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Rewilding a Concrete City Canal
Our mid‑century flood canal is a sterile trapezoid. Proposal: soften one bank, add gravel riffles, floating vegetated mats. Critics fear reduced conveyance during peak storms. Has anyone balanced flood control + habitat in a similar retrofit?
Use compound cross‑sections: keep a low‑flow meandering thalweg inset inside the larger flood shelf. In big storms the whole trapezoid still engages; everyday flows interact with habitat features.
Model debris accumulation explicitly. Early pilots failed not because of vegetation hydraulics, but because woody debris jammed bridge constrictions that engineers hadn’t stress‑tested.