Thank you again for the links and I’ll be sure to share these with my networks.

Courtney

Daylighting watercourses is becoming a very important area for research. There are many claimed benefits from fish passage to public health, yet most projects don’t record the objectives or outcomes.

http://www.daylighting.org.uk is a research project at the University of Sheffield, U.K., where daylighting case studies are being collected all over the world to address this lack of information, and to be used to improve daylighting programs and inspire communities and policy-makers to encourage this.

It would be great if anyone reaching this page and taking an interest in the article would take a look at the research website, or follow on Facebook (@DaylightingUrbanRivers) or Twitter (@losturbanrivers).

Thank you for your very articulate and well-researched response. It is interesting to compare the two projects and the two cities, which despite both being Western Canadian have drastically different climate systems.

In particular, I think the City of Calgary must be commended for implementing policy standards that prohibit runoff in excess of 10% from development sites within the Pine Creek watershed. This type of policy is something that the City of Vancouver has struggled to implement due to Still Creek’s location in a very densely populated area of metro Vancouver, including the suburb cities of Burnaby and New Westminister. However, despite this challenge the City has responded effectively towards improving the water quality – the daylighting process (as mentioned above) has primarily been effective in enabling the committee to re-create wetlands that attract native fauna in the hopes of increasing the level of biodiversity in the area.

Very interesting to see how other cities are working with their environmental conditions/limitations to improve water quality and place value on urban streams. Thank you for your comments!

Courtney

In Calgary, AB, there are two major rivers which define the landscape of the city (in fact, the founding Fort Calgary which started the city rests at the intersection of the two). Most of the City of Calgary’s water management information I could track down concerns road-runoff from the fluctuating Chinook-prone temperatures of a wintry city. The result is a wildly variable flow rate of storm run off, and with it, salts from de-icing.

One project which I think draws parallel to the Still Creek Enhancement project is the Pine Creek study and management plan. The crux of the watershed management plan is that low-impact development is permitted, conditional that 90% of rainwater is absorbed on site. You can read about it at the link below:

http://www.calgary.ca/_layouts/cocis/DirectDownload.aspx?target=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.calgary.ca%2FUEP%2FWater%2FDocuments%2FWater-Documents%2Fstormwater_report.pdf&noredirect=1&sf=1

Thanks for this interesting spotlight on Daylighting