Mapping Absence, Making Presence: Hydrosocial Repair Along Proctor Creek in West Atlanta

Abstract

Mapping Absence, Making Presence, analyses how ecological restoration can serve as a reparative framework for landscapes shaped by systemic neglect and forms of erasure. The Proctor Creek Watershed in Atlanta, Georgia, woven into the everyday life of Westside neighbourhoods was buried and reduced to a piped conduit, essentially severing both its ecological function and its role in community life. Its absence is materially expressed through recurrent flash flooding, water quality decline, and widespread vacancy and blight, material presence of symptoms drawn from redlining, disinvestment, and environmental injustice. This thesis argues that restoration must go beyond ecological metrics to confront histories of displacement and spatial inequalities. Through layered mapping of water, race, and land, tracing buried hydrology, redlined neighbourhoods, and demographic shifts leading to patterns of vacancy, the project indicates how systemic absences are embedded in the urban landscape. By analyzing and mapping eight past plans and visions for these neighbourhoods including the Proctor North Avenue Vision, it identifies recurring goals such as flood control, green infrastructure implementation, and community revitalization, alongside gaps in implementation, concerns about community displacement, and missed opportunities to integrate ecological restoration with neighbourhood redevelopment. This analysis informs a delicate incremental approach which is grounded in exisiting conditions and community priorities. Methodologically it brings together watershed-scale analysis, story mapping, and ecological sectioning to locate opportunities for intervention that balance hydrological performance with cultural and spatial sensitivity.

Daylighting Proctor Creek is reimagined not as a scale of infrastructural reconditioning but as a series of non-invasive, almost surgical acts that are targeted exposures of the buried creek that stitch water back into the redlined neighbourhoods of English Avenue, Vine City, and Bankhead. These interventions are not confined to vacant or blighted parcels of land but function across a range of conditions within these marginalized areas. Daylighted stream sections, bioswales, rain gardens, and micro-wetlands across the area form a distributed network of living infrastructure that performs both ecologically and socially. By making present what has long been absent, this thesis positions Proctor Creek as more than a piped stream flowing beneath but as a conduit of memory, resistance, and renewal. Through this action, based on community-identified needs, the design offers a model for reparative urbanism, advancing the role of water as a medium for justice and resilience of the Proctor Creek Watershed Community, which is grounded in care.

Keywords: reclamation, ecological time, environmental justice, belonging, creek daylighting, urban voids, community identity, ecological design, public space, urban hydrology.