When Infrastructure Becomes Reversible: Functions, Evidence, and Moving Constraints in Five Urban Waterway Cases

Abstract

Cities sometimes reopen waterways that earlier generations buried, covered, culverted, or folded into other urban systems. By the time reconsideration happens, however, the inherited infrastructure usually does more than its original job. Roads, access, parking, drainage, rail operations, irrigation, crowd movement, legal arrangements, and institutional routines can become attached to it. This study asks under what conditions long-standing urban waterway infrastructure becomes reversible, and when retention remains more defensible. The comparison includes five cases: Bee Branch in Dubuque, Aarhus Å in Denmark, Kuratsuki Yosui in Kanazawa, the Godavari at Trimbakeshwar, and Tibbetts Brook in New York City. The study uses documentary case reconstruction around an initial intervention period, accumulated functions and dependencies, later reconsideration, and the resulting decision or implementation path. Evidence was coded at the claim level as documented, inferred, unresolved, contested, or not found, and proposed cross-case explanations were tested against the hardest counterexamples. Two patterns were strongest. First, physical form and infrastructure function were separable only when specific functions could be preserved, substituted, relocated, renegotiated, or deliberately reduced. Second, the binding constraint often moved as projects advanced. Evidence that an incumbent had problems also did not automatically provide a decision-ready replacement. The cases therefore suggest that waterway reversal is less a simple choice between “gray” and “green” infrastructure than a process of reallocating functions, evidence burdens, and constraints around an embedded urban system.