landADAPT Webinar: The St. George Rainway: Blue Green Systems for Climate Adaptation and Livability

Zoom Webinar

This presentation is offered in English with live French translation services.

To address the impacts of climate change and enhance urban biodiversity, the City of Vancouver is beginning to build a network of blue-green systems across the city. The St. George Rainway is one of the first large-scale pilots to be built; it brings 4 blocks of green rainwater infrastructure to St. George Street because of a local community group that advocated to honour and daylight a buried creek. This novel infrastructure has multi-layered aims to mitigate climate impacts and build ecological and social connectivity by promoting active transportation, managing rainwater sustainably, cooling the street, and creating a space for the community, while honouring the buried creek.

The project achieved this by engaging in a multi-year public engagement process to co-create the vision for the Rainway with the community, which resulted in a nature-forward approach while creating space for people. The design reallocates 45% of the former road space to transform a regular city street into one that provides climate adaptive rainwater management, promotes active transportation, and creates areas for people to slow down and gather. The planting palette also reflects input from the community, a local indigenous ethnobotanist, and bioblitzes to understand the local fauna. This project demonstrates a new paradigm for urban infrastructure and the possibilities for Vancouver as a climate-ready and resilient city.

The presentation is a case study of the project, with team members presenting on planning, design, construction, and on-going maintenance.