| Summary: | Imagine a city that utilizes the rain that falls on it as a resource instead of managing it as
a waste. This city is planned, designed and engineered in ways that help to preserve and
bolster the ecosystem within which it sits. The costs to the taxpayer are lower than other
municipalities that have preserved the status quo of managing their stormwater. The city
itself is less reliant on inputs of materials and energy from outside its borders. The
people who live in this city are more cognizant of their natural environment, understand
the meaning of developing sustainably and experience less of the "concrete jungle" than
do people in other contemporary cities. The planners, designers, engineers and decisionmakers
use stormwater management as a tool to achieve a more sustainable city that is
reflective of local ecological functions, as well as global materials and energy
availability. In this thesis, the stormwater management contributions to achieving such a
reality in Vancouver, British Columbia are investigated, while a framework for applying
sustainable stormwater management systems to this and other contexts is constructed.
Data and information are gathered through literature review, case study and interviews.
The results of the study illustrate a more sustainable and integrated stormwater
management framework and suggest that it is possible to incrementally shift the system
towards this over time. The study also shows that it can be more ecologically and
economically sustainable to do so. While there appear to be many opportunities for this
shift to sustainable stormwater management systems, there are also significant, yet
surmountable, institutional and epistemological barriers that must be addressed. === Applied Science, Faculty of === Community and Regional Planning (SCARP), School of === Graduate
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