Brad Lancaster
Getting street runoff legalised as an irrigation source, and writing the manual for harvesting water where there is almost none.
The record
- Standing
- active practice
- Based
- Tucson, Arizona
- The work
- Rainwater, greywater and street runoff harvested at the scale of a single lot and a single block.
- The policy
- Worked with allies in the City of Tucson’s sustainability office and its stormwater control department to legalise water-harvesting street kerb cuts. A permit covers a whole block’s worth of cuts, which pushes neighbours into doing it together.
- The numbers
- A four-inch core through a street kerb, feeding a roadside rain garden eight feet by five feet by one foot deep, harvests an average of over 4,500 gallons of stormwater a year.
Standing is this studio’s placement of the work, not a ranking of the person, and it is the one line here that is a judgement rather than a cited fact.
The work
Lancaster’s contribution is as much legal as horticultural. In most American cities, street runoff is a liability to be piped away and a homeowner who diverts it into a planting basin is committing a code violation. Changing that in Tucson — so that a resident can legally cut the kerb and irrigate a street tree with the water that already runs past it — did more for the urban canopy than any planting programme.
The technical work is documented at the level a person can act on: what a kerb core costs, what a permit costs, how much water a given basin actually catches. Tucson now also requires commercial developments to meet at least half their irrigation demand from harvested rainwater, and requires greywater stub-outs in new homes.
Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands and Beyond is the reference text, and the site behind it is effectively a public works manual.
Where to read them
Sources for this record
Corrections
This record was assembled from the sources above, and nothing in it was inferred to fill a gap. If it is about you and it is wrong, or you would rather not be listed, write and it changes.