Hidden Hydrology | An Introduction
Some brief comments on the goals and origins of the Substack.
Welcome to Hidden Hydrology, a resource for exploring lost rivers, buried creeks, and disappeared streams in urban areas – and reconnecting historic ecology to the modern metropolis. At the basic level, hidden hydrology starts with the rivers, lakes, creeks, streams, ponds, wetlands, bogs, and springs that originally made places desirable to occupy and eventually to settle. Cities are innately tied to the confluences of rivers and waterways, which has created tension between their necessity to support life, and the ecological sensitivity that led to their eventual destruction.
Over time, as settlements became towns and cities, several forces conspired to drive these waterways underground. Pollution, real and imagined threats of disease, flooding, and continual pressures for more land, led to piping, filling, modification, and diversion of natural waterways to suit our growing urban needs. With the removal of these features from our daily lives, we’ve also lost the connection to the many ecosystem services they provided us including habitat and maintenance of biodiversity, providing sources of drinking water, aiding in transportation, providing opportunities for recreation, mitigating floods, reducing urban heat islands, and other ecological and social benefits.
The disappeared waterways that are now hidden from view continue to flow under our urban areas, sharing traces and leaving clues for us to discover. Piecing the clues together involves a mix of historical mapping, studying photos and drawings, reviewing textual accounts like narratives and publications, scientific analyses, and on-site ground-truthing — the ability to connect the dots and create snapshots that span the historical to the contemporary, revealing the unique connections that emerge through the process.
There is a robust body of work around opportunities for urban stream daylighting and ecological restoration of urban waterways, which directly aim for solutions to the problem of our lost and buried waterways. These strategies are often seen as the only solution, and when costs or technical challenges become too great, any sort of intervention is abandoned.
The basis of hidden hydrology is that there are many ways to conceptualize interventions aimed at reconnecting us to our hydrological history and offering glimpses of solutions for the future of these waterways beyond going back in time to their original form and function. The goal is a broader concept of ‘restoration’ that looks through the lenses of art, design, landscape architecture, urban and historical ecology, and regenerative planning. The aim is to define ways to restore our connections and celebrate hidden hydrology as a generator of creative interventions, reconnect us to our home places and global community in new ways, and regenerate novel ecosystems that provide positive benefits to improve the livability of our urban communities.
BACKGROUND
I’ve been interested in the idea for many years and spent time from September 2016 to around 2020 more deeply researching the concepts noted above. During that time, I amassed many examples, which can be found on my Hidden Hydrology website, under the tab for Stories with several case studies and discussions of places spanning the globe, shaping the overall extent of what hidden hydrology is and can become. These writings explore how the processes of erasure of historical waterways is shared in cities around the world, and how solutions share similar approaches but take on the unique cultural values of different regions. We also provide numerous examples of how people build on the ideas of local lost streams as a way to explore place-based creative works through public art, literature, mapping, and interpretation. My goal is to build on these previous writings, however, I will regularly sift through the archives of this work and repost some of the more timeless and relevant stories here, in addition to posting new content.
For the past few years, I’ve been focusing more on specific projects in Portland and Seattle, opportunities to explore my home places, which will include some future publications. The larger concept of hidden hydrology continues to interest me and stories appear almost daily related to the topics, which I post both on Twitter (X) under the handle @hiddenhydrology and Instagram @hiddenhydrology, as well as in my LinkedIn Hidden Hydrology group, so I encourage you to follow on either of those forums.
It’s fun to see the continued expansion of dialogue and ideas that emerge around the topic, so the time seemed right also to share more of these stories in longer form. This Substack will look close to home and abroad to achieve the mission of new and novel restoration strategies for urban waterways. I look forward to connecting with more of the larger community interested in the topic and generating a healthy dialogue.