I’m glad to see “Green Infrastructure” become au courant, although, as with “Low Impact Development,” it’s one of the those squishy terms that invites expansion, and drift.
“Low Impact Development” is used to refer to everything from sensible urban planning to water conservation, and now “Green Infrastructure” shows up in conversations about everything from building with recycled materials to planting trees. It’s all good, I guess.
For a while there, I was using “Low Impact Development Drainage Design” to keep things focused on what LID means to me, which is designing land development projects to treat runoff pollutants and mimic predevelopment hydrology. Maybe I’ll need to start saying “Green Infrastructure Public Drainage Systems” to keep the focus on designing—and retrofitting—streets and storm drains.
As Green Infrastructure becomes a thing, I’m trying to contribute by developing methods to rapidly identify retrofit opportunities and carry them forward to conceptual designs. Wonderfully enough, I’ve got an assignment to do just that. On Wednesday, I gave this 15-minute presentation at City of San Jose offices.