WaterTowns

A hands-on approach to improving a neighborhood, city, or region, placemaking inspires people to collectively reimagine and reinvent public spaces as the heart of every community to create public spaces that promote people's health, happiness, and well-being. Placemaking is a multi-faceted approach to the planning, design, and management of public spaces and capitalizes on a local community's assets, vision, and potential.

Working like a natural forest by capturing and filtering runoff from rooftops, driveways, and other hard surfaces, rain gardens are a proven way of using landscaping to beautify and improve neighborhoods, reduce flooding, clean waterways, protect natural habitats, and save millions of dollars in pollution clean-up and massive utility construction projects. Rain gardens also improve air quality and provide habitat for bees, birds, butterflies, and other wildlife.

Permeable pavers are separated by joints filled with crushed aggregate, allowing the movement of air and water around the paving material. This paving system allows tree roots and the ground below to breathe, and when it rains, water enters the joints between the solid impervious pavers and flows through the paver system. As water runs through the aggregate, the pavers become a filter for urban pollutants and capture stormwater runoff.

By creating a natural treatment area, bioretention cells naturally remove contaminants from stormwater runoff by directing it from a parking lot into a depressed area consisting of a grass buffer strip, sand bed, ponding area, organic layer, and native plants. The runoff passes over or through a sand bed that slows the runoff's velocity and distributes it evenly along the length of the ponding area to be filtered and absorbed by the soil and plants.

Naturalized shorelines prevent shoreline erosion, slow and filter stormwater runoff, and provide biodiversity amongst plants, fish, and animals. Native plants on a riverbank or lake’s edge have densely interwoven root systems that are required to physically stabilize a shoreline. These deep, strong roots are specially designed to hold the soil in place while withstanding the energy of hitting waves, ice movement, and stormwater runoff.