ABSTRACT
Nature is the word Raymond Williams called "perhaps the most complex word in the English language". Williams identifies two additional areas of meaning: "the inherent force which directs either the world or human beings or both" and "the material world itself, taken as including or not including human beings". Language structures how one thinks, what kinds of things one is able to express, and how one acts. The landscape of West Philadelphia's Mill Creek neighborhood is a catalogue of the failures of twentieth-century urban policy, planning, and design. Mill Creek is a place of many puzzles. A key proposal of the West Philadelphia Landscape Project from the 1980s on has been to manage Mill Creek's buried floodplain as part of a broad approach to planning the city's watersheds to reduce combined sewer overflows and restore water quality and as a strategy to secure funds to rebuild the neighborhood.
