Bringing Garden Amenities into Your Neighborhood: Infrastructure for Ecological Quality A Guidebook for Cities and Citizens

The purpose of this guidebook is to illustrate how typical suburban streets and neighborhoods can be retrofit to build signature neighborhood amenities that contribute to urban biodiversity and manage stormwater inexpensively. This street in Maplewood, Minnesota was experiencing periodic flooding. The conventional approach would have been to repave the street, incorporating curb and gutter storm water sewers. © J. I. Nassauer   When streets are repaved or public sewer systems are repaired or replaced, a design approach that incorporates surface storm water management can save money. For example, a two-block conventional street repaving and storm water replacement project in another section of this metropolitan suburb cost about $151,000. The garden amenity approach to this same project cost about $138,000. Site Design This plan view shows the neighborhood, highlighting the overall design qualities. Top left: Entry Left: Unity Center: Nodes Lower center: Connectivity Right: Neatness With the garden amenity approach illustrated here, the neighborhood gained more than an infrastructure to move cars and water. It also gained a unified appearance, with gardens of native plants lining the streets and stone walls creating strong signature entries to the neighborhood. It also enhanced watershed ecologucal quality, by slowing down storm water to infiltrate into the sandy soil or be detained on the heavier soils, rather than sending storm water laden with sediment and urban pollutants directly through gutters and pipes into area lakes and wetlands. Finally, the plants in the new gardens are mostly native plants of wetlands and prairies, and they can also contribute to urban biodiversity.   Newly installed native plant garden.   Native plant garden in the spring following installation. Native plant gardens attract a wider variety of birds and butterflies, and they help people in the neighborhood learn about the natural heritage of their region. The gardens bring real nature, with ecological meaning, back into the city. Note the butterfly in the right center of this photograph. Photographs © J. I. Nassauer Not every garden amenity project will look the same, but the approach can be used in many existing neighborhoods as part of the regular repair and replacement of streets and sewers. This book describes the components of a garden amenity project and suggests some alternative choices for designing each of these components in your own neighborhood.

Joan Iverson Nassauer, Brady Halverson, and Steve Roos

A project for the City of Maplewood, Minnesota by the University of Minnesota, Department of Landscape Architecture ©June 1997 University of Minnesota, Department of Landscape Architecture. Funding for this project approved by the Minnesota Legislature (ML 1995, Chapter 220, Section 19, Subd. 8d. as recommended by the Legislative Commission on Minnesota Resources from the Minnesota Future Resources Fund

Acknowledgments This project was conducted in response to the collaboration of the City of Maplewood, the Phalen Watershed Project, and the Ramsey Washington Metro Watershed District. From the beginning of this project, I have been very fortunate to work with public servants who look for creative opportunities to benefit the environment. I am grateful to Ken Haider and Russ Matthys of the City of Maplewood for their innovative engineering and enthusiastic leadership, and to Bill Priebe of the City of Maplewood for his concern about how things work in the field. I thank Cliff Aichinger of the Ramsey Washington Metro Watershed District for his generous collaboration in this among many fruitful projects. I am especially grateful to Sherri Buss, manager of the Phalen Watershed Project, for her great ideas and ability to bring people together to get things done. Amy Bower, Kevin McCardle, and Anne Hartjen assisted me in previous stages of the Maplewood Ecological Retrofit project. Ross Martin and C. Colston Burrell assisted me in related projects in the past; some of their drawings and designs are included here. Tanya Olson assisted me in a related project, and her drawing is also included in this book. Fred Rozumalski has contributed countless insights to this and related projects. All of these important contributions are reflected in this guidebook. Finally, I thank the citizens of Minnesota, who supported this project as approved by the Minnesota legislature. I particularly want to thank my co-authors. Brady Halverson created the illustrative drawings throughout the book; Steve Roos created the analytical drawings throughout the book, and took it through layout and printing. They both joined with me in many design sessions to develop the ideas in this book. I am extremely grateful for their thoughtful and dedicated work. Joan Iverson Nassauer