LET IT RAIN: Green infrastructure strategies for cheap, effective, and beautiful rainwater management
Sustainability by Design
“Perhaps my most vivid memory of architecture school comes from a studio in which we built a model of a neighborhood design, and then poured water all over it. The trick was to use enough little pieces of sponge in the model, representing rainwater retention strategies at a variety of scales, so that no water spilled onto the floor,” writes Katherine Logan in an article published in GreenSource, the magazine of sustainable design.
“Across North America, regions and municipalities are now trying this trick for real. Why? Because the centuries-old approach of piping water off the land as fast as possible and dumping it into waterways is failing fast.”
The article describes examples of green infrastructure in Philadelphia, Portland and Vancouver's Southeast False Creek.
Southeast False Creek
“In shifting to sustainability by design, we’re really talking about shifting from a 2,000-
year-old engineering convention to a fundamentally new approach to municipal infrastructure,” states Patrick Lucey, one of the designers of the rainwater management system at South East False Creek, a LEED Platinum-certified neighborhood that served as Vancouver’s 2010 Olympic Village.
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Click on World class innovation at Southeast False Creek informs Metro Vancouver Reference Panel
Posted February 2011