<p>The environmental quality of one of the world’s largest inland water bodies—the Great Lakes of North America—is the focus of Healthy Port Futures. The project stems from a series of events held in 2015 under the rubric of DredgeFest Great Lakes, the third of the Dredge Research Collective’s DredgeFests. Healthy Port Futures focuses on sediment management in small, working ports around the Great Lakes. Typically, the port authorities and the United States Army Corps of Engineers dredge the sediment to maintain shipping channels and dump or dispose of the material as a waste product. The Healthy Port Futures project improves on this process in two ways: it uses dredged material in an ecologically and socially constructive manner to create new landscapes such as wetlands and recreational areas; and it reduces sediment buildup in shipping channels by using passive and adaptable sediment management systems to redirect sediment flow.</p>

<p>The Los Angeles river is 51 miles (82 kilometers) long, built of concrete, and dry for most of the year. In 2015, the Environmental Protection Agency declared the river to be navigable, thereby subjecting it to the rules and regulations mandated in 1977 by the Clean Water Act. Although it is still early on in the design process, the L.A. River Master Plan update by OLIN and Gehry Partners is the most recent, and perhaps most promising, manifestation of many years&rsquo; struggle to breathe life into the river. The master plan builds on more than twenty years of advocacy by L.A. landscape architect Mia Lehrer, local planning agencies, the Army Corps of Engineers and others&mdash;all of whom have expressed a different vision for the future of the river. The river corridor passes through more than a dozen cities. The master plan addresses aspects of water use in various contexts: safety-protection from flooding, loss of life, and property; sustainability&mdash;catching, cleaning, and using water in reservoirs, wetlands, and aquifers; creating habitat for a range of species; and human use for the health of the region and populace.</p>

<p>GreenPlan Philadelphia was unveiled by lead consultants WRT, LLC, in 2006: a vision for open space in Philadelphia that focused on green infrastructure as a way to solve many of the city’s water, sustainability, and quality of life problems. Inspiring this work was a strong culture of community organizing by environmental nonprofits and the precedent of Anne Whiston Spirn&rsquo;s work with the Mill Creek community in West Philadelphia in the 1980s. Driven by the city&rsquo;s increasingly urgent need to respond to concerns from the Environmental Protection Agency&mdash;empowered by the Clean Water Act to regulate combined sewer overflows (CSOs) when they damage the health of urban streams and water sources—GreenPlan Philadelphia entered a multiyear planning process and ultimately resolved the agency&rsquo;s concerns. Led by a progressive mayor, Michael Nutter, GreenPlan Philadelphia became a vehicle for transforming the city&rsquo;s vast network of vacant land into one of the nation&rsquo;s most robust networks of urban green infrastructure.</p>

<p>Reacting to the resurgence of its water management difficulties in the 1990s, the Dutch government made flood protection a top priority, paying special attention to climate change implications. Around the turn of the 21st century, as climate change implications grew more apparent, the idea of giving more room to the rivers first gained traction. A 2002 study determined that the maximum carrying capacity of the Rhine to avoid overflowing the dikes was 15,000 cubic meters per second (mps), and the overarching goal for the Room for the River project was to increase that capacity to 16,000 cubic mps. Room for the River is not a single project but a collection of thirty-four projects located along rivers throughout the Netherlands. Each project has two goals. The first goal was to develop flood abatement strategies in order to safely increase the carrying capacity of the major Dutch rivers&mdash;the Waal, the Nederrijn/Lek, and the IJssel&mdash;all of which flow out of the Rhine River near the German border. The second goal, to create a more attractive river landscape, was given equal weight. This commitment to the improvement of local quality of life at such a large scale is what sets Room for the River apart from other forward-thinking projects in water management.</p>

<p>The first phase of the Weishan Wetland Park in the town of Jining in China&rsquo;s Shandong Province was completed in 2013. The impetus for this 15 square mile (39 square kilometer) park was the adjacent development of a new urban center just south of the existing city of Weishan, near the southeastern edge of the expansive Nansi Lake (also called Weishan Lake). This new southern town will eventually have 50,000 residents in an area that was previously agricultural. The proximity to Nansi Lake, one of the country’s largest and most polluted lakes, makes the park&rsquo;s purification function especially important, as the lake is a part of China’s ambitious, though ecologically and socially disruptive, South-North Water Diversion Project, which redirects fresh water from the Yangtze River in the south to the more arid Yellow River basin in the north. Although the water filtration and purification techniques used in the park are not novel, their scale and integration into the new town mark a significant shift in thinking about water, both within Shandong Province and in China as a whole. Weishan Wetland Park is thus an early example of the type of thinking that launched the Chinese national government’s renowned &ldquo;sponge cities&rdquo; initiative in 2015.</p>