It has rained--a lot--throughout most of the Mississippi River basin this spring.  In St. Paul, the Mississippi was in flood stage for 42 days, a record. At the other end of the river, in Louisiana, the Morganza Spillway will be opened to drain excessive floodwaters for only the third time ever.  The river is high in New Orleans, causing concerns about what might happen if a tropical storm comes soon. The title of this post comes from what a former colleague said and he and I dashed through a summer thunderstorm some years ago.  The downpour was, indeed, “future Mississippi River,” as was the nearly 2 inches of rain that fell in the Twin Cities on Memorial Day.

In the Twin Cities, there is always a touch of nostalgia about river-adjacent communities such as the Bohemian Flats in Minneapolis, or the Little Italy community on St. Paul’s Upper Levee.  Now that the river is much cleaner than it was a century ago, and water levels are regulated through a series of locks and dams, it is fairly easy to romanticize riverside life. In fact, many people have moved into new residential developments along the Mississippi River, in some cases living where earlier generations were flooded out decades ago. Other spaces have become parks, as both Minneapolis and St. Paul have devoted considerable funding and energy to creating public access to the Mississippi.

The urban designer Ken Greenberg has written about the “retreat of the industrial glacier” as a figure of speech describing the availability of land in cities that was formerly taken up by now-obsolete industrial or transportation uses.  In Minneapolis and St. Paul, the central riverfronts of both cities fit this description: Minneapolis’ mills no longer produce more flour than anywhere else in the world, and St. Paul’s riverfront is no longer a hub of shipping. But what have those spaces become?  This storymap, created by River Life staff, offers snapshot images of the Twin Cities through maps and aerial photographs from 1895, 1969, and 2018, as well as offering other contextual information.

Here at River Life, we think a lot about what a university like ours should do to be a good citizen of our place.  The campus at the University of Minnesota is on Dakota land; that is a responsibility we must take seriously. We are in a national park, on one of the world’s great rivers, and should take that fact of location seriously also. In Philadelphia the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities, in collaboration with the Drexel Air Resources Research Laboratory and a host of nonacademic partners, has developed an exemplary set of projects that demonstrate responsibility to a sense of place on an urban river.  The Schuylkill River and Urban Waters Research Corps is a digital collection that examines the past, present, and some imagined futures of the urban river that passes Penn’s campus. A “public, cooperative research collective,” the program breaks down many of the siloes between campus and community, and between academic and professional disciplines on a large campus.