Late 19th century American cities were centers of commerce and industry, and dense populations inhabited urban cores both small and large. Urban populations faced public health issues and social problems both real and perceived. Richmond was no different. Advances in transportation technology prompted the burgeoning American middle class to leave central cities and establish the first wave of commuter suburbs. (Richmond claims the first practical streetcar system in the world.) A certain romanticism of the idyllic English pastoral landscape influenced the construction of detached single-family houses, each with self-contained yards and gardens. The hope of the first upwardly mobile suburbanites was that life on the outskirts would be an escape from disease and social ills in-town, a retreat into the health and beauty of the natural world.
Contractors, speculators, and landscape architects sought to celebrate an idealized version of the natural world, introducing non-native plants intentionally and unintentionally, growing grass lawns low in biodiversity, and later spreading fertilizers and pesticides in order to keep up appearances. They crafted a new version of the natural world to suit their needs and fulfill the dreams of the new middle class. Further outside of town, these first streetcar suburbs would later be encircled by a new kind of development enabled by the automobile—houses in subdivisions on cul-de-sacs, strip malls, and superhighways—what we now call suburbia. The irony is that by shaping and manipulating the natural world over the past century, we have altered the landscape to the point of destroying those initial dreams of life lived alongside nature.
Humans have sought to contain nature, shaping it and distorting it at our convenience and for our pleasure. We have literally moved mountains and streams. In Richmond, the issues facing Reedy Creek and the community around it are directly related to these concurrent Anthropocene histories of industrialization, urban planning, architecture, politics, and social sciences.