CASE STUDY AND 500-WORD ESSAY

The Dredgescaping Toledo is a case study that attempts to advance an argument on the Dredge geologic by focusing more on the Maumee Bay, which is situated on the western side of Lake Erie and the largest area of the navigation system of great lakes. The project entails the disposition of sediments from various subaquatic areas enacted to execute this massive land manipulation project. Various tactics were adapted,such as the tributaries,islands, and lakes, to help reduce environmental dredging by expanding the dredge's geologic geology.

Our proposal incites the systemic confluence of the watershed, dredge-shed, and civic-shed into an overall soft-shed — a malleable, resilient, transcalar, and productive system that leverages opportunistic relationships to make each shed more robust. This occurs through a series of tactics — tributaries, islands, and lakes. 

The Toledo grows, surpassing its urban core making the industrial lands encircled by its fabrics. The industrial lands had initially colonized the riverfront. The lands are productive; hence they generate about seventy million-dollar jobs. However, these lands have created a wall between water and the expanded city. Additionally, they are also crucial for the economic health of the city. There is also a continuous public waterfront, which is usually perceived as a cultural catalyst vital for gentrification in various struggling cities like Toledo1. Instead of the negating industry, this case study employs connectors between water and land, tributaries2. Tributaries provide adequate public access via the ports' terrain. However, the tributaries rarely interfere with the numerous industrial lands.

As Toledo grew beyond its urban core, its fabric encircled the industrial lands that colonized the riverfront. While these industrial lands are vital to the city’s economic health, they render the notion of a continuous public waterfront implausible. Instead of negating industry, our scheme attempts to reconcile the confluence of industry and public access to the water. A proposed series of connectors, or tributaries that provide an access easement through the terrain vague onto the water / ice directly also serve as storm water retention basins, to reduce the pressure on CSOs. In Riverside Park, Pen 7, and Pen 8, the tributaries hold and remediate the dredge material, while also forming a platform of public program.

Recently, the Toledo’s dredged materials are usually deposited at the mouth of River Maumee. The disposal technique is often being associated with the inciting algae blooms of Lake

Erie, which usually compresses the aquatic ecosystem3. However, by the dredged materials being deposited far away from Toledo, it is tedious to leverage it as a public amenity. The deposited material is capable of creating essential lands for the city. As per the geologic of dredging, it is essential to determine how the land can be operationalized in various states of matter, such as slurry to the soil.

Presently, Toledo extracts close to 750,000 cubic yards of dredge material annually, which is shipped off to the Maumee Bay where it has been associated with inciting algae blooms. One of the difficulties of using this dredge matter as a public resource is the distance between dumping sites in the Bay and the City.

The proposal also utilizes a series of geotube pontoon islands, which are used in the processing of the dredged slurry in closeness with the city. Geotubes are massive bags usually fabricated from geotextiles; hence dredged materials are directly pumped into these bags, and at some period, purified water seeps out from this place. This technology is beneficial since the geotubes can easily be fabricated into various sizes; hence they can easily be deployed, emptied, stored, and filled. As such, both the sediments and the water are to be remediated and dewatered in close proximity to the toledo city without interfering with different navigation routes.

Inhabitation of geotubes can happen during the dewatering phase as islands, and then later, they get treated as public lands. During the dewatering process, the islands host programmed platforms that connect to tributaries to form an archipelago.

Our proposal utilizes three tributaries noted above in conjunction with a series of Geotube Pontoons that serve to dewater and remediate the dredge. While being dewatered, these pontoons can host a series of light public platforms that allow for a nodal waterfront system of islands. Connected to the tributaries, these pontoons are grouped into larger figures that provide different programmatic opportunities depending on the time of year, festival and event schedules, as well as unanticipated needs of the citizens. After the dewatering period, the public platforms are removed and reinserted into newly dredged pontoons, while the dewatered pontoons are hydroseeded for remediation. Each of the remediated pontoons are harvested for flowers in early November, and their soil is mixed with a rare-earth bentonite and water solution. These geotubes pontoons are then tugged into the bay where they either restore the shoreline, or spray this slurry solution into Lake Erie, which acts to suppress and absorb algae growth. Over the course of several years, the pontoons act as a distributed system to administer this solution around the Lake and restore it to its original state. Riverside Park is conceived as a remediation dredge research site as well as dock for a Dredge Research Vessel — a mobile island that allows the general public to take tours through the Maumee River and directly witness the process of dredging, remediation, and disposal. 

The last phase of the case study elaborates on how the dredge cycle can interface with the hydrological cycle. Due to increased post flooding events in the city of Toledo, the Environment Protection Agency has mandated new stormwater management methods for Toledo 4. The study also proposes the employment of forecasted home sites in Toledo as a representation of various distributed detention basins.

Currently there are over 1124 foreclosed sites in Toledo, several of which are vacant. We propose that these waiting lands are operationalized by creating a perimeter curb of dredge-filled bags around the house and property line to allow stormwater to fill these sites and reduce pressure on the sewer system. In total this distributed ‘lake’ consists of 84 acres of land, equivalent to Riverside, Edison and International Park. The public platforms could be inserted into these lots, resting on the curb foundations, to enable local neighborhood public program when not in use on the river. Riverside Park, Pen 7, and Pen 8 are further organized as a three-step phytoremediation wetland for stormwater and dredge remediation

References

Callot, Jacques. (2011). Benezit Dictionary of Artists. https://doi.org/10.1093/benz/9780199773787.article.b00030618

Dredgescaping Toledo | The open workshop | Archinect. (n.d.). Archinect. https://archinect.com/theopenworkshop/project/dredgescaping-toledo

You, W., Wang, S. S., Wang, Y. G., Lin, Q., Yu, X. X., & Li, P. F. (2014). Moulding process design of artificial purple jade ship basing on blast furnace slag. Advanced Materials Research, 937, 476-478. https://doi.org/10.4028/www.scientific.net/amr.937.476

THE DREDGESCAPING TOLEDO 10