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“Housing should be about building homes that people can afford in communities that work. We should be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater and be seduced by simplistic solutions. There is a relationship between infrastructure services, open space, employment, etc. All those things are supposed to be brought together in plans and reflected in development decisions. And they are not anymore. I want to do what I can to help the current generation of decision makers understand what it is about regional planning that has got us to this point,” stated Ken Cameron.

“Gaps between vision and reality are, of course, standard in politics. What makes this one frustrating to water-sustainability experts is how close to success the green infrastructure push came before it got derailed. Through decades of effort, planning had become policy, and policy had started to become practice. Now the question is whether the high profile of floods, droughts, and population growth will put green infrastructure back in the spotlight—and, if so, whether the decision-makers within Metro Vancouver’s municipalities will correct course,” stated Pamela Swanigan.

“Thinking like a system means you do not make decisions at the site scale. It is not about a particular stream reach or cross-section, or a bridge or a culvert. You need to step back and look at the big picture. You need to look at the entire stream network and what these flows are doing over time an in the landscape of the watershed. It is not just that the forest owes its causal power to the landscape features. The hydrological response of the landscape owes its power to the landscape feature and to the climate feature. That’s the space-time relationship, stated Younes Alila.

“Many plans fail to explicitly define green infrastructure. How it is defined guides the types of projects that local governments implement, with enduring impacts to people and the urban environment. Ecology is not really being embedded in any planning practice. This realization turned my attention towards this question…how do you embed ecosystem science and principles within landscape planning to conserve landscapes, ecological functions, and quality? My work is about a new paradigm that moves away from humans as separate from nature,” stated Zbigniew Grabowski.

“Not everyone gets to plan a brand-new community on top of a mountain as I did at Simon Fraser University. To everybody embarking on these gentle densification projects to construct 4 or 6 homes on single-family lots, you must get the drainage right. Get it wrong and it can be expensive to fix the problem,” stated Michael Geller. “One of the real advantages we had at UniverCity is that I was able to try out new ideas. Whenever people would say, we cannot do that, I could say: I will give you written assurance from the university that if this idea does not work, we will fix it.”

“Nature belongs in cities, but how do we put nature first without pushing people aside? Nature-First Cities reveals the false dichotomy of that question by recognizing that people and nature are indivisible. What are the costs associated with having cities that are not nature-based? What are the benefits if we invite nature back into our cities? What would it take to actually do this? If we are to challenge how urban development has taken place without a deep understanding of our connection to nature, what is a strategy for bringing nature back into cities,” stated Sean Markey.

“Land use intensification and redevelopment – where does that water go? I see the answer having two faces for RISK and LIABILITY. You are creating a drainage demand by preventing rainwater from reaching building foundations or removing groundwater at depth. But the other face is the lost opportunity because the water resource is not being managed in either a coordinated or holistic manner. Creating a drainage demand is the more immediate consequence of land use intensification. The loss of groundwater as an option for water supply is a future reckoning,” stated Robert Hicks.

Kongjian Yu pioneered China’s “sponge city” concept—less concrete and more green spaces to exploit stormwater instead of fighting it. Metropolises all over the world are following suit. “Industrialized engineering solutions have messed up the whole water system globally. You have to solve the problem holistically, and the sponge city is a nature-based, holistic solution. It is inexpensive, and it can be done at a small or large scale. You can have your garden, but you also have to plan from the top. It is a sponge planet, it is a sponge countryside, it is a sponge urban district,” stated Konjian Yu.

“What is being done in the upland wilderness affects what goes on in the low land because the source of runoff and sediment that runs through urban areas is in the headwaters,” stated Younes Alila. “Forest hydrologists for over a century swept the dimension of frequency under the carpet in the name of the “public does not understand probability”. The rest is history and it has not turned out well. So, I made the conscious decision to make probability central to my outreach to the media, wider public, professionals, and scientists.”

“And then something happened. We just seemed to lose momentum in the 2010s. With the benefit of hindsight, others have made the same observation. We got bogged down in the implementation plan. We just talked about the burden on local governments from all the capital items that were arising from the completion of integrated stormwater management plans. Coincidentally, this was just as the region’s needs became dominated by transportation, transit, active transportation and cycling. And then we were hit by the pandemic in 2020 and this huge retirement wave,” stated Ray Fung.