Denver’s Green Streets Guide: The Green Continuum addresses a critical challenge facing climate-focused practitioners: green infrastructure (GI) is a growing discipline often perceived to add complexity and rigidity to city projects. While each context is uniquely challenged to bring green infrastructure to scale, to expand a practice anywhere practitioners must first focus on building a shared language and culture within existing institutional structures.
After a decade of lessons learned building a GI program from the ground up, Denver’s GI division now connects with engineering teams, consultants, and planners alike using its ASLA award-winning Green Continuum framework. The so-called Levels of Green (LoG) framing provides a structure for planning and design teams that allows plans, studies, and design projects to align cross-functionally and support community needs. This toolkit makes it easier for planners to incorporate GI at early stages by optimizing site selection, alternatives analysis, and conceptual planning for water-quality priorities and urban heat-island mitigation. The framework is a Denver construct which may not be the right tool for every city; however, as cities grapple with yesterday’s, today’s, and tomorrow’s challenges, planners must envision their role in the path toward built-environment innovation.
Learning Objectives:
See green-streets projects that have been planned, designed, and constructed using the Denver Green Continuum: Green Streets Guide.
Connect with ways GI can be planned and designed on streets to align with co-benefits like pedestrian safety, bike connectivity, and watershed health.
Learn about challenges in implementing GI from planning to construction, and what role planning tools and shared language can play in overcoming them.