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The 3 Rivers 2nd Nature Project (2000-2005)  
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The 3 Rivers 2nd Nature project was directed by artists/researchers Tim Collins and Reiko Goto. The project addressed the meaning, form, and function of public space and nature in Allegheny County, PA, U.S.A. This is the region that encompasses the former steel industry capital of the United States, Pittsburgh PA, U.S.A. 3 Rivers 2nd Nature focused upon the three major rivers; the Allegheny, the Monongahela, and the Ohio Rivers, as well as the streams and subwatersheds. This five-year project revisited questions of nature and post-industrial public space, first addressed on the Nine Mile Run Greenway Project. The focus of the work is research to benefit the public realm, applied as strategic knowledge with accompanying outreach programs intended to enable creative public advocacy and change.

The 3 Rivers 2nd Nature conducted integrative analysis and instrumental planning based upon the rigorous field studies that began in the year 2000. The work effort focused upon partnerships to accomplish interdisciplinary analysis, spatial mapping, and concept design within and among specific communities. The work culminated with an ecological design plan and a water quality policy report that analyzed alternatives for ongoing water quality sampling. Finally, the project team has organized the "Monongahela Conferences" and the subsequent 2005 "Groundworks" exhibition (October 2005) to examine the artist's role in social and environmental change.

The work of the team is informed by three questions.

• Can artists working as cultural agents affect the public policies and private economic programs, which mark and define urban places and ecosystems?
  
• Given the issues of scale, the power of private interests and the state both invested in the development/growth model, can the artist develop a public realm advocacy that expands the creative act beyond the authorship of the artist?
  
• Finally, can (and should) artists create verifiable social change?

The Project Scope: Three major rivers and 53 streams that flow into and through the edges of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania define the five-year project's scope. The project examined water quality and urban riverbanks, the blue and green infrastructure of our recovering landscape.

The Problem: The 3 Rivers 2nd Nature project was designed to address two of the significant problems in our region. First, what do we know about surface water quality and what does it mean in terms of current policy, regulation, and efforts to resolve sewer infrastructure failure? Secondly, what do we know about the ecology of our riparian waterfront lands and what does this mean in terms of current land use and development? To answer these questions, the project has spent four years studying these areas developing an extensive geographically referenced database on each topic area in the process.

The Need: Prior to developing the protocol for the project, the team did an exhaustive study of existing information. We found a void where information about water quality and riverbank edge conditions should exist. The Allegheny Conference report, "Investing in Clean Water," and the U.S. National Research Council report on wet weather problems in Western Pennsylvania confirm this understanding of the void in water quality data. The void in terrestrial data is less well documented, but equally poor. Although the condition of current knowledge is not surprising in a region where broad leaf trees struggled for life under smoky skies no less than thirty years ago. We are in a time of significant natural recovery; a passive no cost constructive phenomenon in unequal competition with development ideas that are potentially destructive. Projects that are all under current consideration in the region today, include the development of forested steep slope lands, the filling of stream valleys, hydraulic improvement of streams through channels and box culverts, and the mining of residual coal from city hills.

The goal of the 3R2N project was to conduct an analysis of the green infrastructure that provides social, aesthetic, ecological, and economic benefit to the Three Rivers Region. The project team would argue that the most significant impact of the industrial era of modern culture is its impact on nature. Post industrial culture can be defined in terms of an emergent awareness of lost ecological integrity through legacy pollutants that affect, air, water, soil, food, the human body, and global climate. One of the key points of critical intervention is to address the local experience and conceptualization of nature; the aesthetic perception of nature and its valuation as a public realm benefit. The air, the soil and the water belongs to all of us.

Objectives

• Conduct a green infrastructure analysis. Current water quality, ecology, hydrology, habitat values, and public access were compared to historic information and databases. Baseline studies were established where possible.
  
• Identify opportunities for ecological restoration. Targeted ecological-restoration extends and unifies disparate green infrastructure systems.
  
• Understand the history and the basis for cultural restoration. Cultural restoration is an integrative change in the way a community thinks about infrastructure and ecosystems - the relationships between humans, land and water.
  
• Conduct public dialogue about the potential for all of the above .

3R2N Programs

1. Aquatic Systems and Water Quality

2. Riverbanks and Watersheds            

3 Rivers 2nd Nature is the second of two ecological-arts projects within the
STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, at Carnegie Mellon University,
is in relationship to 3 Rivers Wet Weather Inc. ALCOSAN,
and the Allegheny County Health Department.

Tim Collins - Project Director
Reiko Goto - Associate Director

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Each society and its related means of production create a specific kind of physical space.

-Henri Lefebvre

Funding provided by the
Heinz Endowments, the Warhol Foundation, the Pittsburgh Foundation, and other anonymous sources