Category:

Leading Change

RESTORE THE BALANCE IN THE WATER BALANCE: “Sponge Cities”- A catchy way to describe the goal in restoring the capacity of the urban landscape to absorb water, release it naturally, and soften the impacts of floods and droughts!


“Extreme weather, a changing climate, and impervious streets and roads have combined to create an urban disaster. All of this has seen cities begin to re-imagine their relationship with water. Rather than just designing systems that allow the water to drain away slowly and stably, they want to harvest and reuse it. This approach to urban design – where water is held in place to be called-upon when needed – is known as the ‘sponge city’, and it is rapidly growing in popularity,” stated Laurie Winkless.

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INTEGRATING NATURE INTO INFRASTRUCTURE IN BRITISH COLUMBIA: “Every significant innovation results from a magical combination of timing, preparation and luck. So true for the creation of a new online course on Green Infrastructure,” stated Dr. Joanna Ashworth, co-developer of the self-directed online course on Green Infrastructure Policy, Design and Practice launched by Simon Fraser University in 2021


“Whether it’s the community coming together to build rain gardens or adopt catch basins, dedicated volunteer streamkeepers who put in countless hours restoring and protecting important salmon habitat, or government decision-makers and employees enacting policies, everyone has a role to play in advancing Green Infrastructure implementation. There’s more work to be done as we collectively travel along a path to find upstream, proactive solutions to climate change impacts,” stated Joanna Ashworth..

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USE PLAIN LANGUAGE: “Words like ‘stormwater’, ‘rainwater’ and ‘drainage’ can have such powerful unconscious effects on how you interpret the discussions and they can mean different things to different stakeholders in the system,” stated Charles Axelsson, PhD candidate, University of Venice (January 2021)


“In the sciences, one of the largest challenges to research is science communication. A lot of fantastic studies are misinterpreted outside of scientific circles because the language, style and meaning of science writing is very different to non-specialists. With climate change studies, this can lead to a serious disconnect between climate change policy and the supporting research. Good policy is reliant of strong communication of everyone’s interests,” stated Charles Axelsson.

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FACILITATING THE PARADIGM-SHIFT FROM STORMWATER TO RAINWATER: “Before the Water Balance Model for British Columbia was developed, the missing link urban hydrology was a tool that could easily quantify the benefits, at a neighbourhood or watershed scale, achieved by reducing rainwater runoff volume at the site level,” wrote Kim Stephens in an article published by Innovation Magazine (June 2004)


Rainwater management is at the heart of a contemporary approach to land development in balance with the natural environment. In 2004, Kim Stephens provided this perspective: “BC stormwater criteria and tools are receiving increasing recognition across North America because of their unique emphasis on solving both flooding and environmental problems at the source. This rethinking of traditional approaches to urban hydrology is helping to achieve higher levels of stream protection by integrating land use planning with volume-based strategies.”

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YOUTUBE VIDEO ABOUT VANCOUVER’S HIDDEN STREAMS: “In the future I think we’ll be seeing more and more city planners, engineers and architects work with and learn from nature instead of burying it underground,” stated Uytae Lee, CBC Vancouver video columnist (April 2019)


The industrialization of Vancouver was rapid, and soon the creeks that connected land-to-ocean were buried. “Streams such as Still Creek and others like it were once considered a nuisance, They would often get in the way of road construction or buildings. They were also these dumping grounds for garbage, so there was really this incentive to bury them and that’s kind of just what happened,” stated Uytae Lee. “We’re sort of finally realizing that nature has a lot more value than we often give it credit for.”

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LOOK AT RAIN DIFFERENTLY: “How will communities ‘get it right’ as land develops and redevelops?” asks Peter Law, President, Mid Vancouver Island Habitat Enhancement Society (Asset Management BC Newsletter, February 2019)


“The way we have historically developed and drained land has disconnected hydrology from ecology. The consequences of this disconnect are more erosion and flooding, loss of baseflow and aquatic habitat, and an unfunded infrastructure liability for stream stabilization. Communities have for the most part failed to properly address root causes of ‘changes of hydrology’, as well as subsequent impacts of those changes on natural creekshed function,” states Peter Law.

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Michigan’s Struggles to Fund Stormwater Infrastructure: “The pipes that we put in the ground 50 years ago were designed under a different set of criteria,” said engineer Greg Kacvinsky


As problems of flooding and overflow become more common, communities butt up against the reality of having to pay for repairs and improvements. “And so when rainfall changes, and when climate changes, the system doesn’t provide the same level of service that it used to. Where communities used to be able to rely on money coming down, or raining down, from the federal government, now the federal government is there to say, we’ll give you money…but you’re gonna pay us back. Paying more for infrastructure and utilities is the new reality,” Greg Kacvinsky said.

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HOW CITIES CAN MAKE ROOM FOR WATER: “Understanding the water cycle is an opportunity to generate a positive relationship between natural processes, plants and people,” stated Elisa Palazzo


“Innovative strategies understand flood as a natural process to work with, rather than resist. Non-structural, soft and nature-based solutions to flood adaptation are replacing centralised and engineered technologies. These projects use climate change positively to provide multiple added benefits,” wrote Elisa Palazzo. “Looking at how cities are designed and performing in Australia, there is plenty to learn from the international experience. We have a lot to do to adjust this knowledge to the local context.”

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“Nothing will provide 100 per cent protection against the potential losses from urban floods, but planning ahead reduces the odds that you will be flooded and may reduce your costs when a flood does occur,” says Michael Drescher, University of Waterloo


“Wild weather seems increasingly widespread these days. Cities are especially vulnerable to extreme weather, meaning that many of us will end up paying for the damage it can cause. But how much we pay — and when — is largely up to us. We could, for example, pay now to prepare ourselves and limit future damage, or we can pay later to repair our properties and restore the environment,” wrote Michael Drescher.

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SPONGE CITIES: “It’s important to make friends with water. We can make a water protection system a living system,” stated Kongjian Yu, the landscape architect who is famous for being the man who reintroduced ancient Chinese water systems to modern design


Kongjian Yu is best known for his “sponge cities”. President Xi Jinping and his government have adopted sponge cities as an urban planning and eco-city template. “The mottos of the sponge city are: Retain, adapt, slow down and reuse,” stated Kongjian Yu. “Based on thousands of years of Chinese wisdom, the first strategy is to contain water at the origin, when the rain falls from the sky on the ground. We have to keep the water.” Yu’s designs aim to build resilience in cities faced with rising sea levels, droughts and floods.

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