into the overall concept of hidden hydrology documented here on this site has left numerous imprints on how I think about hidden hydrology as a concept and a methodology for integrating into planning and design. Upon reflection, I have typically always approached the project through the lenses of hydrology, history, ecology and place, with the human element occupying a supporting side-narrative to these other elements.

Every story has a uniquely human interface and the phenomena of hidden hydrology is no different, with a variety of actors involved in the discovery, use, manipulation, destruction, protection, and restoration that are all story arcs of urban streams, wetlands and other water bodies. I have always seen the people involved in more broad strokes, as populations and groups acting against nature and natural processes, or conversely communities and coalitions being often negatively acted upon and attempting to preserve and protect systems. Rarely did I connect people to places in a meaningful way beyond faceless groups, only rarely placing individuals and their stories and essential ingredients to unlocking the true history of place.

Sketch of Indians Fishing by Willamette Falls – 1841 by Joseph Drayton (Oregon History Project)

As origin stories, the native Chinookan people have occupied and shaped the waters of Portland for centuries. There are specific narratives of leaders, like Concomly as part of the larger Chinook territory in the late 1700s and early 1800s and Kiesno (aka Cassino) who was located near Portland on Wapato Island, who was also an important figure through the early to mid 1800s , The native stories and start to take shape via early explorers, whereby they drift into settler narratives told about those indigenous people and never told by them. Thus we remember ‘discovery’ and the snapshots of what written narratives and maps were documented, but know less about the life and the interaction with many of the places in the region beyond a few major areas of significance that were spiritual centers and places of food gathering and trade. I challenged myself to weave these stories into the narratives, and although I feel more informed, I’ve barely scratched the surface, so the next steps are to engage and learn from descendants and hear stories of places that were of significance to Chinook people in the past, and those that are still resonant today.

In Seattle, I walked and wrote about Licton Springs, which explored the deep indigenous connections to place in a remnant urban stream – weaving together the long and contentious history, which was recently given protection as a landmark of cultural significance to Coast Salish people. Many of these stories need to be told, and the opportunity to connect our diverse history to water places – the water stories and human stories, continues to intrigue me.

Broadening the cultural lens, I’ve written about Tanner Creek and the Chinese farmers who cultivated lands adjacent to the creek using the amazing resource by Marie Rose-Wong on early Chinese residents of Portland, documenting the erasure of the creek and the Chinese farms in tandem, both slowly disappearing from Portland in the wake of ‘progress’ that wanted neither the Chinese people, nor the messiness of flooding, steep gulches that stood in the way of a modern metropolis.

View of Chinese Farms in Tanner Creek Gulch – circa 1892 (Portland Archives)

The narratives feature places like Guild’s Lake, a contested area with a variety of actors working to destroy, displace and erase historic waterways to pave the way for development and industrialization, with little thought to the impacts ecologically and socially to these actions. As you map out the timeline of erasure for many waterways, it’s never one person or one big move, but a variety of consistent, incremental actions, driven by the need for progress and growth, that privileged the needs of few over the impacts to many. The missing piece of this is again the human dimension, the root of all of these stories were the people who occupied these places, and how they, and their actions, gave life to the unique water places in the community. And as other forces removed the waterways, how they were impacted by the places are lost. The places are not coming back, but but hopefully through the stories some idea of that experience can re-emerge and remain.

Chinese man fishing in Guild’s Lake – circa 1890 (Oregon Historical Society – OHS-bb016278)

Another significant narrative in Portland’s water history is the intersection with the African American story, told through the emergence and eventual destruction of Vanport City. There are many narratives as to the cause of the flooding and destruction of in the1940s worth exploring, and the eventual displacement and segregation that happened after the city was destroyed continues to shape the city today.

Aerial View of Vanport Flooding, 1948 (Portland Archives)

As my post documenting the amazing OPB documentary “Vanport” shows, these, too are human stories, with interviews and first person accounts of the development and occupation of this novel community, and the lead up to the destruction and displacement of larger populations of people that had lasting impacts and left an indelible mark on the racial history and social structure of Portland.

CLIMATE CONNECTIONS

While Vanport was not a result of climate change per se, this larger narrative of catastrophic flood events also provides a hint at more extreme future scenarios that intersect with my research on hidden hydrology: the connections between the lost and buried streams, wetlands, ponds and water bodies, along with made-land through filling and manipulating shorelines, and how these ultimately give clues to and exacerbate our present impacts related to climate change.

Stories in the mainstream media are reinforcing these connections, and through recent research, and continues to gain prominence and momentum as a dimensions of climate change evolve and the impacts are played out in communities more frequently and in more extreme forms.

1894 Flood in the North Park Blocks of Portland – (Portland City Auditor)

There are a number of drivers for the ‘creative destruction’ of water systems in cities. Making land for development by piping creeks, filling gulches, ponds, wetlands and shorelines to make developable land offers the chance to grow and continue to build. Much of this was also an element of the modern safety movement that was concerned with life and property damage from flooding creeks, and the related sanitary movement was driven by public health concerns, often by removing access to polluted waterways. In short term and in earlier times, these efforts may have seemed good approaches but come with some unfortunate baggage in loss of ecosystem function, and lack of resilience.

Flooding is obviously not a new thing, and is not always the result of removal of waterways not of climate change. However it is not difficult to make general connections that flooding often follows the historical shape of water in cities, and that removal, filling, and piping of creeks, streams, wetlands and ponds has lasting impacts to the hydrology and that the impacts will be more evident as climate change raises sea levels, increases extreme precipitation and storms, and increases urban heat.

A recent NY Times editorial by Eric Sanderson makes this case, unpacking impacts of recent extreme weather and hurricanes and tracing that to lost streams that wove through New York City. The simple statement of “Water will go where water has always gone.” sums up the phenomenon, while giving us an interesting new (old?) methodology for predicting impacts by using historical hydrological systems in new ways. Beyond that in the past year, my Twitter feed is filled with stories of flooding in Europe, UK, and around the US, a global climate change induced impact all traced back to the link between historical waterways and current, human-caused climate change. Lots more on this topic to come.

EVOLUTION

As I researched more from the archives of local newspapers and uncovered more unique, human stories, the narratives became less about places and the lost waterways, but how these created a tableau of life. Rarely were stories these idyllic and utopian, but painted a picture of daily life and the struggle to build a city carved out of the forest at the confluence of two rivers. Often they were narratives of greed, racism, and exploitation, focusing on power and money which were allowed to run rampant in a time of very little environmental policy and awareness of impacts.

The water stories become stories of native people who developed thriving communities that were in a short span of time decimated by disease, violence and displacement from their lands and waters. The stories of Chinese farmers who lived on the margins of gulches and ponds in Portland, who contributed to the building of the community and were rewarded with racism and erasure from their places of productivity and community. The devastation of a flooded African American community of Vanport left ship workers and their families, engaged in supporting the war effort while building a life in Portland left many without a place live and led to a continuing and marginalization that continues today.

These historical water stories connect people to place and add a human dimension to an ecological history. When woven together with more contemporary climate stories, it also provide a solid foundation for why this work matters in design and planning for the future. It is far from a nostalgic looking back of what’s lost, but rather an opportunity to think about lessons learned related to how we can live and thrive together while growing a diverse community. It is also a blueprint for action on climate resilience, a future-focused approach to planning for urban heat, flooding, and other key resilience measures to make our communities more livable. Call the preliminary phases of this project a good information gathering, understanding what hidden hydrology is. The evolution becomes how to use this information to shape our communities in positive ways. Look forward to exploring and continuing to evolve.

01 October 2018

Anne Whiston Spirn’s Legacy in Philadelphia

Jason Kingcase study, city, climate, creeks, cultural, design, ecology, history, infrastructure, landscape, maps, philadelphia, places, precedents, streams, watershedsLeave a Comment

The most recent October issue of Landscape Architecture Magazine (LAM) has a great story on hidden hydrology inspiration Anne Whiston Spirn, FASLA, titled Where the Water Was, which highlights the “long arc” her work in West Philadelphia, namely the “water that flows beneath it.”

The aha moment is recounted in the article, the inspiration for the poem linked above “The Yellowwood and the Forgotten Creek“, as recounted in the article, she “was on her way to the supermarket, when she was stopped at a gaping hole where the street had caved in over the Mill Creek sewer. “I looked down and saw this big, brown rushing river, and all this masonry that had fallen in. I thought, ‘My God, there are rivers underground. We’re walking on a river.'” (122) Sprin’s work spans decades since that story in 1971, predominately around Mill Creek which was “buried in the brick sewer pipe in the 1880s”, morphing into the West Philadelphia Landscape Project (WPLP) [covered in brief on our post on Philadelphia here]. While I was inspired as a student and professional by her work on books like The Landscape of Landscape and The Granite Garden, her work on hidden streams was perhaps the most powerful for me, both as an object of study but more broadly to leverage this research into a vehicle for positive change. As mentioned, the WPLP website “contains maps, historical documents, reports and studies.” including an updated interactive timeline, and some newer updated interactive mapping which is good to see, as much of the interface until late was a bit dated.

A long way from the preliminary maps in CAD as part of the early mapping in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The sophistication and breadth of this work at the time is telling thought, and I remember seeing these for the first time in college and being amazed. The article shows what many of us know, which is how much of what we take for granted in technology of mapping that’s available to us today, and how hard it was, physically and sometimes politically to get good information. As Spirn mentions “You had to literally go out and field check.” (134)

The takeaways of this early work was to both connect the above ground with what was underground, both historically in predevelopment hydrology but also with sewer routing and burial of waterways. As mentioned, the idea that is a constant with Spirn of “reading the landscape” was instilled as a way to understand the full picture of a site or district. The connection of the physical features with the social is also evident as Spirn is quoted: “It’s a pattern of eastern old cities and across the U.S., where lower-income folks are living in the bottomlands… Many are literally called the Black Bottom.” (126) From this analysis, the idea of mapping and using vacant lands was a way to solve the hydrological problems of flooding or sinkholes, but also to revitalize communities.

The Buried River from Anne Whiston Spirn on Vimeo.

How to do it was an issue, as recounted in the article, ideas where one thing, but changing minds into action was another. McHarg’s Design With Nature inspired her writing The Granite Garden, not as an academic treatise, but rather “…to fill a void. Scientific journals, historical documents, topographic maps, all sorts of materials contained a wealth of information for ecological designers, but no one had pulled it together in a comprehensive, understandable book that could guide designers as well as the public.” (127) This book influences generations of landscape architects in many ways beyond merely historical ecology, but in how we think and communicate. For the project itself, Adam Levine (who is the mind behind the PhillyH20 project which i documented previously) found the 19th Century maps “that showed Mill Creek and its tributaries before the land was developed. Spirn’s students digitized those surveys and overlaid them on the city’s topographic maps, finally getting an accurate depth of fill along the floodplain. “We found it’s buried up to 40 feet in some areas…”” (134)

The actions were part of this research as well, and many interesting strategies came from the Vacant Lands report (see here), as well as a number of other projects, many of which took a long time to become reality, or came with ups and downs of poor implementation or. The successes came, owing to the persistence of Spirn and her local compatriots in West Philadelphia, summed up in the article simply:

“Change is a bit like a buried creek. It’s hard to remember its origins. Its many branchings are invisible.” (137)

The legacy locally is a series of activists still working on landscape and community building. Beyond that, there’s an army of landscape architects inspired by this project and her writings, and her life-long spirit of advocacy. A great homage to a wonderful teacher and landscape hero. Lots of great info in the article – which unfortunately isn’t available digitally at this time.

HEADER: Snapshot of Interactive Map of Mill Creek – via

21 September 2018 21 September 2018

Denver Drainage Unearthed

Jason Kingcity, creeks, daylighting, denver, design, infrastructure, parks, places, rivers, streamsLeave a Comment

A recent article in the Denver Post “Denver accelerates “daylighting” of lost waterways, “undoing history” with decades-long re-engineering effort” discusses some exciting new work on restoring hidden hydrology and “Re-opening of buried waterways” in the area to manage stormwater runoff and create habitat. The context:

“Old Denver pulsed with H2O, water that snaked through the creeks and irrigation canals crisscrossing Colorado’s high prairie before 150 years of urban development buried most of them or forced them into pipes.”

A similar story to many cities across the globe, “…developers focused on filling in creeks to make way for the construction of railroads, streets, smelters and housing — all laid out across a grid imposed on the natural landscape.” This can be remedied today “…by reconstructing the urban landscape where possible, they’ll slow down water, filter it through vegetation to remove contaminants, control storm runoff and nourish greenery to help residents endure the climate shift toward droughts and rising temperatures.”

DENVER, CO – AUGUST 27: Newly planted grasses grow along Montclair Creek on August 27, 2018 in Denver, Colorado. The City of Denver is working on restoring the creek to help with future flooding. (Photo by RJ Sangosti/The Denver Post)

It’s heartening to see this large of a paradigm shift, and engineers, such as Bruce Uhernik, whom quoted saying:

“We’re just trying to take back that space and make waterways more natural and more beautiful. Why would people not want something to be more natural? This is being responsible — not just to what the city and people need, but to the environment’s needs. Birds. Fish. Trees that should be growing along these corridors. All these work in unison. If you break the chain, things fall off course.”

I appreciate some of the language, but the term “undoing history” is a bit strange to me as I always think of projects like this, in any form, as redoing history. I guess it’s your take on what is history: the original pre-development condition that needs to be restored, or the interventions and filling as the history that needs undoing. As mentioned, there’s plenty of history as “Historic Denver maps from the late 1800s show multiple irrigation canals and curving dotted lines denoting unnamed waterways, including a creek that flows through the Montclair Basin from Fairmount Cemetery toward north Denver industrial areas where smelting and rendering plants were located along the South Platte.”

Either way, it’s a cool project, and has some unique components and context, much of which can be found in the Denver Public Works ‘Green Infrastructure Implementation Strategy‘, a document broad interventions for stormwater and habitat. The prevalence of creeks is seen in the map of Recieving Waters (page 7) shows that while there are a number of urban creeks, they are impacted by residential, commercial, and industrial development throughout the region,

A series of maps in the report outlines pollutants of concern like Fecal bacteria and E.coli, Total Suspended Solids (TSS), Nitrogen, Phosphorous. This map (page 21) shows subbasin level designations of Nitrogen, which is elevated by human activity, and can lead to algae blooms, and issues with aquatic species.

A focus on the urban core includes the Platte to Park Hill (Part of area 20 above (City Park/Park Hill), which integrates a number of systems. As mentioned in the report: “Stormwater Systems is taking a
comprehensive green infrastructure approach to better protecting people and property against fooding while improving water quality and enhancing public spaces. Four projects are part of the Platte to Park Hill… Collectively, the four coordinated projects will increase neighborhood connectively, add new park and recreation spaces, provide critical food protection, and improve water quality.” (page 54) The Globeville Landing Outfall project is one of these segments, as part of the strategy, using open channel design, which “…will help clean storm water naturally when possible and will move the water to its ultimate destination, the South Platte River.” A rendering of the plan:

The 39th Avenue Greenway (also seen in the header) also includes open channels for flood control and storm events. The opportunity to layer community function with these facilities is key, as they are “…designed using a community-focused approach to provide the following benefits in addition to flood protection… “ which includes new open space, bike/walking trails, and more. A rendering shows this integration.

An additional article from the Denver Channel provides a bit more perspective in video form on the Montclair Creek Project, including the “gray to green” approach “correcting past mistakes” focusing on the daylighted river weaving through a golf course and some more urban parts of the City, along with a greenway as mentioned above prior to outlet into the South Platte River. The funds for the project, which were not insubtantial at $300 million, were voter-approved, with “daylighting of old waterways that were forced into pipes and buried during the industrial revolution in favor or streets, railroads and homes.”

HEADER: Image of the 39th Avenue Greenway and Open Channel – via the ‘Green Infrastructure Implementation Strategy‘ (page 55)

12 February 2018 12 February 2018

A Place for the Senses, Part 1 – Smellscapes

Jason Kingart, case study, design, landscape, language, literature, maps, rivers, senses, streamsLeave a Comment

The exploration of hidden hydrology takes many forms. While often focusing on the visual through maps and illustrations, and the verbal, through documents and texts, there’s a range of other sensory experiences that connect lost rivers and buried creeks to our modern life.

It is vital to connect the lost experiences with actual places, if only help imagine what was there previously, as well as to, surprisingly, find the traces and fragments of the palimpsest that remains after decades or even centuries of erasure. Beyond the idea of just being mere ground-truthing as a method of connecting the maps and texts to actual places, is the ability to engage other senses of touch, hearing, and We engage and use our brains differently when we’re outdoors versus indoors, as a recent study showed that “…brain activity associated with sensing and perceiving information was different when outdoors, which may indicate that the brain is compensating for environmental distractions.”

At the root of this is physically experiencing spaces through exploration and discovery. While we will dive into the more specific literature and potential for walking/flâneury in this context of exploration that encompasses our collective sensory experience, for now we will focus on some relevant overlapping themes in terms of specific focused sensing in a spatial frame – specifically soundscapes and smellscapes. Some, but not all of these fit exactly in the tighter sphere of hidden hydrology, however all do provide valid paths of inquiry that could be directly applied to increasing our understanding and engagement with these buried, disappeared, worlds.

As with all of these explorations, this quickly expanded beyond one post, so I’m focusing first on the concept of smell – and will follow up subsequently with elaboration on other sensory subjects.

Smellscapes

The sounds and smells of water are powerful sensory experiences, which can evoke a range of emotions, hint of hidden landscapes, confront and astound then sooth and delight. There’s also a strong historical element, outlined beautifully in this CityLab article ‘Sense and the City‘, which discusses Carolyn Purnell’s book ‘The Sensational Past: How the Enlightenment Changed the Way We Use Our Senses’. in which she shows through explorations of noise, smell, and more over the span of history, “….while our bodies may not change dramatically, the way we think about the senses and put them to use has been rather different over the ages.”

It is no accident that the events around what led to the massive reconfiguration of London through the burial of rivers into pipes is known as the ‘Great Stink‘, driven by growing water pollution and hot weather which causing a mass exodus due to the notion that the smells could transmit disease, which was coupled with recent cholera outbreaks. As mentioned in the Wikipedia article “The problem had been mounting for some years, with an ageing and inadequate sewer system that emptied directly into the Thames. The miasma from the effluent was thought to transmit contagious diseases, and three outbreaks of cholera prior to the Great Stink were blamed on the ongoing problems with the river.” The scientist Michael Faraday, who investigated and wrote a letter on the poor conditions of the Thames, is depicted in this Punch Cartoon from 1855 holding his nose and “…giving his card to Father Thames”, commenting on Faraday gauging the river’s “degree of opacity”

And while access to land and reduction of negative impact so the irony of much urban modernization of rivers by burying them was often driven by smells, fear of pollution via miasma, or legitimate issues with outbreaks like cholera, the so called “Monster Soup” via the 1828 image by William Health depicting the water of the Thames.

Expanding that notion, I recall this map, via CityLab, of the ‘Stench Map” from the “Charles F. Chandler Papers,” Columbia University Rare Books and Manuscript Library, which was described as a “Map Showing Location of Odor Producing Industries of New York and Brooklyn, circa 1870”

They quote Virginia Tech historian Melanie Kiechle and author of the recent book “Smell Detectives“, who is quoted in the article about the fascination and challenge of spatially representing sensory data: “Trying to show smells, which are not concrete—they’re invisible, they’re ephemeral, they’re always changing…”. She also authored this paper in Journal of Urban History called ‘Navigating by Nose: Fresh Air, Stench Nuisance, and the Urban Environment, 1840–1880” [paywalled] where she mentions “City dwellers used their understanding of stench nuisance as detrimental to health to construct smellscapes or olfactory maps of New York City. Such maps identified health threats and guided movements through or out of the city.”

And another, referenced in this Instagram from the NY Public Library Map Division, entitled “Going the whole hog. The odiferous Midtown West in 1865”, which shows this excerpt from a map “Region of Bone Boiling and Swill-Milk Nuisances” found in “Report of the Council of hygiene and public health of the Citizens’ Association of New York upon the sanitary condition of the city” published by The Citizens’ Association of New York. Council of Hygiene and Public Health in 1865″

The short of it was, in the mid 19th Century, cities were often foul and disgusting places, and, if you want a more thorough and frightening description of the above, visit CityLab’s post “The Sanitary Nightmare of Hell’s Kitchen in 1860s New York” which describes conditions that inevitably existed throughout many cities at the time. For rivers, this meant modernization, none as famous as the sewerization of London by Joseph Bazalgette, which tackled the issues of urban pollution and flooding in the mid to late 1800s, while also opening up room for development.

This approach served as a model for many areas around the world confronting similar issues, and serves as perhaps the greatest driver of buried creeks and hidden hydrology in modern cities. Not solely based on smell, but it was definitely a factor. In entombing these rivers, we cut off the bad but also vacated the positive associations of the smell of water that couple nostalgia via memory. Good and bad, the evocation of smells of water – ocean funk, tidal salt/fresh water mixing, freshness of a bubbling creek, wet grass, and all things in between have strong impacts on our experiences. One of these concepts mentioned recently in writings I recall, including both a chapter in Cynthia Barnett’s book “Rain: A Natural and Cultural History“, and featured as Robert Macfarlane’s word of the day, is the concept of “petrichor,” which is much more complex but can be simplified as the smell air before, or after rain, which is so evocative as to support an entire industry, outlined in detail in an Atlantic article by Barnett “Making Perfume from the Rain“.

The role smell plays in our experience and enjoyment of places is often not discussed specifically, beyond nuisances, so it is heartening to see artists, designers, and planners taking on this specific area for study. We will expand more on the water-specific aspects of this in the future, but for now, a great intro is this wonderful meditation on ‘The Conservation of Smellscapes” from the blog Thinking like a Human, which captures the idea better than I, and which also references a couple of the smellscape pioneers which we will discuss in more length below.

Kate McLean

Anyone interesting in the topic of smellscapes has inevitably come across the amazing work of Kate McLean, especially with recent write-ups in Atlas Obscura, The New Yorker, BBC News, and Co.Design to name a few. McLean is an artist and designer and current PhD candidate who focuses on sensory research which is found at her site Sensory Maps. and you can follower her as well on her Twitter account @katemclean. In her websites explanatory text, she mentions the techniques and use of the visual to represent the sensory: “The tools of my trade include: individual group smellwalks, individual smellwalks (the “smellfie”), smell sketching, collaborative smellwalks, graphic design, motion graphics, smell generation and smell diffusion, all united by mapmaking”

A 2015 story on “Mapping Your City’s Smells” discusses some of her work, specifically for London, where they developed a ‘dictionary’ of urban smells, “…including less pleasant odors (“exhaust,” “manure,” “trash,” “putrid,” and “vomit” among them) and downright lovely-sounding ones (“lavender,” “fruity,” “BBQ,” and “baked,” for example).” An aroma wheel developed by the team, captures the complexity of these smells.

From this, they used words in geotagged social media posts to capture a spatial picture of these elements, then mapped them based on concentrations in a Pollock-esque composition showing bad smells along red tones and nature smells in greens. As noted: “The researchers envision these maps being used in a variety of ways. Urban planners, they suggest, can use them to figure out which areas of the city smell the worst—and then consider using air-flow manipulation, green spaces, and pedestrian-friendly streets to change them. Maybe computer scientists will one day create a wayfinding app that gives users the most pleasant-smelling path to their destination. Or maybe city officials will be inspired to use social media data to more consistently monitor how their residents are being affected by smells—and by the pollution that creates it.”

An online map of this data also exists from McLeans collaborators Daniele Quercia, Rossano Schifanella, and Luca Maria Aiello, under the auspices of goodCitylife.

Smelly Maps provides an interactive version of the data for London, with some additional Info about this: “Think about your nose. Now think about big data. You probably didn’t realize it, but your nose is a big data machine. Humans are able to potentially discriminate more than thousands different odors. On one hand, we have our big data nose; on the other hand, we have city officials and urban planners who deal only with the management of less than ten bad odors out of a trillion. Why this negative and oversimplified perspective? Smell is simply hard to measure. SmellyMaps have recently proposed a new way of capturing the entire urban smellscape from social media data (i.e., tags on Flickr pictures or tweets). Cities are victims of a discipline’s negative perspective, only bad odors have been considered. The SmellyMaps project aims at disrupting this negative view and, as a consequence, being able to celebrate the complex smells of our cities.”

Zooming in, you get a breakdown on the relative smell density and dominant smell in a dashboard style.

On the interactive side, a smellwalk project from 2014 for Amsterdam gives a good overview of the process, where multiple people walk and record information, with “Over 650 smells were detected by 44 people undertaking 10 smellwalks over a period of 4 days in April 2013. Based on written descriptions from the smellwalkers, 50 broad categories were identified. Both frequently-mentioned and curious smells feature on the map.”

She provides a short description of the results, discussing her expectation of cannabis instead replace with the reality of waffles, spices, herring, laundry, flowers and leaves detected by participants.

“Dots mark the origins of the smells, concentric circles indicate their range and the warped contours allude to potential smell drift in the north- and south-westerley winds encountered on the days of the smellwalks. It is estimated that humans have the capacity to discriminate up to 1 trillion smells and our experience is highly individual; to walk and sniff is to know.”

The color legend breaks down specific dominant smells (both frequently-mentioned and ‘curious) derived from the 650 smells, and a subset of the 50 categories.

The graphical quality of these maps amplifies the the experiential quality, which also I believe makes them more engaging to wider audiences of designers and planners. The magnitude lines offer an opportunity to zoom in on some specific comments displayed in an engaging way.

A video of this Smellmap Amsterdam is worth a look also:

The 2017 New Yorker article “The Graphic Designer Who Maps the World’s Cities By Smell” shows a more localized example, as the author, guided by a kit she downloaded from McLean’s site, later mapped by McLean herself in Greenwich Village. One of McLean’s own earlier endeavors looked at some specific blocks in New York, with a hyperlocal exercise,inspired by another article from New York Magazine ‘The Smelliest Block in New York‘.

The work blending art and science is a great model, and the representation offers some good lessons for mapping less concrete elements in the urban landscape. The further parallel with hidden hydrology is in being able to interpret the unseen, as McLean mentions in the Atlas Obscura post, ““Participants are often surprised about how many odors can be detected if you really pay attention to smell,” McLean says. “Humans can differentiate a trillion different smells but we breathe about 24,000 times a day. Much of it can easily go unnoticed.” “

Victoria Henshaw

Another pioneer in the field is Victoria Henshaw, who sadly passed away in 2014. She provided another strong voice in the field of smell, authoring a 2013 book on the subject, Urban Smellscapes: Understanding and designing city smell environments, which was “…contributing towards the wider research agenda regarding how people sensually experience urban environments. It is the first of its kind in examining the role of smell specifically in contemporary experiences and perceptions of English towns and cities, highlighting the perception of urban smellscapes as inter-related with place perception, and describing odour’s contribution towards overall sense of place.”

An urban planner by training and an academic, Henshaw wrote on the topic at her blog Smell and the City, which, along with her book left a wonderful trove of info on the topic. An interview in Wired UK “Odour map seeks to save endangered smells‘ hints at an oft-mentioned theme in any writing around the subject: that while we scrub the cities of the bad smells, we also lose the essence of what makes places unique and special.

As mentioned by Henshaw: “”The approach to town-centre management has always been about sterilisation,” she says. “We’ve become so unused to strong smells that we now have adverse reactions to them.” This disassociation is both the target as well as the opportunity to tap into unrealized sensory design opportunities, as we gain more understanding of the impacts. One such method as the ability to reroute ventilation systems “to the front of restaurants and entertainment venues — with the intention of attracting more customers,” which ostensibly captures the essence and vitality of a food stall in Barcelona, from her site.

There’s a mention as well of a Global Smell Map that seems to be no longer viable as it doesn’t have any info. A later article by Henshaw as well from 2014 ‘Don’t Turn Up Your Nose at the City in Summer” focuses the nose on New York, which for her was ‘The season of smell”, where smell becomes a factor in the original city grid layout to “maximize the benefits of westerly winds to dissipate the supposedly deadly miasmas thought to spread disease…” as well as industrial pasts, even long after the smoke stacks go cold, mentioning that “In London’s Olympic Village, for example, the main stadium was built on a former industrial zone — and when it rains, locals report detecting the smell of soap seeping from the site of an old factory.”

She mentions the sociology of smell as well, mentioning external issues like waste-treatment facilities and their smelly impacts often being located in poorer areas. “Smell also provides a sociological map of the city. Poorer people tend to have less control over their smell environments.” The experience of smell-walks and close observations of senses, provides a new way of seeing and understanding places, and although sometimes foul, Henshaw’s advice is sound:

“But don’t hold your nose. Teach yourself to parse the city’s odors and you will find a new dimension of urban experience opening up before you. Accept the olfactory.”

McLean and Henshaw, along with a cast of others also helped co-edit the recent literature on the subject in the 2018 book “Designing with Smell – Practices, Techniques and Challenges”, which offers “case studies from around the world, highlighting the current use of smell in different cutting-edge design and artistic practices…” [with] “…an emphasis on spatial design in numerous forms and interpretations – in the street, the studio, the theatre or exhibition space, as well as the representation of spatial relationships with smell.”

As mentioned, this detour into the realm of senses and smells may seem counter to the investigation of hidden hydrology, but these examples connect the hidden to the physical world through exploration, and also provide compelling ways of using these investigations of place while presenting graphic information that is compelling, interactive, and data-rich. Next we will dive into another sensory exploration, that of soundscapes.

HEADER: Smell Map by Kate McLean – via Medium