Connective Power of Rivers
Rivers are powerful tools that can catalyze 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 who depend on them. Today, we must revitalize these rivers and harness their power to regenerate the landscape and connect communities.
Beyond Borders
Working along some of America's most iconic rivers, SCAPE melds regional planning with 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, bring people back to the river's edge, enhance its ecologies, and celebrate its cultural legacy.
Working closely with 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 along its banks.
Given their tremendous scale, watersheds can become organizing structures for massive multi-jurisdictional, multi-generational, and multi-cultural transformation, creating space for the convergence of ideas, identity, and collaboration.
Stitching fragmented landscapes
A regional vision is only as strong as the physical work that supports it. After decades of disinvestment and hardening in river corridors, the joint climate and biodiversity crisis demands bringing life back to rivers through renaturing riverbanks and selectively removing dams and levees.
A holistic approach to reconnecting these systems is essential. We thread deep community and stakeholder engagement into every stage of work, parallel to the technical work of daylighting buried channels, restoring native ecosystems, combating erosion, thickening riparian edges, and reestablishing hydrological connectivity.
Developed for the Resilient By Design: Bay Area Challenge, Public Sediment for Alameda Creek is a watershed-scale vision for Fremont, Union City, and Newark, 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. Read more about Design for Climate Adaptation.
Resilient by Design: Bay Area Challenge
The same 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 and landfills, contributing to chronic flooding in adjacent neighborhoods.
As part of the McCoys Creek Recreation and Restoration Plan, the creek 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 more than five years to turn this vision into reality. In October 2025, the creek was finally reconnected to the St. Johns River, where floating wetlands will soon provide refuge and habitat for juvenile fish spawning upstream.
The broader plan restores native ecosystems, reduces flood risk, and expands 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. Read more about Learning Landscapes.
The installation embraces the generative clutter of collaborative design, showing how individual conversations, revisions, and priorities coalesced into a shared regional vision.
The installation embraces the generative clutter of collaborative design, showing how individual conversations, revisions, and priorities coalesced into a shared regional vision.
Rivers have always been the arteries of human civilization, and are also living systems with spatial and ecological logics of their own. The work of stitching river landscapes back together demands thinking across scales and generations, while recognizing that the health of a river is inseparable from the health of the communities and the species that depend on it.
