In urban areas most people can’t imagine, that there was once, or still is a stream underneath them. Many municipal urban planners are bringing these streams “to light,” by a process called daylighting. This includes bringing a stream to light, from underground, often by integrating storm water management and ecosystems. Daylighting can have many benefits, including ecological, economic, and social. We wrote about a daylighting project in Seoul, South Korea about a year ago. Since then daylighting has gotten exposure from cities like Seattle, Berkeley, Portland, and our very own San Francisco. Most of these streams and creeks, which have not been visible since the 1800’s are now viewable as sewers and pipes transformed underground in order to make room for urban development. With global warming on the rise, many cities cannot handle the pressure of rising stormwater runoff, often backing up water treatment plants, which directly affects the entire city. Urban planners are turning to daylighting as a resource to relieve pressure from stormwater runoff as well as connecting people with their water resources.

Seoul Stream Daylighted and Turned Into a Beautiful Public Space

Seoul’s landmark daylighting project involved tearing down a major divisive freeway through the heart of the city and replacing in, instead of with another vehicular transportation network, with an enhancement of the natural environment, a community amenity, and a stormwater management improvement.

Thornton Creek in North Seattle has just recently been daylighted in collaboration with a mixed-use, residential, commercial, and office, development adjacent to the Northgate Mall.

While daylighting seems like an extremely attractive option for urban water system improvements, there are also many issues related to daylighting. One of our engineer’s Adam writes, “While it’s easy to tout the benefits of daylighting from an academic or professional perspective, American municipalities often get caught up on fiscal constraints, searching for exaggerated untruths to defend inaction. Benefits vary depending on the location and scale of the drainage network, what habitats are associated with the stream, the local climate conditions, existing stormwater management conditions and infrastructure, and the scope of the daylighting project.”

Recently San Francisco has pondered upon the thought of using daylighting throughout the city, which would relive stormwater runoff pressures and would expose watersheds to the public. Show your support for the use of daylighting in San Francisco by attending the next community meeting here.

Today, a booming economy should be looked at as a savior. But for China, it’s also a burden. That’s because more factories, people, agriculture, and entertainment all require extreme uses of water.

Sherwood Design Engineers hopes to combat this problem within our city-scale project in Langfang, located in Northern China.  We have developed a master plan for a balanced water cycle, which would improve water quality, mitigate further aquifer depletion, and regenerate wildlife habitat in the Northern China Plain. We hope that this plan will set the precedent for all cities throughout China.

Sherwood has recommended that the Northern China Plain eliminate imported water from the South-North Water Diversion Project (see http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7864390.stm). This project includes eastern, central and western routes that will divert water from China’s Yangtze River to the parched north.  There are many issues related to this plan, including financial and environmental.  A few of these problems are tremendous water shortage in the form of droughts as well as sinking due to over pumping from its aquifers. The new balanced water cycle plan would reduce aquifer pumping and would allow for groundwater to recharge from natural infiltration, recycled water, and diverted peak storm flows.

You can read about China’s water shortages here:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/15/AR2010031503564.html

Our project “Sausalito Residence” which features California’s first rainwater-harvesting system approved for residential use, is 1 of 5 homes featured on the AIA Marin Homes Tour on May 15. Read the full article at SFGate.com here, more details are also in this article on the Houzz blog.

Here’s an excerpt from an article in today’s Christian Science Monitor (which includes an interview with Sherwood’s John Leys):

In the months since California changed the gray-water permit requirements, demand has begun to build statewide, says John Leys of Sherwood Design Engineers in San Francisco, which has clients across the United States as well as abroad. Mr. Leys recently consulted on new water-planning regulations for Abu Dhabi, capital of the United Arab Emirates, which has water needs similar to those in the American Southwest. “Ten years ago, we were not seeing any demand for gray-water systems,” he says, but now clients of all types are requesting projects that range from simple and inexpensive backyard irrigation retrofits to complex, multipurpose gray-water systems that are part of the design from the beginning. Leys notes that as pressures over drought regulations and energy conservation have started to build, many businesses have begun to see that reclamation and reuse make sense from both a business and an environmental standpoint.

Read the full piece on the Christian Science Monitor web site.

Sherwood’s Bry Sarte was interviewed for the January, 2010 of AIA’s arcCA magazine. The five page long piece is called “Changing Practice in Civil Engineering.” The interview is not yet posted on the AIA web site but we will link to it when it is up. In the mean time here’s a sneak preview from the article:

Q: What is the current state of sustainable practice in civil engineering?

A: Sustainable infrastructure is still evolving, both as a definition and a practice. At this point, nearly every civil engineering firm has a sustainability menu among its offerings, but, I would argue, these offerings are not often integrated with the overall practice.

Storm water management and water resource are among the most forward thinking areas of civil engineering – states and municipalities are beginning to make changes in this regard, with some states now requiring rainwater harvesting. There is also tremendous will to change the energy system with smart grids, wind farms, biofuels, and pilot projects for other innovative advances. But change needs to happen first at the regulatory and code level. Without new codes in place, many sustainable systems cannot easily become widespread.

The latest issue of The Architect’s Newspaper has an article on one of Sherwood’s projects, New York’s Olmstead Center. Click here to read the full article.

Sherwood Engineers in Architects Newspaper article on Olmstead Center

West Coast Green is this week in San Francisco, and I am honored to be among the distinguished list of speakers at the event. I will be co-presenting a panel on Integrated Water Systems with Paul Kephart from Rana Creek and Andy Mannle this Friday, October 2, at 11am. The panel we did last year, “The Sexiest Large Scale Water Design Applications We Have Ever Seen”, was S.R.O. So they’re bringing us back for an update, which we’re calling (somewhat less racily) “The Whole Pitcher.”

Also at West Coast Green, Sherwood will be participating in the “Greening Fort Mason Design Slam.” The event was created to brainstorm design strategies and practical ideas for the continued evolution of Fort Mason Center as a leading environmentally sustainable destination. I will be facilitating this charette this Friday October 2 at 12:30pm along with a number of great minds from WRT, The Grove Consulting, Van Meter Williams Pollack, Solutions and PEC. You can read more about it here and register to attend the conference here.

Daylighting urban streams has long made sense aesthetically, but now the environmental, traffic calming, and air pollution benefits can be quantified based on new studies of the famous Cheonggyecheon running through downtown Seoul.

From the New York Times:

Cities from San Antonio to Singapore have been resuscitating rivers and turning storm drains into streams. In Los Angeles, residents’ groups and some elected officials are looking anew at buried or concrete-lined creeks as assets instead of inconveniences, inspired partly by Seoul’s example.

By building green corridors around the exposed waters, cities hope to attract affluent and educated workers and residents who appreciate the feel of a natural environment in an urban setting.

Environmentalists point out other benefits. Open watercourses handle flooding rains better than buried sewers do, a big consideration as global warming leads to heavier downpours. The streams also tend to cool areas overheated by sun-baked asphalt and to nourish greenery that lures wildlife as well as pedestrians.

But four years after the stream was uncovered, city officials say, the environmental benefits can now be quantified. Data show that the ecosystem along the Cheonggyecheon (pronounced chung-gye-chun) has been greatly enriched, with the number of fish species increasing to 25 from 4. Bird species have multiplied to 36 from 6, and insect species to 192 from 15.

The recovery project, which removed three miles of elevated highway as well, also substantially cut air pollution from cars along the corridor and reduced air temperatures. Small-particle air pollution along the corridor dropped to 48 micrograms per cubic meter from 74, and summer temperatures are now often five degrees cooler than those of nearby areas, according to data cited by city officials.

And even with the loss of some vehicle lanes, traffic speeds have picked up because of related transportation changes like expanded bus service, restrictions on cars and higher parking fees.

“We’ve basically gone from a car-oriented city to a human-oriented city,” said Lee In-keun, Seoul’s assistant mayor for infrastructure, who has been invited to places as distant as Los Angeles to describe the project to other urban planners.

Local water supply in rural India from the New York Times

• Dr. Nocera at MIT is reserching the ability to capture energy through photosynthesis, so that we can harness solar energy at night
• A cap and trade system for carbon emissions is looking like it is gaining consensus as the best option for  accounting for externalities of pollution, but how much will it cost our society?
• More on green schools, this time talking about “the halo” system that enables natural light to shine into the classroom even on cloudy days at Da Vinci Arts Middle School in Portland, Oregon
• Design your own graywater capture system!
• Google tackles office greening in London. Best way to increase recycling? Take away trash cans at individual desks.
• How can a hotel go green but still cater to visitor needs? Take a hole out of the soap bar…
• A new analysis report was released recently, showing that India could face a severe water supply problem if they do not change their usage patterns soon

Green Inc, New York Times’s great blog about the economics of green industries, has very interesting piece on how PUR is achieving success through a new marketing campaign.  Known for their filters here in the US, they also market disinfectant powder that can be added to water.   They have been marketing it in developing countries as a way to provide clean water to underserved communities for 8 years, but started achiving great success last year when they changed their marketing strategy to a social marketing technique that stresses this as a public health need similar to handwashing or immunizations.

Water was also in the news yesterday when a coalition of bottled water companies filed a lawsuit against New York State to try and stop a new 5 cent deposit from being placed on bottled water.  The issue at hand? Water that adds sugar, such as Vitamin Water, is exempt from the deposit.  I’m all for a deposit tax on bottled water, but how the law was created that doesn’t cover all plastic drink bottles is beyond me, and seems to be suspicious as to which lobbyists were involved in the creation of this legislation.