In late January, on the day bids were due from professional firms vying to design a master plan for Buffalo Bayou's east sector, members of the Buffalo Bayou Partnership watched a presentation that wasn't hindered by the bounds of, say, a budget.

Chris Reed, a professor in the practice of landscape architecture at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design, was presenting ideas from a studio project by six teams of his final-year students.

The partnership will take all the inspiration it can get for the epic task of revitalizing the seven-mile stretch of Buffalo Bayou that winds lazily from Allen Parkway to the Ship Channel's Turning Basin. That's more than twice as long as Buffalo Bayou Park, whose banks just west of downtown were neglected but already in place and surrounded by property that had developers smacking their chops.

As Reed describes it, the east sector has a boatload of issues, aside from its size: "large-scale abandonment, active heavy industry, poor neighborhoods, industrial ruins, denuded ecologies, contaminated land and a radically transformed hydrologic system."

In short, ugliness all around. But also potential.

People often think of existing infrastructure as a negative, Reed said. But he and his students liked the idea of keeping remnants of freeway interchanges as part of an ecopark.

"There's something about the scale of those things that's really nice and offers you a memory," he said. "This idea of not erasing a place is really important. We're not trying to cover it up."

Reed always wants students to seek solutions that are compatible with the place they're studying. "We don't want a solution for New York imported to Houston," he said.

Before a 13-week deep dive from afar, the students visited Houston for a few days — hiking and biking along Buffalo Bayou in 92-degree heat, taking the partnership's boat tour, meeting with community leaders and examining what the city's lack of zoning (a foreign concept!) looks like in person.

They looked at Houston's growth; at the bayou's historical locations; at how currents and silt move; at who's regulating what; at the active industry; at who lives along the bayou's east sector. They mapped landfills, dump sites and active industrial areas relative to race and income. Not surprisingly, those sites tend to be located next to neighborhoods that are majority-minority.

"So there's real social justice issues," Reed said. "How do you deal with that culturally and also create something that adds value for the people who live there?"

Rather than focus on a master plan, the students divvied up a series of sites to consider.

Reed showed an array of dizzying graphics that were also printed out for display on the walls, representing digital models of ecological, environmental, demographic and economic data. If you were so inclined, you could totally geek out on diagrams labeled Stream Evaluation Timeline (from an interactive animation simulating water and silt flows) and Transitory Dross Topographies (with dotted lines indicating how big mounds of earth might be moved).

Xun Liu and Ziwei Zhang, the duo behind the Stream Evaluation Timeline, imagined a dramatic wetland park underneath I-69 that anticipated reworked freeway interchanges and expanded the existing park near the McKee Street Bridge. Their renderings left the ruins of existing overpasses as "insertions of infrastructure to create ecology" — suggesting they could capture sediment flow and improve bank stabilization. They also proposed an aggregate channel from White Oak Bayou to help alleviate flooding and offered a detailed planting strategy to create a future alluvial forest.

Andrew Madl and Andrew Taylor, the Transitory Dross Topography guys, dreamed up an industrious working park — a soil farm — at the same site. They were thinking about creating jobs from the continuous deposits of flood silt.

Juan Diego Izquierdo and Rebecca Liggins proposed a series of "stormwater finger parks" that would cleanse and slow runoff at the silos-incinerator site near Jensen Drive, where they also re-imagined empty lots as temporary nurseries that could employ area residents and double as community gathering spaces.

Adam Himes and Sophie Juneau re-imagined Sims Metal Management's Proler Southwest metal recycling facility in the Fifth Ward as a public open space for quieter, cleaner kinds of recycling; with a linear greenway that could be used for composting, exchanging reusable stuff and — no joke — festivals. They also developed "edge models" for stabilizing bank erosion that would use existing scrap to reshape the land so it would collect sediment where plants could grow — a process they called "scrap seeding."

Jonah Susskin explained his project with Louise Roland for a water park: "The issue was not 'how do we take away the industrial workplace?' — a lot of these eastside places are still active and will probably remain so for quite some time — but 'how do we start to embed some more pedestrian-scale things and interactivity through these sites?"

He and Roland, like Himes and Juneau, envisioned a place that combined things you would not normally put side-by-side. Like swimming pools and compost piles, which they sketched into the circular structures of the city's decommissioned Northside Water Treatment Plant. That got gentle laughs. Not so funny: A pedestrian bridge that visitors could cross to the site and that would encourage them to dream more about the neighborhood's potential.

Yuxi Qin and Chris Reznich also wanted to elevate people. They designed a series of towers and docks the length of the east sector that would also serve as transportation hubs. This was perhaps the most simple, genius idea of all: Who needs more light rail or bus lines when you could hop on a boat to get from one end of the bayou to the other?

They also imagined the vacant Watco site at Turkey Bend as a cultural incubator space and a big nursery operation that would create jobs; they developed a strategy for decontaminating the entire waterfront with green, growing plants.

Such an interesting potential mix of uses could only happen in a no-zoned city like Houston, Reed suggested. "An opportunity to have something for the public next to one of these active places like a concrete plant is not something you get everywhere."

Guy Hagstette, the long-time parks advocate, wondered, "Is that something we can celebrate?"

Yes, Reed said. "The Watco site is amazing. ... I don't know a lot of industrial sites still in America that have the scale of those structures still in place."

Anne Olsen, the partnership's director, loved that Reed kept referring to the bayou as a "river." And the idea of activating the water. "We're happy to see it even being thought of that way, because we think it's where we should be going," she said.

Perhaps the most simple, genius idea of all: Bookmark Gray Matters.