66 The Bushkill Creek is impacted by low stream connectivity due to historic low-head dams, originally built to power 19th-century mills, that block native trout migration and pose safety risks from dangerous⁹ recirculating currents. While heavily used in summer, these dam structures create maintenance and liability concerns. Removing the dams would restore natural stream function, improve water quality, reconnect habitat, and increase flood storage by reactivating the floodplain. Our team proposed keeping the existing bulkhead of the dam and converting it into a community gathering place for fishing and environmental education, honoring history while prioritizing safety and ecological restoration. This attitudinal shift in the design of waterfronts toward stewardship, care, and an actual, lived relationship with the land can also shift how we think about waterfront investment. Large, capitalheavy projects have done a lot of good, but they aren’t always the model we can rely on moving forward, especially given economic uncertainty, debt burdens, and natural resource shortages. In small cities, there is an opportunity to do something more incremental and grounded: working directly with communities, testing small interventions, and building over time. As is the case with the plan for the Bushkill Creek, implementation is less about one big move and more about a series of actions that accumulate, conducted with the community. Changing climates will require a mass spatial reorganization of cities, with migration affecting both people and non-human species alike. The climate collapse that we are facing, and encountering most directly along waterfronts, is not merely a catastrophe. It is also a condition that makes transformation possible. What if we embrace it as a critical transition point, a forced departure from old ways of being that no longer work? The Bushkill Creek Greenway Master Plan is just one example of climateforward, relational planning that uses nature as a connective tool for an urban waterfront. With more than 3.5 million miles of streams and rivers flowing through 95% of U.S. cities, waterfronts are not just local landscapes, they are national infrastructure for ecological resilience. And as we move into more regenerative models that emphasize stewardship, care, and relational design, I hope we lessen the need for resiliency in the face of global pressures. What we protect can, reciprocally, protect and nurture us as well. Distillation Guidebook Co-Lab • 9.18–9.19 2025
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