Peoria studio

This interdisciplinary project brought together citizens and organizations in Peoria, Illinois, with researchers and students from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Together, we taught each other about the conditions and opportunities that existed in Peoria that might be leveraged to promote the overall health and wellbeing of people in the region. The project included students from the Architecture, Landscape Architecture, Graphic Design, and Urban Planning programs. I participated in the first semester as a Landscape student, and in the second as a Design student.

The Landscape Architecture studio focused on a specific and significant problem in Peoria—the problem of combined-storm-sanitary-sewer overflow (CSO). Peoria experiences between 20 and 30 CSO events per year, resulting in the city discharging untreated water waste into the Illinois River. Each event not only contributes to severe erosion, flooding, and contamination of clean water in the region, but also increases the rate at which existing storm water infrastructure ages. The studio explored the potential for broader, longer term, and more comprehensive approaches to neighborhood development and re-design in Peoria. Students worked in teams to develop design strategies that envisioned the future of water systems in relation to current urbanization and regional demands.

The River City Sponge was a system proposed to stimulate natural absorption of stormwater into the earth through a system of small interconnected parks, making use of the vast number of vacant city-owned lots in Peoria. Sites were sorted into low to high priority based on their density, size, topography, drainage, and more. A series of modular design components were designed to direct water flow and storage, utilizing natural phytoremediation to treat polluted water and to address the proximal issue of local soil contamination (particularly high levels of lead).