Rock Creek is a complex example of how the city threatens its own amenities. We have glanced at it already—polluted by casual spurts and dribbles of waste from hundreds of thousands of people, its basic hydrology and therefore its very existence as a stream dependent on the proper use of the rural upper third of its watershed. For it has already suffered the loss of many tributary runs and branches in the lower two-thirds during the process of solid development.
In 1966, the critical upper third of the Rock Creek basin was very nearly turned over to suburban developers as a playground for bulldozers by a lame-duck Montgomery County Council on a rezoning spree. When protests against these actions, as well as against the general degradation of the stream, culminated in the issuance of our report The Creek and the City and then in a public meeting under INCOPOT auspices, people who had long been fighting the Creek's battle became the nucleus of a revived public effort. It now appears that under a new Council the upper watershed may be developed in some accordance with the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission's protective plan for the area, so as to keep much of its surface covered with the grasses and humus through which rainwater percolates underground into aquifers that feed the creek through dry periods, and with some safeguards against the customary terrific siltation that careless development produces. And pressure has been generated to deal with the creek's other pollution, which is certain to be a long and laborious job.
Suburbanization itself is based in social forces, and this is not a sociological report. The knotted, often bitter, sometimes violent tone of contemporary American cities does not come within our province, but some consideration of it is inevitable. Not only must any planning for a decent environment—like planning for water use—take into account the needs and interest of the majority of the Basin's citizens who live in and around Washington, but it needs to be based in some understanding of the way they are. For in part the way they are is what determines the pattern of urban growth and much of the restless shifting and wandering that makes the city's people a strong influence to the limits of the Basin and beyond. In part also, however, the pattern of urban growth makes the people the way they are—it has been observed, for instance, that if suburban Americans were better satisfied with their manner of life, they probably would not spend so much of their time in automobiles getting away from it.
Within Washington itself, children may be born to erstwhile rural parents and may come to adult years with only a scant sense of the peace and beauty that can be found a few miles away, and often with little sense of anything else but the crumbling, teeming, stifling, noisy, sooty slums where they live—the other side of the monumental splendor along the Federal riverfront. Not all urban frustration is an outgrowth of the physical environment by any means, but much is. And this frustration, plus the pattern of exodus for some and sour jammed imprisonment for the rest, has within the past few years been killing off one by one all the special satisfactions and delights that cities from time immemorial have furnished their inhabitants.
This 26 square-mile section of the Rock Creek watershed, just above the District line in Maryland, was rural in 1913, with many small tributaries fed by springs and seeps. Ensuing development based on little knowledge of natural processes covered most of the old aquifer recharge areas with pavements and rooftops, so that more precipitation ran rapidly off the land instead of soaking in and flowing out gradually into streams. Flooding during storms and loss of flow at other times caused most of the tributaries to be covered over as storm sewers, so that out of 64 miles of natural flowing stream channels that existed in 1913 in this section, only 27 miles can be found above ground today.
Fleeing the dissonant center—or avoiding it from the start when they move to the metropolis from elsewhere—citizens who can afford it move into suburbs carved in the outlying countryside by gargantuan machinery, sometimes in compliance with a plan that preserves some trees and airy open space and a sense of the things that were, but more usually not. Here the fugitives place themselves one against the other in the hugeness of their numbers so that very quickly in many places the countryside hardly exists except in leapfrogged forlorn patches or farther out, where its ownership in speculatively held blocks—the old farm houses gone to pot, their fields in weeds or casually tilled or grazed to merit agricultural taxation—avouches the certainty of continuing sprawl. It is a much-documented process with two decades of history behind it now. It is cancerlike in its effect on the region, and disillusioning in its effect on many of those who participate, for often it forces them into the position of being mass destroyers of the very things they seek—air and wild greenery, quietness and the elbow room to be themselves.
A growing body of knowledge as to what kind of terrain can stand dense development, and what kind cannot, and how streams and woods and wildlife and even farms can be physically retained among urban populations, and why they ought to be, is becoming available. Its principles are more or less ecological, which simply means that they seek to maintain right uses of different elements of the landscape under urban conditions, in order that these elements may function with a reasonable degree of naturalness, remain compatible with one another and with human purposes, and be available for people's enjoyment. Flood plains make good hay fields or parks, for instance, but poor sites for homes or shopping centers. Porous areas that recharge aquifers ought to be kept as much as possible under vegetation rather than pavements or buildings, if people are to have streams later and not capricious drains that are better off covered over. Steep slopes, if carved severely, usually exact a later revenge. House clusters and townhouses and apartments rightly spaced and located can let the country function even while settling on it numbers of people equivalent to those who would be there if it were hacked into a solid expanse of tiny lots. And so on.