Connective Power of Rivers
Rivers are powerful tools that can enable regional transformation. Winding across jurisdictional boundaries, diverse communities, urban and rural settings, and ecoregions, rivers have the power to reconnect people and mend fragmented landscapes.
Environmental and landscape challenges along river corridors are vast and varied, spanning hundreds of miles and crossing jurisdictions. Working at the scale of a watershed demands a paradigm shift, one where challenges are not solved in isolation, but through meaningful, systemic engagement and cross-jurisdictional collaboration.
Over centuries, rivers have been culverted, used as open sewers, trapped between levees, and severed from the people that depend on them. Today, it is time to revitalize our rivers and harness this power to regenerate the landscape and connect communities.
Beyond Borders
Working along some of America's most iconic rivers, SCAPE melds regional planning and site-specific design to forge new regional identities, envision a more resilient future, and mend the larger landscape.
Weaving 652 miles across four states, the Tennessee River is a divided landscape shaped by decades of human intervention. Abruptly engineered into a nationwide utility, the Tennessee River Valley is nonetheless one of the most biodiverse regions on the planet, and a place of profound historical and cultural significance. In a world increasingly shaped by climate change and biodiversity loss, it is time to repair this landscape, to bring people back to the river's edge, enhance its ecologies, and to celebrate its cultural legacy.
Working in close collaboration with the Tennessee RiverLine, SCAPE is developing planning and design guidelines to establish the river as a 1.2-million-acre park, supporting economic growth, ecological health, recreation, and long-term stewardship.
The watershed becomes the backdrop for a massive multi-jurisdictional, multi-generational, and multi-cultural transformation, creating space for the convergence of ideas, identity, and collaboration.
Stitching Fragmented Landscapes
But a regional vision is only as strong as the physical work that supports it. After decades of disinvestment and hardening in our river corridors, the joint climate biodiversity crisis demands that we bring life back to rivers through renaturing riverbanks and selectively removing dams and levees.
A holistic approach to reconnecting these systems is essential, requiring systematic and intentional pairing of community engagement and highly technical work: daylighting buried channels, restoring native ecosystems, combating erosion, thickening riparian edges, and restoring hydrological connectivity.
Originally developed for the Resilient By Design: Bay Area Challenge, Public Sediment for Alameda Creek is a watershed-scale climate adaptation vision for the cities of Fremont, Union City, and Newark in California. The project proposes "unlocking" Alameda Creek to reconnect upstream sediment to downstream Baylands, helping sustain, in the face of sea level rise, the protective tidal marshes and mudflats along the edges of San Francisco Bay.
Resilient by Design: Bay Area Challenge
The goal of physically reuniting a river with its larger streambank system is at the heart of SCAPE's work on McCoys Creek in Jacksonville, Florida. For decades, the creek was culverted and buried beneath highways, landfills, and dense overgrowth.
As part of the McCoys Creek Recreation and Restoration Plan, it was daylit and reimagined as a linear park, reconnected to the St. Johns River and allowed to flow freely through a soft, widened channel.
As part of the McCoys Creek Recreation and Restoration Plan, it was daylit and reimagined as a linear park, reconnected to the St. Johns River and allowed to flow freely through a soft, widened channel.
SCAPE has worked for over five years to turn this vision into reality. In 2024, the creek was finally reopened to the St. Johns River, where floating wetlands will soon provide refuge and habitat for juvenile fish spawning upstream.
The broader plan advances native ecosystem restoration, flood risk reduction, and expanded recreational access for historically underserved communities.
Rivers Build Constituencies
Reconnecting rivers to their landscapes and communities is ultimately an act of coalition-building. To realize transformative visions at river scale, communities, policymakers, activists, planners, designers, and residents must come together, recognizing that shared investment in riverine and watershed health is what moves ideas from concept to implementation.
Since 2018, SCAPE has worked along the banks of the Chattahoochee River in the Metro-Atlanta region to transform a once-forgotten waterway into a 100-mile continuous public realm: the Chattahoochee RiverLands. This unfolded through more than 300 stakeholder and community events, where collective effort overcame jurisdictional fragmentation, advanced a shared regional vision, and established equitable, universal access at a territorial scale.
At the 18th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, SCAPE installed Workshopping the Chattahoochee, a testament to the difficult and essential work of community-driven design explored through the lens of this decades-long planning process.
The installation embraces the generative clutter of collaborative design, celebrating the effort of uniting communities, landowners, and policymakers to center the river as a regional spine.
The installation embraces the generative clutter of collaborative design, celebrating the effort of uniting communities, landowners, and policymakers to center the river as a regional spine.
Rivers have always been the arteries of human civilization, but they are also living systems with their own logic and their own needs. The work of stitching back river landscapes together demands thinking across scales and generations, and to recognize that the health of a river is inseparable from the health of the communities and species that depend on it.
