Enriching the Ecological Value of and Increasing Human Interaction within an Industrialized Flood Plain
The highly industrialized Pawtuxet River has lost a great deal of its floodzone as well as created a highly polluted edge along the Western portion of the river. The Scituate Reservoir in Northwestern Rhode Island is the drinking water supply for Providence and drains into the polluted western section of the Pawtuxet River. My site is a flood plain which has been industrilized in the past. A flood in the 1960's wiped out the few houses and roads in the area and in the past 50 years the roads have been abanodoned asking for a critical assessment of the risidual space created by the cut of the raiload, the building of RT 117 and an old farm road. The space straddles the river and presently contains a public nursery on the Northern side of the river. The new program of the space builds on the past ecological function of the site, enriches the site with new ecological program, allows agriculture to become an important feature of the space, as well as creates a new type of agriculture by building a space on site for the bioremediation of local contaminated soils. The site is an educational space for the community which contains a nework of paths. Each path describes the ecological function of the space one occupies by the way it is constructed and interacts with the land it is built in. On a larger scale the space begins to make connections between Pawtuxet Village and Roger Williams Park as well as the continues to address human involvement within the river cooridor by passive use of the space. This cooridor begins to make another connection between the Naragansett Bay, a body of salt water used for transportation, and The Scituate Resevour, a body of fresh water used for supplying The City of Providence with drinking water. Finally, the integration between designed floodzones, ecologically specific spaces such as wetlands, meadows and upland forrests, spaces for contained bioremeditaion and the appropriate inustry is crucial for a sustainable economy, healthy rivers, appropriate flood zones and human understanding of the importance of these systems and our involvement in them.