Watts Branch is located in the northeast corner of Washington D.C and Prince George’s County, Maryland. It is the largest D.C. tributary of the Anacostia River. The stream is 4.2 miles long and its watershed covers 2,405 acres, divided almost evenly between the District (47%) and Prince George’s County (53%). The watershed supports a population of close to 30,000 inhabitants. The District portion of the watershed includes over a dozen neighborhoods, 10 charter and public schools, and a host of congregations. Only 12% of the watershed is forested.

 

Why Watts?
Julie Bargmann
Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture

“Inner city blues make me wanna holler.” Marvin Gaye

The Watts Branch stream valley and its neighborhoods begged for a synthetic and sympathetic design approach. While many D.C. agencies work there, they had always approached their individual project missions with narrow vision. A key link was not being made: the health of the stream, the park and the neighborhoods must be addressed simultaneously.

Watts Branch presented itself as a perfect initiative for our school whose mission declares that design matters – environmentally, socially and economically, culturally and aesthetically. Working with the people who live along Watts Branch made this project very real - and our studio projects need to be real.

So in the fall of 2003 an interdisciplinary group of students took the first look into the area that led to the multiple, collaborative design studies that followed.

 

Introduction:
Shanti Fjord Levy
Graduate Landscape Architecture and Architecture

The following pages represent samples from the work of three collaborating groups of students and faculty. Each of these projects generated work to communicate facets of the complex issues at Watts Branch to a different set of people. This body of work aims to be catalytic rather than prescriptive.

Summer Design Study:
This study first looked at the “energy in the valley,” the multitude of isolated government and non-government projects working in this area, looking for ways they could overlap to become a cohesive regeneration of the stream valley. The summer project focused on providing tools for local civic leaders to ask for what they want in conversation with agency representatives. It also supported their efforts to galvanize community action around salient issues. A key part of this work was learning to communicate a reading of the valley as a series of distinct rooms, defined by the landscape structure and alive with natural and cultural ecologies. A workbook expressed this reading as a series of walking tours, offering a new view of familiar neighborhood landscapes.

Community History Workshop:
The Community History Workshop drew out the generations of stories of the place hidden in documents, archives and memories. Collectively, these stories reveal the deep, if sometimes fractured roots of the neighborhood - its anchored identity. Excerpts from the text produced in the workshop run through the sidebars of this article.

Design Studios:
Two projects from the landscape design studio offer a glimpse of the potential of the place to recover its relationship with the stream. These projects identify the schools and recreation centers as the places to start in instigating neighborhood change.

Summer Design Study:
Watershed + Neighborhood = “Waterhood”
excerpts from the summer design study workbook
Where the human neighborhood is defined by the geometry of property boundaries, pedestrian and automobile movement patterns and the aggregation of homes and buildings, the natural neighborhood is defined by its topographic shape, the flows of animals, plants and seeds that follow water and air movement within the cell of each hydrologic room. Each room is enhanced by the volumetric mass of tree crowns and diversity of the planted form that creates microclimate for diverse habitats. The urban watershed is a rich community that supports flora and fauna while acting as a governor and moderator to reduce climatic impacts upon urban infrastructure systems.

Each neighborhood can also be defined in human terms as the city landscape composed of streets, parcel boundaries, land-use activities and movement systems that establish communities’ activity centers. The aggregated group of neighbors and shared interests compose the neighborhood.

The watershed and neighborhood overlap in both positive and negative ways. A stand of big trees shades residents in their homes on a hot summer day, helping them to reduce electrical costs for mechanical cooling. When sewer lines are not maintained and uncontrolled storm water digs away at these old pipes, it can release raw sewage into the neighborhood stream and park systems. This overlap or interplay between neighborhood and watershed systems, a pair of neighborhood landscapes, is revealed in the ongoing history of the place.

Working Zones & Design Actions:
To continue the process of collaboration along the Watts Branch cultural corridor, we have organized the individual programs, projects and plans into a set of four working zones and three design actions.

A working zone is a method of subdividing and aggregating work efforts along the diverse corridor environment into manageable areas of common ground. A working zone boundary is loosely defined and differs from a planning district or political boundary. A zone can expand and contract over time as projects are added or finished. The working zones form the basis for attracting and grouping individual projects, forming working relationships to leverage funds and coordinate program efforts as they seek to enhance the overall environment of Watts Branch. The working zone approach to project implementation is based on the idea that digging up the landscape once to serve four different agendas is less disruptive and cheaper than digging up the same landscape four different times. This method of bundling projects and efforts is extremely important to the enhancement of ecological functions and reduction of negative economic and social impacts upon surrounding neighborhoods. Bundling projects into zones is also an effective way to organize neighborhood volunteer efforts and local ownership.

Working zones are identified by mapping past, present and future development activity, ecological patterns and community input. The boundaries and shape of these areas or zones are defined by two criteria — one, the distinctive physical features of the watershed and neighborhood, and two, the convergence of local and District initiated projects. In this study, Watts Branch is categorized into four working zones. Each working zone title recalls the two scales of work effort: one, a connection to the larger ecological canopy of the watershed and two, the neighborhood’s orientation toward the stream valley. Within each working zone are key signature elements or landmarks that define the natural and cultural geography of each zone.

Each working zone contains a number of large and small projects and potential opportunities. Based upon design research and community input three design criteria or actions have been identified to help translate the corridor cultural and ecological agenda into actual spaces and places. They define the primary formal, functional and operational agenda of taking the assets of green infrastructure—underpinned by a rich urban forest—into the everyday development of community land uses. These include commercial and residential development, as well as infrastructure systems, such as roads and storm water lines. The design actions also set the stage for regenerating Watts Branch as a cultural corridor where the activities and flow of people, water, animal habitat and environmental process engage and support one another.

Great Streets
Washington D.C. has two types of great streets. The most familiar are the civic and commercial corridors, such as Connecticut Avenue, Pennsylvania Avenue and Minnesota Avenue. They stretch across the District’s urban landscape, defined by continuous parallel street plantings, pedestrian sidewalks and an architectural building wall street.

The second type of great street reaches down and through the plains and valleys beyond the Federal core. Nannie Helen Burroughs Boulevard, which meanders through the Watts Branch stream corridor, is of this type. It is an intra-neighborhood cultural corridor that is anchored by historic corners and a set of intersecting side streets that reach into adjacent neighborhoods and natural systems. It is a local arterial linking the cultural environment of schools, homes, churches and businesses with the ecological environment of public gardens, parks, tributaries and trails.

Natural Greenways and Cultural Corridors
Washington, D.C. has a long tradition of building and maintaining greenway corridors that take two forms, linear and circular. The most famous linear greenway is Rock Creek parkway, which weaves its stream ecology and recreational systems across the District to the Potomac River. The second is the circular parkway and greenway system that was laid out in the 1900’s, connecting civil war fort sites and parks located on the heights that overlook the central federal terrace. These greenways are part of the National Capital network.

There exists a third type of greenway that is best represented by Watts Branch. This smaller scale linear park and stream corridor operates as a cultural corridor, connecting the District neighborhoods into the larger capital greenway and street networks. These local cultural corridors foreground the diverse ecological and ethnic neighborhood cultures that comprise the “background” of Washington’s urban landscape. In Watts Branch, nature is a source of economic hope and ecological stability—an indictor habitat or sign to the larger region that this neighborhood is a historic landmark and a culturally active, economically vital and safe contributor to the District and metropolitan area.

New Communities in the Waterhood
In the District’s new comprehensive plan, the Inclusive City, there is a focus on developing mixed-income mid-density housing along major transit arterials, such as along East Capitol St. This is a very important planning and neighborhood stability strategy, supporting neighborhoods that are experiencing demographic changes and increased access to goods and services.

Watts Branch is home to a specific type of mixed-use mid-density arterial development: mixed-income and mid-density housing situated on an upland or terrace of a major urban watershed. For example, Lincoln Heights gets its name, “heights” from its location on top of the upland hills which surround Watts Branch’s watershed and define its central valley. Although Lincoln Heights is within a 10 minute walk to transit facilities along East Capitol St., cultural activities indicate that its regional address is tied to the arterial workings of Watts Branch: residents use the bicycle and pedestrian trail and frequent the parks and shady spots along the stream; they also participate in the economic life on Nannie Helen Burroughs Avenue and Division Street. Here in Watts Branch, the neighborhood and watershed create a dual-function artery, a central focus that works in parallel with more traditional civic boulevards such as East Capitol Ave.

The Anacostia Waterfront: “On and Of the River”
The focus of Anacostia’s waterfront planning effort has been on development located along the edge of the river’s main channel. This is a critical planning step in the process of foregrounding the Anacostia River as a cultural asset in public view. To take the next step, one must recognize that the waterfront of this tidal river reaches beyond its main channel through stream branches that extend eastward into adjacent District neighborhoods. Watts Branch is the largest of these tributaries in the District and supports a broad flood plain corridor. Watts Branch and the Anacostia River share a long cultural history in which they formed a linear, cultural waterfront connecting a diverse set of neighborhoods.

The full reach of the Anacostia River can be experienced in two ways. The first is to be “on” the river’s main channel: recreating in a public park, living in a new condominium near the shoreline, or viewing the river from the city’s new baseball stadium. The second experience is had by communities within the river’s larger watershed. These residents can be “of” the river by connecting to its tributary streams or branches. Like the branches of a tree, tributaries such as Watts Branch reach into neighborhoods carrying their stream ecology into the economic and cultural life of these richly diverse communities.

 

Landscape Design Studio Projects
Elissa Rosenberg, critic
Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture

 

Parallel Courses: Revealing a Stream Through Neighborhoood Routine
Alissa Ujie Diamond
Graduate Landscape Architecture and Architecture

The Watts Branch studio sought to address the environmental and social challenges at specific sites along the stream, and to propose interventions to integrate the park into the community live of the surrounding neighborhoods.
This project is a proposal for an existing recreational center at the easternmost corner of Washington, D.C. The site is ordered by two factors. First, the gridded system of the streets and playing fields, which guides the daily pedestrian and recreational routines of the inhabitants. Watts Branch itself, in its curving course through the site, offers the second influence. The presence of the stream is now only a missed opportunity, hidden from the site by the dominance of the street grid and the chain-link barriers intended to protect it from further abuse. In this project, the stream is opened to the street, path, park and play spaces so that neighborhood residents can experience a greater connection to the natural systems on the site in the course of their daily lives.

Watts Branch Environmental Learning Spine:
Making Cycles Visible
Jessie Calder
Graduate Landscape Architecture
Environmental education is addressed in terms of participation, observation and experience of cycles. A path, or spine, connecting the Aiton Elementary School to the Lederer Center community gardens structures the site and allows for encounters with processes and cycles such as urban storm water flow, filtration, composting, cultivation of seasonal and community gardens and the recycling of on-site materials.

Images & References available in .pdf format