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Heather Mosley | SBJ

Going with the Flow: Waterways key to city’s placemaking initiatives

SBJ Economic Growth Survey: Live, Work & Play

Posted online

­For Tim Rosenbury, Springfield’s director of quality of place initiatives, there’s something magical about water.

“Maybe the notion that water, especially moving water, has been somewhere and is going somewhere triggers our imagination,” he says.

Springfield is putting resources behind its waterways. An example is the daylighting of Jordan Creek, which was covered over by a culvert in the early 1930s. The phase of the project that will allow the creek to flow in the open as it once did will cost $6.8 million.

Jared Rasmussen, project manager for Renew Jordan Creek with engineering firm Olsson Inc., agrees: People want to be around water.

“What we’re trying to do is bring that asset that’s been hidden for years so people can see it and interact with it,” he says.

The project is partially funded with a grant from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to improve impaired waterways, and the rest is funded by the city’s level property tax.

Rasmussen says daylighting Jordan Creek means more than just unboxing it. It means planting natural habitats to appeal to bugs that are indicators of the health of the stream.

When the stream flows freely again, residents will be able to stroll along it, and workers might eat a sandwich beside it on their lunch hour. According to input provided in 2021, the public desires gathering places there as well – a restaurant, dog park or a pavilion they can reserve for gatherings.

“It’s going to be an Ozark creek,” Rasmussen says. “Sometimes it might dry up, but when we get into fall or spring, we’ll see regular rains, and it’s going to be a very natural creek.”

The city likely will experience less flooding, too, as this is one of the key purposes of the project.

“It fixes flooding, addresses aging infrastructure and creates an environment people want to live and work around,” Rasmussen says. “People want to experience urban greenspace in downtown Springfield.”

Now streaming
The daylighting of Jordan Creek is just one water-related project under construction in the city. Another initiative is restoring Fassnight Creek to its natural state in the area alongside the Phelps Grove neighborhood. The $3.1 million project will remove 1,000 linear feet of existing concrete channel while incorporating natural pools and native Missouri plantings, according to the city’s Public Works Department. It also is funded by a 319 grant as well as a grant from the Missouri Department of Conservation.

Rosenbury acknowledges the project will add natural beauty to Springfield but adds there is economic development value as well.

“The leadership of Springfield recognizes that more and more people get to choose where they live, and they don’t choose their town based solely on their job,” he says. “They are looking for quality of life as well. In fact, many people have jobs that are not in the same locations where they live.”

Attention to quality of place helps make the city appealing.

“If Springfield continues to have sustainable growth, one of the ways in which we attract people and keep people is by making Springfield a truly livable community,” Rosenbury says. “That is the economic prosperity argument for quality of place.”

The activity known as placemaking aims to makes a city attractive – that is, it’s geared toward making people want to choose a specific location to live, work and play.

Attraction matters to respondents in Springfield Business Journal’s 2022 Economic Growth Survey. When asked to name the top five most important issues for their business over the next five years, 92% wanted to attract new customers, and this was the single largest issue for 49%.

Talent acquisition and retention were top-five concerns for 92%. Additionally, attracting more business to the Springfield region was in the top five priorities of 65% of respondents, and growing the working population in the Springfield area was ticked by 57%.

On a more personal note, 63% of respondents reported they intend to age in place in the Queen City.

All of these are reasons placemaking matters, Rosenbury says.

“Cities do compete for businesses and for households, and we’ve just got to have every weapon in our arsenal to fight this battle to be economically prosperous,” he says. “We are in a talent race as well, and so attracting talent means that we’ve got to be an attractive place.”

Everyone’s doing it
Robert Weddle, dean of the Hammons School of Architecture at Drury University, is enthusiastic about the prospects posed by the city’s waterways, including Jordan Creek, Fassnight Creek and Lake Springfield.

Master planning for Lake Springfield – created by the damming of the James River in 1957 and used for the cooling requirements of the James River Power Station – is currently underway at a cost of $1 million. It’s funded through an $800,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Economic Development Administration, with other funding from the Hatch Foundation, City Utilities of Springfield and the city.

Weddle pointed to other examples of cities where waterways have proven to be economic drivers. In Chattanooga, Tennessee, for instance, the redeveloped riverfront became an organizing space for new cultural facilities.

Closer to home, he notes, Kansas City officials began efforts to beautify Brush Creek, paved over in 1935 by a political boss who owned a concrete company. Brush Creek is now the setting for a greenways trail that passes the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art and the Country Club Plaza shopping area. The city embraces water so heartily that one of its nicknames is the City of Fountains for the 200-plus decorative water features throughout the city.

There are countless other examples of cities with river walks and similar water features, according to Weddle.

“When you have a waterway, people are attracted to the ability to be in some authentic nature in an urban space. It’s just pleasant,” he says.

In terms of economic development, “pleasant” has value, according to Weddle.

“Cities that make spaces like that have a better time attracting and keeping employees and businesses, because that just naturally flows from improving quality of life in an urban space,” Weddle says. “There’s a direct line to quality of life.”

Errin Kemper, director of the Department of Environmental Services for the city, agrees.

“If you really want to dive down to the fundamentals of why people care about water quality, they don’t care about the chemical composition of water,” he says. “People love water for the ability to do things they want to do, like swimming, fishing or boating.”

Kemper says people in the downtown area don’t always realize there’s a river under their feet. He looks forward to seeing Jordan Creek restored.

“In an urban setting, you really appreciate it,” he says. “There’s a connection with nature in the middle of a lot of concrete.”

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