Category:

“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.

“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.

“As a matter of policy, the Province was quite deliberate in the sense that we wanted to push the boundaries of how municipal infrastructure was developed. We knew that we were going to have to do this under pretty strict fiscal constraints. And so that is why innovation became so important. We used the slogan The New Business As Usual to convey the message that, for change to really occur, practices that until then had been viewed as the exception must become the norm moving forward. With the new grant programs, we had some funding to support innovation,” stated Dale Wall.

“And isn’t that how turning that supertanker of thinking happens? Just incrementally, then by gosh, we end up going in a whole different direction than we were when we started,” stated Joan Sawicki, Parliamentary Secretary for the Georgia Basin Initiative. Launched in 1994, the GBI was a call to action by the provincial government led by Premier Mike Harcourt. The living legacy of the GBI is embedded in and embodied by the Georgia Basin Inter-Regional Educational Initiative. The IREI is now in Year 13 and provides peer-based education among local governments.

Susan Haid has played a leadership role in trailblazing an ecosystem-based approach to community planning in British Columbia. “The 1990s was a very instrumental time of policy and regulation development. And municipal dialogue too. The discussions around the Fish Protection Act had a huge influence shifting perspectives to a bigger scale. The course that I teach at UBC is about how policy frameworks shape urban design. Building in resiliency to our cities from the site level to the regional level could NOT be more critical than now,” stated Susan Haid.

Langley’s approach to achieving water balance through green Infrastructure evolved as successive neighbourhoods were built over the past two decades. In the beginning, the focus for Green Infrastructure was on what could be achieved within greenways. Langley staff then turned their attention to rain gardens. Building on their history of successes, their next evolution was implementation of “blue links”, which is another name for rain gardens. The blue link is symbolic of the transformational change which has taken root in the Township in the 21st century as designing with nature became the ‘new normal’.