About "urban waterways": "urban implies culture, "waterway" implies nature.

There is also nature in the city: natural landscape embedded in a cultural landscape. Thus a successful restoration of an urban waterway has to embody both the natural processes (hydrological and biological functions) and the cultural elements of the natural feature (history, public space, education, entertainment, tourism, etc).

Looking at the history of the streams in the three case studies, waterways are usually compromised, engineered and damaged the most during periods of rapid urbanization to accommodate the needs of the city. Lack of time and resources lead to myopic solutions that yield little consideration for the whole system.

These cases also raise very interesting questions regarding the level of damage, the scale of the project and the condition in which restoration is or is not possible.

For River des Peres and Cheong Gye Cheon, the scale of the streams, the degree of damage and the level of urbanization were prohibitive to a true restoration of the natural processes of the stream. Their success was limited in reconstructing an image of the natural feature with its attached cultural meanings.

On the other hand, Strawberry Creek was more successful in providing both the natural habitat, maintaining certain level of integrity of the watershed and creating public space. However, Strawberry Creek was also rather spontaneous and localized. Although it inspired other day-lighting projects of different parts of the same watershed to follow suit, it missed the opportunity to look systematically at the whole watershed to link and coordinate these projects, hence making restoration in a much larger scale a possibility.