The St. George Rainway : building community resilience with green infrastructure

Central to global climate change and central to the profession of landscape architecture is the element: water. The St George Rainway offers a new opportunity to be a demonstration project for the City of Vancouver, Canada, where the city and its community of Mount Pleasant act as collaborators with design, construction, and maintenance of a project with water in the public realm. The voluntary engagement in the physical transformation of one’s community can provide opportunity for a growth in social cohesion. Subsequently, this growth can improve the conditions that fostered the bonds and bridges within that community that inspired the initial engagement. Green infrastructure, when considered through this lens, has a reciprocal relationship with social cohesion, where the improvement of one feeds the improvement of the other. This model could therefore provide both a resilient option for physical development of land and for social development of community for neighbourhoods by encouraging more interaction among neighbours and with their local public realm.