Published on August 26, 2024 by Jen Angel
I have spent most of my career at the water’s edge. For close to 15 years, I worked in public infrastructure on the waterfronts in Nova Scotia. I know first-hand the power of nature and the pace and scale at which it is changing.
And I’ve had the unfortunate opportunity to experience “100-year storms” more than a few times in the past decade. Extreme weather events are becoming increasingly common. And not just on the coast. This July in Toronto, we experienced a record-breaking 100 millimetres of rain. Many homes and businesses were flooded, and Evergreen Brick Works, located on the Don River floodplain, was hit hard.
Flooding in the Children’s Garden
But what many people don’t know is that Evergreen Brick Works is a climate ready landscape, designed for flooding. Our building foundations are raised to help water escape from beneath, our paved surfaces are made of pervious concrete that allows water to sink into the soil beneath, and our site is lined with greenways, rain gardens and sponge grounds filled with native plants that capture, treat, and slow the flow of stormwater runoff.
While our site was devastated by the speed of the rainfall and runoff from the city streets above, our climate-ready design curbed the worst of it. The need for more climate-ready spaces has never been clearer. Improved public spaces, incorporating nature-based solutions, are powerful tools in the face of climate change. They also improve the quality of life in our communities every day.
With myriad problems to solve and scarce public budgets, we ought to be prioritizing projects that solve for multiple public priorities at the same time, projects that leverage cross-sector participation. Climate ready public spaces can do that. And as we build the dense housing we so urgently need in our towns and cities, prioritizing the quality and functionality of the spaces in between is critical to ensure the cities we build are places everyone can thrive, now and in the future.
Traditional approaches to public infrastructure are no longer sufficient to meet this moment. Take school grounds. Our Climate Ready Schools pilot project in Milton, Ontario, was delivered alongside public and private partners. The grounds were designed as a “sponge” to absorb 100% of rainfall on the school site while mitigating flood risk in their neighbourhoods and bringing access to nature and joy to kids and their families. It’s a community hub and a powerful tool for climate adaptation and mitigation.
Students plant shrubs in soil at Irma Coulson Pubic School
This type of “sponge city” design is being implemented around the world. In Seattle, daylighting a section of a buried creek eliminated flooding, improved water quality and invited Chinook salmon back to their original home (you can learn more about the daylighting of Mud Creek during a walking session at the Conference with Dr. Khirfan). In Montreal, flood-prone streets are being re-designed with “sponge parks,” green spaces that are absorbing excess rainfall and beautifying city streets.
Great public spaces can do so much more than just mitigate flooding — they can cool our cities, sequester carbon, reduce cortisol levels, promote feelings of community belonging and save healthcare systems millions of dollars. And when we build them together, unlocking community ideas and capacity and even investment to build local projects in common purpose, the positive impacts are even greater. This is what we want to explore at this year’s Evergreen Conference on October 9 and 10.
October is arguably the most beautiful time of year at Evergreen Brick Works with the changing fall colours. As the days get shorter and the temperatures drop, it’s also a time for reflection and introspection.
Among the opportunities for reflection, The Evergreen Conference will showcase a public art installation by Space for Grief called Museum of Grief for conference goers to experience. The exhibit is part of our annual Good Mourning Festival—a community event in November that brings together different cultures and showcases the power of public space to create a sense of belonging and support. And there are lots of moments of joy planned, too.
There is something about coming together, stepping out beyond our daily perspective, away from our screens, connecting with nature and each other, that builds a strong sense of being part of something greater than ourselves. Given the magnitude of the challenges we’re facing these days, this is more important than ever. Indeed, a critical dimension of climate resilience, is the strength of our connections in community that enable us to work together, to be hopeful, and to respond.
I invite you to the Evergreen Conference to experience this sense of possibility firsthand.
Families enjoy Evergreen Brick Works in the fall
At the conference, we’ll not only celebrate successes from around the world but also candidly discuss the challenges we encounter in our communities across the country. Creating and maintaining high-quality public spaces is hard. Limited funding, competing priorities, lack of supports, regulatory hurdles and risk intolerance, are just a handful of the obstacles we must navigate. But by coming together, sharing our experiences, and sharing resources and tools, we can make it a little bit easier to build solutions and realize the benefits of great public spaces.
This work is hard. And the people leading it in our communities in Canada work hard. The Evergreen Conference is also a chance to relax, restore, and play. We’ll put our hands in the dirt at the PLAYcemaking Warehouse, engage in guided meditations with the Forest Bathing Club, and experience first-hand the multi-solving magic of public places by being part of a community making them.
See you at the conference!
Jen Angel
CEO, Evergreen
