Three icons of the St. Louis riverfront. Photo by Derek Hoeferlin
In front of me sits a gorgeous book titled Way Beyond Bigness. It is lush with photos and foldout schematics and a tour de force comparison of the Mississippi, Mekong, and Rhine river basins. Derek Hoeferlin, professor and chair of landscape architecture at WashU’s Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, pulled in experts in each region to inform the book, which is subtitled The Need for a Watershed Architecture.
And this is where I hesitate. For years I was not even sure what a watershed was. Tentatively, I open a book that is bound to baffle me—but ah! It is written for all of us, and right off the bat I find a clear definition and a clever play of words. A watershed is a region whose water all drains into the same river, basin, or sea. “But it’s also a watershed moment,” Hoeferlin writes, and he repeats this when we meet for coffee. So much needs to be rethought: how we connect with our rivers, how we manage floods and droughts, what it even means to live in a collective watershed. And in order to do that right, he wants to rethink design itself, changing it from a solitary art to a collaboration of various experts who can help integrate water, land, cities and their built environment, cultural values, environmental issues, planning, fairness, and global context.
Hoeferlin is not a man of small thoughts.
“I grew up in the woods outside Eureka,” Hoeferlin says, “up on a hill above the Meramec River and its floodplain.” Like me, he was warned that the Mississippi River was a dark, muddy swirl of deathly danger. At least his family drove across the Meramec River regularly; I was warned about the Meramec, too. “Oh, honey, never swim or float that river, people die there every summer!”
The Meramec was edged with nature preserves but also with “cheap, suburban, big-box development,” the kind we keep building and then building levees to protect. But what kid notices that? Rivers were there to float. Overall, young Derek felt more connected to the Ozarks than to the Mississippi River, which, “other than the VP Fair or a riverboat cruise, was this terrifying place. You are told you will die if you touch it.”
Off to Tulane for college, he studied architecture and completed his first master’s degree, then added a second at Yale. “I’d gone on the occasional riverboat cruise in New Orleans, too,” he recalls. “But no one was talking about issues of flooding or the city sinking. We were living on borrowed time.”
When Hurricane Katrina hit, he had just accepted a faculty position at WashU. Now, with water’s dangers obvious, he paid it close attention. “I immediately questioned my role as an architect set within such an unprecedented, human-altered ‘natural disaster,’ one that cut across multiple scales and disciplines,” he writes in Way Beyond Bigness. Working with another WashU prof, John Hoal, Hoeferlin helped lead the Unified New Orleans Plan for recovery. He was seeing “watershed” as scientist-geographer John Wesley Powell defined it: a region “within which all living things are inextricably linked by their common water course.” Simple logic dictated that the humans who settled there would form a community—and rise or sink together.
After analyzing the New Orleans watershed, Hoeferlin could see his hometown’s system with clearer eyes. He saw its fertile American bottoms floodplain, a continuous stretch of land edged with limestone bluffs and soggy with river water. Saw, too, how industry had fragmented the region “into closed parcels of extraction, production, and displacement.” And so St. Louis went, many of us clueless about our watershed and disconnected from the river that is, historically, the only reason we are here.
“St. Louis is at this incredible juncture,” Hoeferlin remarks. “Everything went through here. And with that come catastrophic consequences to communities.” Over the decades, favoritism toward industry severed us from the Mississippi. (On the city’s 1948 land use map, the entire riverfront has been rezoned as industrial.) “We’re not going to get rid of big industry or big ag,” he concedes, “but how do we exist within that framework and not bow to it?”
First, we figure out how our water works. “St. Louis is smack dab in the middle of the Mississippi watershed, where three great rivers—the Illinois, Mississippi, and Missouri—all join.” They differ sharply from one another, but commingled, they flow with a fierce turbulence all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. Studying the implications changed Hoeferlin’s thinking about landscape, about design, about environment and art and justice.
And when it came time to push his thinking even further, he had an idea: “What if you look at three different river basins? Different scales, different cultures, yet in terms of river engineering, they have all built these massive levees and dams that are facing very challenging issues, now that we are overlaying climate change.”
Mekong, one of the three river basins he chose, “is rapidly accelerating, full tilt development, building massive dams even more intense than ours, because they are 20,000 feet up in the Himalayas. Massive reservoir dams for hydropower that is then exported to cities outside the watershed boundaries.
The Rhine, his second choice, “is adapting. They have climate-change policy in the Netherlands and in Germany. They are making room for the river, and for projects that will manage flood and drought.”
As for the Mississippi, “it’s stagnating, trapped by a twentieth-century system that was over-engineered.” We have ignored, walled off, and interfered with the rivers of our watershed, sometimes all at once.
Hoeferlin quickly adds that his comparison “does not mean the Rhine is doing everything right or we are doing everything wrong. The Mississippi isn’t catastrophically failing. We are still the breadbasket of the world. Shut it down, and in two weeks, you will have shut down the global food supply.”
That said, we have some rethinking to do—as does the rest of the planet. Extreme storms are costing billions of dollars and killing rather a lot of people. Hoeferlin does not want to tell developing countries that they cannot develop. But sea level is rising, and there will be places where someone has to say, “You can’t grow rice anymore. You’re going to have to grow shrimp. And it’s going to be okay.”
It is, if we learn to work across multiple scales, blending the insights of multiple disciplines in order to understand entire river basins.
Hoeferlin is traveling this autumn, first to Istanbul to speak to the International Federation of Landscape Architects, then to Ho Chi Minh City and Singapore to give keynotes. Criss-crossing a blue planet, watery and filled with promise and—our parents were more right than they knew—danger. To address the challenges at every scale, we will need “a new synthetic notion of architecture, as well as landscape architecture, urban design, and other design disciplines.” Blueprints will no longer be framed by the walls of a building, the boundaries of a region, or the city limits.
“And I want to get the message out there beyond the design disciplines,” Hoeferlin says, leaning forward. Politicians need to care about problems that will outlast their time in office—and reshape their constituents’ lives. Here in the U.S., will there be an eastward migration as water grows scarce? People might be drawn here—“but we totally mismanage our water! Flooding is bad, but the droughts are worse, and to my understanding, there isn’t as much funding for catastrophic droughts. Which will increase. So what is the future of corn and soybeans and cotton?
“Water is one of the most politicized things on Earth, if not the most,” he notes. “Yet it is apolitical. Water goes where it wants to go. It will find its way.”
Read more by Jeannette Cooperman here.
