Urban Blueways

Abstract

The convergence of urban renewal, the emerging environmental movement, and historic preservation in the 1960s spawned great interest in redeveloping the central waterfronts of American cities. The prominent landscape architect John Ormsbee Simonds advocated, and consulted on, the transformation of several city riverfronts during the 1960s and 1970s. Working from an environmental philosophy, Simonds viewed central riverfronts as the keystone of a system of metropolitan blueways or protected water-based park lands and corridors. His planning efforts, and those of others like him, laid the foundations for the waterfront redevelopment movement’s sweeping success in the closing decades of the twentieth century.