strategies for stormwater wetlands

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**Apologizes, this page is under construction. For more information, please contact the author.**

Heavier rainfall due to climate change, combined with widespread wetland destruction, has led to major environmental problems in cities: urban flooding, water scarcity, and water quality problems. Wetlands, the primary landscape that could help cities cope with these problems, have been largely (if not entirely) destroyed in urban areas by the very process of city making. This project reclaims urban wetland infrastructure through strategic design, planning, and engineering concepts.

The research is based on two of America’s largest, fastest-growing, and most water-stressed metropolises: Los Angeles (2nd largest metro at 13.2 million people) and Houston (5th largest metro at 6.5 million people). Through iterative design and fluid dynamics modeling, the project discovered the optimal wetland designs that combine engaging landscape topography and hydrologic performance and illustrate them as design guidelines for planning and water agencies all over the United States. These guidelines  reconceptualize how landscape architectural design can impact the cultural imagination of wetland engineering.

The text and images are edited excerpts from the publication completed by a team under the supervision of Celina Gunzman and Alan Berger from the LCAU, MIT and Hiedi Nepf from Nepf Labratories, MIT. For more information, including references, please contact the author.