Joan Nassauer, a professor of Landscape Architecture at SNRE, discusses the benefits and limitations of “blue infrastructure” in dealing with the city of Detroit’s stormwater overflow challenges.

“It’s infrastructure. It’s not restoring nature,” Nassauer says. “It should be thought of as constructing eco-system services that employ elements of nature. When you realize it’s a design challenge, then you see the opportunities to design it so that it’s a desirable place to live, which is really what it all comes down to.”

Her insights appear in an article in today's (July 11, 2013) Detroit Free Press in an article by John Gallagher.

The storm water issue, and how it could be addressed using the city’s abundant vacant land, is one of many highlighted in the recently published Detroit City Future plan. http://detroitworksproject.com/?ref=dfc.

This document, the Detroit Strategic Framework, articulates a shared vision for Detroit’s future, and recommends specific actions for reaching that future. The vision resulted from a 24-month-long public process that drew upon interactions among Detroit residents and civic leaders from both the nonprofit and for-profit sectors, who together formed a broad-based group of community experts.

From the results of this citywide public engagement effort, in turn, a team of technical experts crafted and refined the vision, rendered specific strategies for reaching it, shared their work publicly at key points, and shaped it in response to changing information and community feedback throughout the process.