Revitalizing Urban Waterway Communities

Richard Smardon is a SUNY Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry, USA. Sharon Moran is an Associate Professor at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry, USA.April Karen Baptiste is an Associate Professor of Environmental Studies and Africana and Latin American Studies at Colgate University, USA.

"Importantly, as this book stresses, reviving urban waterways is about restoring relationships and community building. In so doing, the authors argue persuasively that there is real potential to tackle issues of environmental justice." - taken from the Foreword, Professor Judith Petts, CBE, University of Plymouth, UK"Richard C. Smardon, Sharon Moran and April Karen Baptiste have delivered an invaluable handbook on urban stream restoration for professional practitioners, policy makers and planners, community-based scientists and activists, and university faculty and students. The distribution of urban water quality problems has long been a critical environmental justice issue, with deep political economic, geographic, and social roots. Revitalizing Urban Waterway Communities: Streams of Environmental Justice provides a wealth of scientific evidence and case studies (with especially instructive examples from Europe) that serve as a best-practice guide to those aiming to clean up their waterways and at the same time, avoid the pitfalls of green gentrification. Particularly innovative are the book’s approach to engagement via arts and culture, and how stream restoration can serve as a way to improve the physical landscape and water quality while at the same time repairing social relationships. It is required reading for urban environmentalists and social justice activists." - Jennifer Wolch, William W. Wurster Dean, College of Environmental Design University of California, Berkeley, USA"From the nation’s capital to the East Bay, from Syracuse to Milwaukee to Chattanooga, Smardon and his colleagues have embraced the rich diversity of experience in revitalizing urban watersheds and waterfronts—a truly collaborative process which will survive the ups and downs of federal environmental policies." - Rutherford H. Platt, Emeritus Professor of Geography, University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA

• 1. Introduction: Urban Waterway History and Planning Context 2. History of Urban River Restoration in Europe 3. The Big Picture—Framing Environmental Justice, Political Ecology and Stream Restoration 4. Environmental Justice Leadership and Intergenerational Continuity 5. Public Engagement Process 6. Restoring Streams and Relationships 7. Community Engagement and Mapping 8. Urban Waterways as Green Infrastructure 9. Creative Engagements with Waterway Restoration and Environmental Justice 10. Summary and Streams of Revitalization Practice