Siting green stormwater infrastructure in a neighbourhood to maximise secondary benefits: lessons learned from a pilot project

Abstract

When siting green stormwater infrastructure (GSI), cities do not respond only to technical and regulatory requirements; they also strive to maximise environmental, aesthetic and social benefits. To help cities optimise the siting of GSI in the context of climate change, we developed a participatory decision support tool. Applied to a neighbourhood, this tool identified only a few sites where GSI would yield all secondary benefits and reduce climate change vulnerability. In the light of the need for large-scale implementation of GSI in cities, this finding raises the following questions: How can the potential benefits provided by a site be best identified? Are there potential synergies or antagonisms between benefits? How do they relate to vulnerability? Can a participatory decision-making process involving local stakeholders improve this process? Informed by the existing literature on balancing ecosystem services and vulnerability, these questions are addressed within a broader perspective of landscape design and urban planning.

Keywords:

• Green stormwater infrastructure
• bioretention
• green roofs
• ecosystem services
• benefits
• multifunctionality
• climate change
• vulnerability
• landscape planning

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to express their gratitude to Ouranos for providing the funding for this project and for the production of this article, the City of Québec for organising the workshop, all the students who participated in the project, and all participants in the workshop for their invaluable contributions. The names of the latter are mentioned in the report quoted in this article (Dagenais et al., 2012). Finally, we wish to thank Prof. Tim D. Fletcher for his helpful comments on some passages of the article, and Andréanne Leboeuf for her help with the graphics and maps.