Can San Fran teach Detroit how to be more green?

John Gallagher | Detroit Free Press

A dozen or so years ago the term "blue-green infrastructure" had little if any meaning in Detroit. Urban farmers were tending hundreds of community gardens but otherwise few people were imagining a greener city born out of Detroit's expanse of vacant and abandoned property.

Today, though, civic leaders and ordinary Detroiters alike see the city's vacancy as much of an opportunity as a burden. The Detroit Future City framework for the city's revitalization popularized the idea of using greening concepts to repurpose vacant land and buildings. The city's new planning director, Maurice Cox, preaches these concepts in meetings throughout the city.

And this week, a delegation of about 14 Detroit civic leaders including City Council members Scott Benson and Brenda Jones will visit San Francisco to study that's city's advanced ecological systems. "We really want to bring back some of these best practices that they use in San Francisco -- green buildings, recycling, green industry, stormwater management," Benson said.

Blue-green infrastructure includes everything from urban farming, reforestation, rainwater gardens, unearthing or "daylighting" streams buried decades ago, and more. Virtually unknown a dozen or so years ago, these sort of topics are becoming part of Detroit's lexicon.

In part that's because not enough market demand exists to fill with traditional development any but a small portion of the city's vacant land and buildings — abandonment that occupies at least a quarter and perhaps a third of the city's landscape. New homes, shops, and factories won't fill up that vacancy, so Detroit needs to come up with another productive way to repurpose it all.

And part of the motivation for exploring blue-green infrastructure is simply economic. The city already has spent hundreds of millions of dollars building facilities to deal with the problem of rain and snowmelt running off streets and parking lots into sewers, burdening the city's combined sewer-stormwater system. If Detroit can give all that water someplace more natural to go — letting it soak into open fields, forests, streams — it could save the city untold millions in big-pipe stormwater treatment facilities it won't have to build.

"It's a necessity here," Benson said. "Here's our bottom line: the cost of stormwater is huge and we need to learn how to manage it."

Among others, the 14-person delegation to San Francisco will also include Eric Candela, director of government relations for the non-profit Greening of Detroit tree-planting organization, and Gary Wozniak, CEO of the RecoveryPark urban agriculture project that recently reached agreement with the city to lease up to 40 acres of Detroit land to grow food crops. Local foundations are paying for the visit. The delegation will spend Thursday and Friday in San Francisco looking at recycling and stormwater management systems.

Supporters of blue-green ideas say that once Detroiters reach a clear understanding of these concepts and the benefits of them, the opportunities to create blue-green infrastructure will become clear and abundant.

"Blue and green infrastructure, done properly, can add value," Candela said, "both in terms of quality of life and economic value. In that sense it's an opportunity for Detroit to productively repurpose some of the vacant land that is found throughout the city."

Wozniak agreed.

"It's exciting to see what other cities are doing around blue-green infrastructure," he said. "Detroit Future City laid out a road map for the city of Detroit to take a look at those opportunities. Other cities are a little more advanced in actual application of that. I think it's a great opportunity for us."

Detroit is still in the early stages of adopting blue-green strategies in a systematic way. But organizations as diverse as the Kresge Foundation, Next Energy, the city's Department of Public Works, and the Detroit Economic Growth Corp., are all working to advance these concepts.

Much work remains to be done. The city needs to understand how blue-green works in a mostly poor, mostly black city where residents don't need another batch of outsiders coming in to save them. The case for implementing blue-green needs to be made crystal clear.

But the case is there to be made. Quality of life, cost controls, and job creation can all stem from the blue-green projects Detroit is starting to think about. The concepts are there. The work on bringing it all together lies ahead.

Contact John Gallagher: 313-222-5173 or gallagher@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @jgallagherfreep.