Reviving the Riverfront, and D.C. - Institute for Local Self-Reliance

In 2000, Uwe Brandes moved to Washington, D.C. to join Mayor Williams’ administration with a bold vision to transform the Anacostia River waterfront, one of the nation’s most polluted rivers at the time. Uwe spearheaded a participatory planning process that was and still is far too rare, actively involving communities and stakeholders directly impacted by the revitalization efforts. He adeptly translated these community conversations into comprehensive urban planning documents, which were subsequently codified into the city’s comprehensive plan. These documents now serve as the guiding framework for D.C.’s investments.

Today, Uwe is a distinguished professor of urban planning at Georgetown University. He continues to influence D.C.’s development through his roles on various committees and initiatives, ensuring that community-oriented and community-led principles remain at the forefront of the city’s growth.

Uwe Brandes:	Our work was able to really elevate those local perspectives in a way that just hadn’t been, really ever, before. We were able to translate these community-based conversations into a series of urban planning documents, which then got codified in the city’s comprehensive plan and now continue to be the guiding framework for how the city invests.
Reggie Rucker:	Hello and welcome back to another episode of Building Local Power DC, our current stop on our tour of cities, talking to folks on the ground who are proving what’s possible when a community comes together to shape its future. I’m your co-host, Reggie Rucker here in DC. Technically I’m in Burke, Virginia, but that’s another story for another day. And I’m here with my co-host, Luke Gannon. What’s up, Luke?
Luke Gannon:	I’ve been doing well, Reggie. I’ve been getting my hands in the soil, which has been so nice and felt so good. It’s been so beautiful in Minneapolis, so I’m doing all right. Reggie, how are you liking it out in Burke?
Reggie Rucker:	Well, like I said, another story for another day, but I will say I’m currently looking out into this forested trail behind my home, the deers are roaming out there, the foxes are making these really wild noises at night, but the proximity to nature is nice, I will say that. But what’s also nice is the proximity to D.C. And this series has been enjoyable, really enjoyable, getting to have on the shows people who I’ve come across and been able to connect with throughout my time here. And today’s no different with one of my professors from Georgetown, Uwe Brandes, really smart man, and I had him for my urban law class, and I could spend hours talking to this guy. He has such an interesting set of experiences and knowledge on cities, and D.C. in particular. I’m really glad I’m done with school, but it was nice to be able to get one more lesson from Uwe.
Luke Gannon:	And I love this episode because it makes me feel like I’m a student again. But as Reggie mentioned, Uwe is a professor at Georgetown University and Faculty Director of the Urban and Regional Planning Program at the Georgetown Global Cities Initiative. He serves as a chair of DC’s Commission on Climate Change and Resiliency, and has had extensive experience planning, designing, and developing buildings with community partnerships and much, much more that you can check out in the show notes. But first, let’s jump in to how Uwe got to where he is now. Here’s Uwe.
Uwe Brandes:	I have a very non-traditional professional background. In some respects, I started off in a pretty straightforward way. I wanted to become an architect. That was my first goal, professional goal, when I was growing up. And for a long time I thought, “Gee, wouldn’t it be nice just to have a small architectural practice and that would be my profession.” What happened along the way though is I kept running into very unusual opportunities that always changed how I saw myself and certainly what I saw myself doing and how I saw myself adding value. I’ve trended over time to issues, always in cities, but issues that were more closely related to urban infrastructure. And so I have this academic background of studying engineering, urban planning and architecture, but I really got my start working on the Big Dig in Boston, which was this absolutely enormous urban infrastructure project that was incredibly ambitious to literally reshape the core of the city of Boston.
	And as a young professional, that was just so eye-opening. I mean, I just was just amazed by the various facets of a major multi-billion dollar project like that. And this was back in the day before people informed themselves through the internet, back in the day when people actually watched the six o’clock news. So there was six o’clock news on TV every day and everyone watched it. So as a young professional, I was working in this civil engineering firm in the office, and then I would go home at the end of the day and watch the news. The news was utterly focused on the project that I was working on. But the news was not about the technical aspects of the project or the engineering of the project, the news was about neighborhoods. It was about which neighborhoods were being impacted, which neighborhoods were supporting the project, and which neighborhoods were opposing the project. And to me, that just swung the door open to an entire world, really a universe, of thinking about cities, investment in cities, and how stakeholders in cities receive that investment.
Luke Gannon:	After finishing his education, Uwe became a consultant, and throughout the mid-nineties worked with different cities on their redevelopment plants. In the mid-nineties, market conditions were weak, so cities were trying to attract investment to grow their economies.
Uwe Brandes:	During that time, I worked on a succession of projects that were focused on reimagining very polluted former industrial sites within cities that, typically, because this is the way cities grow over time, were located on waterfronts. And so a couple of cities I worked in New Rochelle, Glen Cove and New York, different sites within New York City, but then I spent a lot of time during that period of the 1990s working in Buffalo, New York. And Buffalo had been one of those cities that has this amazing rich heritage of using its waterfront as a core element of its economy. That’s the history of the city. It was the terminus of the Erie Canal, so all of the both economic history, but also cultural history associated with maritime commerce. And that had all essentially been forgotten, literally paved over, where Buffalo’s Harbor, Inner Harbor, as it’s called, was a series of parking lots that nobody ever went to. And the city had been exploring ways to bring new life to that area.
	So my job, and what I did, and I worked with the city for almost five years, was to really think about this formerly thriving nineteenth-century waterfront, that was basically buried under a series of parking lots. We went through this process of engaging community, engaging all kinds of different public agency stakeholders, to really cobble together a strategy that would incrementally change this part of the city over time, recapture it both in terms of the cultural history of the city so that people could understand and learn about the history of the city by going to this amazing place, but then also leveraging that for economic development in the city. And Buffalo, certainly at the time, and still today, is constantly looking for ways to grow its economy.
Luke Gannon:	As a young professional, Uwe became known as a person who could work on reimagining these industrial polluted sites. Following his work in Buffalo, he moved to D.C. to work for the new administration at the time, which was Mayor Williams.
Uwe Brandes:	It’s really interesting because these complicated polluted sites, often large tracts of land, in the middle of cities, really had a series of very special considerations associated with them. First and foremost, the people in the communities that lived around these sites were especially sensitive with respect to the public health impacts that these sites had on them personally and their neighbors. And the urban planning process associated with sites was directly related to a very participatory engagement strategy because of the federal laws that required this, but also just the history of litigation in cities and around sites that were polluted like this.
	This of course relates directly back to a larger set of considerations, really a larger set of policy considerations, around long-term systemic impacts associated with the location of industrial uses in communities. What we today, very, in some cases, fluently describe as environmental justice. Mayor Williams had this idea of thinking about the Anacostia River, which was really widely known and widely understood and perceived as just being a very polluted river and really an extension of the city’s sewer system, as a tool for reimagining the city, reimagining how people could benefit from this river in this natural corridor as part of a new economic development strategy for Washington D.C. So that’s what got me down to Washington. So I came in the summer of 2000. Mayor Williams had been elected in the fall of 1998.
	It was really an extraordinary time. And in retrospect, I feel incredibly privileged to have had the opportunity to participate in this process of moving the city out of what was effectively receivership, with Congress having taken control of the city’s finances in the mid to late 1990s. So I joined this team of people that included amazing people to really rethink the economic basis of the city and how people in the city would be part of that story.
Luke Gannon:	In the 2000s, the effects of the crack epidemic were still evident, contributing to a perception of widespread violence. In order for new policies to be implemented, as Uwe explains, there had to be certain cosmetic relationship alignment with people in Congress.
Uwe Brandes:	In 2000, when I arrived, the city was under the control of the Congress, so there was a control board, and that board reviewed every expenditure in the city in excess of $1 million. So any major contracts that were issued by the city were all directly reviewed by this congressionally appointed control board. There was a sense that the city, as a municipality, as a municipal expression of governance, did not have integrity. So there was a whole capacity building process that all of this work was a part of.
	It was also very interesting, and a little bit later in 2001 or 2, the GAO actually completed a study and published this report that bribed the structural inequity within the city, reviewing the resources that the city had access to, the responsibilities that the city had, many special conditions associated with governing a city that also is a national capital and that seed of the national government. It was inventing the tools and applying them at the same time and we were very lucky to have alignment of three things. This is, I think, philosophically or structurally really important.
	Mayor Williams had done an extraordinary job of opening the lines of communication between the city and the federal stakeholders and so there was a political alignment that was achieved and that was fantastic. Then secondly, and this is something that especially for the eastern neighborhoods of the city, had not ever really happened before, and that is that there had never really been participatory planning, where land use planning, infrastructure planning was done together with citizens of the city, Washington D.C., the history of Washington D.C. has always been about top down decision making.
	So one of the things that we were able to do through this focus on the Anacostia River is to actually engage citizens, neighborhood representatives, community-based nonprofits, in the actual decision-making around major, what ended up being, very major land use decisions of what kinds of uses should be organized along the Anacostia River. So that was really incredible. Then the third major issue, and one that we had no control over but was incredibly fortuitous, is that this coincided with the time in the capital markets where people were looking to invest. I’m a city planner, so I think about cycles of cities and when to do what. It is always a special moment when there’s capital that wants to come into your city.
	I’m using that term deliberately. It’s special because it’s not always good, it can be dangerous, but if harnessed properly, it can be extraordinary. All different kinds of form of capital can be formed as part of that process. So it was a special moment in time. We had more alignment in the governance, the very special governance of Washington with this federal, local relationship. We had opportunity to engage people in the future of their communities. And then we had this tailwind, if you will, of investors wanting to invest in Washington.
	So that was the basis for what we ended up calling the Anacostia Waterfront initiative, which was this big participatory planning process that happened over a period of three years. And then it continued on in the form of many different projects and initiatives that flowed from this initial period.
Luke Gannon:	There has been a long legacy of community organizing and power building in D.C. that has made the capital what it is today.
Uwe Brandes:	The history of projects on the east side of the city, especially projects along the Anacostia River, especially in large infrastructure projects, were really the subject of an enormous amount of litigation. I actually think this is great news and it’s really an amazing legacy of citizen action and nonprofit and advocacy action. And that is there were a couple of really seminal pieces of litigation that citizens of the city stopped the construction and the build out of the freeway system. So there was this big plan for freeways to crisscross the Anacostia, and that was part of the highway plan that the city had adopted, and that was stopped through litigation.
	The second is that this city, we are a very historic city, we’ve got this very historic sewer system that is a combined sewer system. So as a city has grown, what that meant is that the sewer system was overflowing into the Anacostia River, literally to the tune of a hundred sewage overflows into the river every year. The city was not in compliance with its stormwater permits, and a group of organizations sued the city, and they sued the EPA, for not enforcing these rules. So that was just really important as a backdrop of how public sector and communities had been interacting with one another in these nineties.
	So we were able to completely reposition the conversation, and in fact, our process repositioned some of that litigation as well, which was really interesting and we were able to work out strategies that were acceptable to all of the parties. I don’t mean to oversimplify this, but the strategy was simple. It was talk to people.
	I mean, there was a lot of different ways in which we talked to people, and I’m always very fond of pointing out that this was probably the last big urban development initiative in the United States that happened before the advent of social media. So we did have email, but we didn’t have social media. So we did send out invitations to different meetings via email, and we had a website, but all of the interaction that we did was in person, with people, organizing meetings ourselves from the city government that people could come to. Then most notably, and again, this is a period of three years, we spent an extraordinary amount of time going out to visit people where they were. So whether that meant going to community meetings, different kinds of community and neighborhood associations, spanning from all of the different public housing projects along the river, all the way to meeting with business organizations and other special interest organizations in the environment or historic preservation, and there’s so many of different kinds of advocacy organizations.
	I do think this is just incredibly important to understand, and that is on the one hand, because we’re a federal city and there really hadn’t been this planning done before, because the federal government always called the shots up until the seventies. So this was a new way of entering into a series of, what we framed as a visioning process, to even establish what are the overarching goals that should be discussed? And before you even get to discussions around investments and projects and all of that, so we did a lot of visioning.
Luke Gannon:	The communities along the Anacostia had been convening and discussing the vision for their neighborhoods long before Uwe’s arrival. But Uwe was able to actively participate in these discussions and elevate their impact.
Uwe Brandes:	People had already been coming together at a neighborhood level, at a community level, to deal with problems and to imagine the future of their communities through their own conversations. And this idea of the Anacostia River, which had been perceived, and to some extent, still is perceived as, the defining line of social division within the city, that that would somehow be insurmountable and we’re perpetually stuck in thinking of the Anacostia as White and prosperous on one side, and poor and Black on the other. And that’s just not the way in which people who live along the Anacostia think.
	So our work was able to really elevate those local perspectives in a way that just hadn’t been really ever before. We were able to translate these community-based conversations into a series of urban planning documents, which then got codified in the city’s comprehensive plan and now continue to be the guiding framework for how the city invests and has been the guiding framework for how the federal government invests in the nation’s capitals. It’s been a really extraordinary journey from these neighborhood meetings to see the impact that participatory planning can have in really shaping the future. In some respects, and I don’t mean to Hyperbolize, but in some respects like the destiny of the city.
Luke Gannon:	One of the biggest projects that Uwe is most proud of that he worked on was the project to keep sewer overflow out of the Anacostia River.
Uwe Brandes:	The project that I think, at the end of the day, is so consequential for the city, and it’s largely been completed at this point, is this multi-billion dollar investment that was made in the city’s sewer system. At the beginning of this project process, as I mentioned before, there were all of these sewage overflows into the river. There are all kinds of material impacts associated with dumping sewage into rivers in the middle of your city, but there’s also so many perceived impacts and secondary and tertiary impacts associated with that.
	Coming out of this visioning process, the number one thing that everyone agreed on was that we’ve got to clean up this river and restore the ecological integrity of this river for everyone’s benefit. And not for our generation’s benefit, it’s not like we’re benefiting one neighborhood or another, this is like a multi-generational legacy project. The ultimate bill for a project was in excess of $3 billion. A significant portion of this was financed on a 100-year basis, and this speaks to a long-term vision for an investment like this, but also when we talk today about sustainability and resilience. I mean the necessary infrastructure that we need in order to live together in a city, what was called in technical terms, the long-term control plan. It took an army of people to get that project done. And I know I speak on behalf of everyone who participated in that, we’re all very, very proud of that.
Luke Gannon:	Historically, Uwe thought about local self-reliance in terms of economic reliance, but more recently, he has expanded his understanding of the philosophy.
Uwe Brandes:	You think that there’s a very exciting conversation about circular economies within cities right now and so that’s how I would initially think about it. But more recently, and certainly since the pandemic, I do think about this in terms of resilience and the social equity that exists within communities, lots of research been done on this, right? The greater social connections there are in communities, the more resilient they are. I do think this is actually not an easy thing to advance these days, in part, because of information technologies. So I’ve really been thinking about this a lot more recently in terms of culture, social connections within communities, and we can have neighborhoods, but what allows for a real community to emerge within a neighborhood?
	I tell this to all of my students. For anyone who’s interested in cities and the life of cities and life of community, you have to read Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of the American City. It’s amazing that this book still has such relevance to us today. The book is now 60 years old, but it is the touchstone for thinking about community initiative and the autonomy and integrity of communities living within cities. And as I talk to people, and certainly my students, if you read that book and you don’t come away from it excited about the prospect for urbanity and diverse and inclusive, thriving communities and cities, then there’s a problem.
Luke Gannon:	Now, this was just a fraction of the projects and work that Uwe has been a part of. So if you’re interested in learning more, you could go enroll at Georgetown and take one of his classes, or check out our show notes where we link to additional resources. But seriously, this made me want to be a student again. Thank you so much for your time and dedication Uwe.
Reggie Rucker:	Great job, Luke. Thank you so much for this as always, and Uwe, thanks for the wonderful lesson on D.C. and really how to include community in the process of building community. It was, again, such a great lesson. Thank you so much. And thanks to all of you, our listeners, for tuning in. We’ll be back again in two weeks with another story out of D.C. But in the meantime, check out the show notes from today’s episode to dive deeper into what we discussed today, and as always, you can visit ILSR.org for more on our work to fight corporate control and build local power.
	If you want to send us an email with your thoughts on this episode, you can always do that at buildinglocalpower@ilsr.org. Let us know what’s on your mind. This show is produced by Luke Gannon and me, Reggie Rucker. The podcast is edited by Luke Gannon and Taya Noelle. The music for the season is also composed by Taya Noelle. Thank you so much for listening to Building Local Power.