see rainwater as a resource to be kept rather than got rid of at great cost.”
A
good illustration is the giant Potsdamer Platz, a huge new commercial
redevelopment by Daimler Chrysler
in the heart of the city.
G. Los Angeles has spent billions of dollars digging huge drains and concreting
river beds to carry
away the water from occasional intense storms. The latest
plan is to spend a cool $280 million raising the
concrete walls on the Los
Angeles river by another 2 metres. Yet many communities still flood regularly.
Meanwhile this desert city is shipping in water from hundreds of kilometres away in northern California and
from the Colorado river in Arizona to fill its taps and swimming pools, and irrigate its green spaces. It all
sounds like bad planning. “In LA we receive half the water we need in rainfall, and we throw it away. Then
we spend hundreds of millions to import water,” says Andy Lipkis, an LA environmentalist, along with
citizen groups like Friends of the Los Angeles River and Unpaved LA, want to beat the urban flood hazard
and fill the taps by holding onto the city’s flood water. And it’s not just a pipe dream. The authorities this
year launched a $100 million scheme to road-test the porous city in one flood-hit community in Sun Valley.
The plan is to catch the rain that falls on thousands of driveways, parking lots and rooftops in the valley.
Trees will soak up water from parking lots. Homes and public buildings will capture roof water to irrigate
gardens and parks. And road drains will empty into old gravel pits and other leaky places that should
recharge the city’s underground water reserves. Result: less flooding and more water for the city. Plan B
says every city should be porous, every river should have room to flood naturally and every coastline should
be left to build its own defences. It sounds expensive and utopian, until you realise how much we spend
trying to drain cities and protect our watery margins -and how bad we are at it.
