3. strategy

In order to restore our rivers, we need to change our way of thinking: instead of fighting the water we need to learn how to live with it, learn its rhythms, let it in and design for the extreme weather conditions, where all living organisms are equally welcome. With this project I want to uncover the hidden potential of the Strzyza’s natural capacity to store rainwater.

Since the areas around the Strzyza have no coherent ownership, it is important to act on all ownership levels. I believe that the way to restore the Strzyza is through various interventions: from engineered city investments on the land belonging to the municipality to simple community actions, which will take place on areas owned by privatized neighbourhoods. Diverse ownerships around the creek make it one top-down plan impossible. The existing conditions require choreographed and precise actions, instead of a fixed big-scale design. At this moment, the only way to fight the consequences of the Strzyza’s disappearance is by local collaborations between diverse owners. Only together will we be able to deal with the consequences of the lost river’s ecosystems. My role in bringing the people and the river together is by choreographing diverse processes and actions.

Tasks of garden creations, which will be performed by the collaboration between municipality and citizens and could be easily repeated by the citizens living in the floodplains, both on municipal oand private grounds: removing pieces of Strzyza stream walls removing unnecessary pavements and uncovering the soil re-using and re-purposing pavements creating new garden walls which strenghten the new protective dikes and work with water flow depending on the collected material size, they are repurposed in diverse ways re-shaping the topography, creating space around Strzyza re-using the collected soil to create new floodplain edges, which slow down the flooding waters bringing more air to flattened by cars topsoil planting new riparian trees to enhance the infiltration and slow down water flow planting new riparian vegetation

Tasks of reparation, maintanance and harvesting: harvesting plants making beer out of harvested plants harvesting rainwater re-arranging dead branches taking care of the soil life repairing new garden walls and objects ecological maintanance: maintaining Strzyza ecology to minimum building sandbag dams

The goal of the various interventions in this project is to mitigate the flooding by slowing down the water and increasing the porosity and natural storage capacity of the Strzyza’s watershed. The first step in renaturalizing the Strzyza is uncovering it and reconnecting its water with the soil, creating natural conditions for the development of spontaneous, riparian vegetation to reappear.

The engineered interventions of uncovering the Strzyza on municipal land need to be performed under the supervision of water engineers, and with the financial support of the municipality of Gdansk and the guidance of a landscape architect. Uncovering the Strzyza from the underground and renaturalizing the waterbed by demolishing parts of the stream’s walls will lead to its spontaneous renaturalization.

Simpler than the engineered uncovering, the task of renaturalizing the Strzyza’s floodplain, its later reparation and maintenance can be performed by communities or individuals under the guidance of a landscape architect, engineers and the municipality.

Municipal, collective and private interventions around the Strzyza explore new ways of living with the stream. Learning new skills can help prepare for future floods. Repeated tasks will become part of people’s daily habits and can be passed from one generation to another, creating a resilient, collaborative community.

We need to invest our public money in urgent matters, such as those connected to our disappearing rivers, which increasingly flood our homes. The city should help its citizens and take responsibility for their wellbeing by minimizing the impact of floods.

The municipality of Gdansk could finance the gardens as part of a participatory budgeting project, realizing them together with inhabitants, engineers, ecologists, landscape architects and city planners. In this way the project can be realized with public money, as a collaboration between citizens and the city. That collaboration is crucial in creating safer communities that are better informed about the flooding.

All of the proposed interventions can be performed with the materials found on site and river vegetation spontaneously appearing. Instead of adding more, this project is about removing and re-arranging.