Project brings together First Nations groups, urban citizens, industry organizations and state bodies
Peter Goggin, associate professor of English in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, is lead author on "Blueing and Greening the Brown and Beige: Phoenix’s Rio Salado and Imagined Riparian Renaissance")", a chapter in the new book, Blue-Green Rehabilitation: Urban Planning, Leisure and Tourism in River Cities, published by CABI. The anthology comprises nine international case studies that illustrate examples of best practice and/or the problems that can arise from urban blue-green rehabilitations.
A brief summary follows:
The Rio Salado (Salt River), runs though the Phoenix, Arizona, metropolitan area, one of the largest urban zones in the USA. For most of the 20th century the riverbed has been dry, its waters diverted by dams further upstream. It has been described as an eyesore and used as a dumping ground and for gravel mining. But in the past two decades, municipal projects such as Tempe Town Lake and the Phoenix Rio Salado Habitat Restoration Area have already proven highly successful for tourists and residents, as economic and environmental waterway developments. In 2018, the Rio Imagined initiative, a partnership of community stakeholders, including municipalities, tribal groups, citizen action alliances, industries, and state and federal agencies was formed to develop multi-decade vision and planning to restore, revitalise and reimagine the entire urban/river corridor and the canal system it feeds. This chapter explores some of the place-situated narratives about the Rio Salado and proposes a model of regional rhetoric for framing complexities of revitalising and rehabilitating a ‘dead’ urban desert river for tourism, ecological and development purposes.