Freshwater Mecca - Is Milwaukee the Leading Freshwater City?

I have been slow in posting new content to this blog because I have some unfinished business to take care of for the Urban Milwaukee website - namely a six-part article series on Milwaukee's "freshwater landscape" that I've been working on for over a year.  Links to the first two articles are provided below.  I plan on posting the full series on this blog after it has completed its initial run on the Urban Milwaukee website.

Part 1: Freshwater Mecca - Is Milwaukee the Leading Freshwater City

Part 2: Freshwater Mecca - Milwaukee's Clean Water Advantage

This series was inspired in part by Milwaukee's major business initiative focused on water technologies and water related businesses.  As seems to be the case with all good things in the Midwest, it has attracted skeptics and naysayers, as noted in an article reviewing the national and international attention garnered by the water initiative to date.

I believe the water focused business initiative is part of a much longer and even more extraordinary initiative focused on the restoration and transformation of Milwaukee's freshwater landscape. Milwaukee has perhaps the most publicly accessible and high quality lakefront setting of any city in in the US, and an ever expanding riverwalk and river trail network that already exceeds the San Antonio Riverwalk in some measures (especially in  authenticity).  Milwaukee's urban rivers have undergone an extraordinary environmental transformation over the past 3 to 4 decades, that in turn has led to an extraordinary transformation of the riverfront lands that were largely vacant blighted industrial land.  The combination of the restored lands and rivers form what I describe as Milwaukee's freshwater landscape, which I believe may be unsurpassed by that of any city in North America.

In terms of the rust belt and Midwest renewal, one of the most intriguing parts of the story is the that the development of this extraordinary urban freshwater landscape is likely something that would only be possible in a rust belt city.  The lining of the riverfront land with warehouses and industrial facilities is a characteristic of an historic manufacturing city.  The near complete abandonment of these lands is a characteristic of the rust belt, but as it turns out, a circumstance that provided the possibility of recreating the center of a major city from scratch during the general era in the US of the renaissance of downtown urban areas.  However, other extraordinary circumstances combined in Milwaukee to create a freshwater landscape that I believe already surpasses that of any other US city.