Part I: ASSESSING THE LINK BETWEEEN FLOODING AND DEVELOPMENT IN CHARLESTON, SC

The City of Charleston is located in a region that is commonly referred to as the South Carolina Lowcountry, aptly named because much of the land area is at or below sea level. Charleston is, and has always been, a watery place characterized by the intermingling of land and intricate networks of tidal creeks, marshes, and rivers that converge with the Atlantic Ocean. These features have made Charleston an ideally-situated port city with a bustling harbor; one that has evolved from its colonial legacy as the largest slave port in the United States into the thriving tourist destination it has become today. Water defines the lowcountry landscape and supports the variety of lifeforms that have adapted to daily and seasonal fluctuations in inundation associated with the ever-changing tides.

In contrast to these naturally occurring landscapes, much of Charleston’s development, especially over the last 100 years, has occurred with little to no regard to the interconnection between the flow of water and the complex ecosystems that have shaped and ultimately sustain the area. Charleston’s growth is characterized by low-density, suburban sprawl, which has resulted in the introduction of mass quantities of impervious surfaces that pose a variety of ecological, economic, and social risks to such a low-lying, water-dependent place.

With sea-level rise projections estimating a two-to-seven foot increase in Charleston over the next 100 years, tidal flooding is of particular concern for developed areas throughout the Lowcountry.1 These events, which are predicted to occur 180 times a year by 2045, pose significant risks to quality of life for all of Charleston’s inhabitants and place extreme stress on aging coastal infrastructure.2

In response to these concerns, a recent planning initiative involving local, national, and international water experts advocated for the use of nature-based solutions to address flooding throughout the Lowcountry. According to the Dutch Dialogues Charleston report published in 2019:

“Charleston is at a critical juncture in its history and development. Pressures brought by its coastal location, desirable environment, and economic position push against its low-lying land, fragile infrastructure, and rising flood threat.”3

“Living with Water” was a central theme of this project, which was founded on the radical notion that “water is not something to exploit or control,” but “something to respect, manage and embrace.”4 The Dutch Dialogues recommendations for Charleston represent a major departure from dominant water management practices that have persisted over the past 300 years. Often referred to as the period of modernity, this epoch of Western society is rooted in the alienation of human beings from nature, the proliferation of white supremacy, and the commodification of everyday life under capitalism—resulting in the proliferation of land practices defined by colonization, extraction, manipulation, and control.

In Charleston, this legacy persists in city planning and sustainability initiatives that consistently fail to address the root causes of today’s most pressing environmental challenges, many of which are the result of years of dubious land reclamation practices that relied on filling in marshes and creeks to create new, buildable land for development.5 To make matters worse, City officials and government agencies continue to prioritize highly-engineered drainage infrastructure and concrete flood mitigation barriers that completely disconnect or ignore the natural course of water that would otherwise flow through the remaining hydrological systems that are inherently predisposed to manage tidal fluctuations and minimize flood risk.6

Further inland, erosion is another key area of concern that contributes to increased flood risk throughout the Lowcountry. The combination of sea level rise-induced marsh migration and development contributes to increased stormwater runoff that overwhelms extant watershed systems. When land cover is almost exclusively dedicated to impervious surfaces and the primary vegetation is limited to manicured lawns typical of single-family residential neighborhoods, this creates an ecological deadzone that displaces biodiverse ecosystems with resource- and maintenance- intensive lots that now cover thousands of acres of former wetlands throughout the greater Lowcountry region.

There are, of course, many negative impacts associated with this pattern of development, but it is important to emphasize the way private property and homeownership have contributed to the increasing frequency and severity with which flooding occurs in Charleston. Water does not respect property boundaries, streets, neighborhood divisions, or county lines. It flows along the path of least resistance, connecting us all along the way. For this reason, it is essential that Charleston’s residents and leaders embrace the “living with water” approach championed by the Dutch Dialogues Charleston team in as many ways and at as many scales as possible, as soon as possible.

Moving in this direction will require a paradigm shift towards a more participatory worldview; one that, according to Participatory Action Research scholars Peter Reason and Hilary Bradbury, acknowledges “the link between ecological devastation…and humanity’s participation in natural processes.”7 Within Charleston, an important aspect of this process must include a historical interrogation of the plantation system’s role in defining what development could look like, where it took place, and the ways in which the shadow of slavery persists in the hydro-physical landscape today.

Clyde Woods, author of Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta, further contextualizes this point, arguing that we must recognize “the central role of plantation agriculture in the development of capitalism in the United States” and, by extension, its role in the creation of “several development trajectories in the South…which must be understood individually and relationally to comprehend existing alliances and to enter upon new development paths.”8 In other words, if we want alternative outcomes, we must adopt alternative approaches that are grounded in an understanding and acknowledgement of historical patterns of economic and environmental exploitation to address ongoing injustices and move towards more cooperative, reparative development trajectories. We must be able to discern the contemporary forces that perpetuate plantation-oriented development trajectories and their destructive land and water management practices from those that offer something else entirely.

2. “Sea Level Rise Strategy: Charleston, South Carolina.” U.S. Climate Resilience Toolkit. City of Charleston, December 2015. https://toolkit.climate.gov/reports/sea-level-rise-strategy-charlestonsouth-carolina.

3. Waggonner & Ball, The Water Institute of the Gulf, and Kingdom of the Netherlands, “Dutch Dialogues™ Charleston” (City of Charleston & Historic Charleston Foundation, September 2019), https://www.historiccharleston.org/dutch-dialogues/.

4. Waggonner & Ball, The Water Institute of the Gulf, and Kingdom of the Netherlands, “Dutch Dialogues™ Charleston”

5. Christina R. Butler, Lowcountry at High Tide: A History of Flooding, Drainage, and Reclamation in Charleston, South Carolina (Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 2020).

6. Robinson Design Engineers, “Charleston Peninsula Storm Surge Wall: A Critical Assessment,” June 2020, https://www.robinsondesignengineers.com/work/charleston-storm-surge-barrier-anddutch-dialogues.

7. Peter Reason and Hilary Bradbury, Handbook of Action Research, Concise Paperback Edition (Sage Publications, 2006), p. 10.

8. Clyde Woods, Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta (Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2017), p. 7.