Planting rain & shade in streets to cool & calm the hood
Brad Lancaster and the Dunbar/Spring Neighborhood Foresters designed, got grant funding for, and project managed the installation of four fully permitted new water-harvesting traffic-calming “chicanes” or “curb extensions” at the intersection of 9th Avenue and University Blvd in Tucson, Arizona where two bicycle boulevards intersect.
These installations will protect on-street parking by directing traffic out of the parking lane, and into the driving lane. Additionally they will help slow and calm traffic by narrowing the streets, making things safer for the many bicyclists using the bicycle boulevards that connect to many other neighborhoods.
These chicanes are designed to passively harvest over 5,000 gallons of stormwater per year per chicane from the street (where we receive just 11 inches of annual precipitation), which reduces flooding, makes the streets safer, and provides free irrigation for the multi-use, food- and medicinal- bearing native plants planted within them.
Once the native plants are established (it takes one to three years of supplemental watering to get the new plants established), ALL the plants’ water needs will be provided by passively harvested rain & street runoff. This helps indirectly recharge the groundwater by not extracting water from it to irrigate the plants post-estabilishment. And this helps directly recharge the groundwater as surplus harvested water that infiltrates beyond the plants’ root zone, will eventually make it to the aquifer.
The soil life and roots bioremediate, or naturally filter, the stormwater.
This is enhanced by the home-made compost and mulch added to the basins after this video was shot February 2025.
Dryland Design did the great rockwork stabilzing the basin banks (using local Catalina granite rock).
NO rock or gravel is used in basin bottoms as it impedes stormwater infiltration.
KE&G Construction, Inc. did the concrete curb and asphalt removal work.
For more information on how to harvest numerous free on-site waters such as rain, stormwater, greywater, condensate and more
see the latest full-color editions of Brad Lancaster’s books
“Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands and Beyond“,
available at deep discount, direct from Brad at his website,
HarvestingRainwater.com
For more information on these rain-irrigated neighborhood food forestry efforts see NeighborhoodForesters.org