Water Infrastructure and Community Building: The Case of Marvin Gaye Park

Abstract

The contemporary redefinition of infrastructure as landscape proposes to address functional issues together with ecological, aesthetic and social concerns. Despite its claim to provide an integrative model, this discourse emphasizes ecological over social benefit. It is argued here that the underlying principles of this model-decentralization, site-specificity and multifunctionality-also have significant socio-cultural implications that relate to building community and enhancing place attachment. This paper will assess the social impact of the landscape infrastructure model by examining the relationship of water infrastructure to the social and cultural dynamics of urban communities through the case of Marvin Gaye Park, a stream valley park in Washington, DC.

The Multifunctionality of Country Stores: Insights on Resilience from Rural Vermont

“…Originally a term that identified the multiple functions that agricultural landscapes serve, it has expanded to recognize the wide range of ecological, economic, and cultural outputs of rural places more broadly (Brandt and Vejre ; Hollander ; McCarthy ; Holmes ). It has been applied to forest policy (Muñoz‐Rojas and others ), water infrastructure (Rosenberg ), and hunting governance (Fischer and others ). Given the wide application of multifunctionality in geography and rural studies, it is surprising that the concept has not been used to analyze the built environments within landscapes.…”

River histories: a thematic review

“…A mental loss of a river can result if access to it is cut off by a motorway on the river bank (Backouche 2008) or through the creation of new concrete and mental borders following a military conflict (Korjonen-Kuusipuro and Kohvakka 2010). Also, the functional simplification of a river to a one-purpose object and its transformation into infrastructure, as discussed in the previous section, has been identified as a mental loss of a river (see Rosenberg 2015).…”