- Creating a Sustainable City: Philadelphia’s Green City Clean Waters Program    772 kb by    Featherstone, Jeffrey & Cammarata, Marc & William Devine, Marissa Barletta; | jeffrey.featherstone@temple.edu    Short Outline Philadelphia’s Green City Clean Waters Program integrates water management into the City’s socioeconomic fabric. Through a municipal investment of over $2 billion and innovative stormwater billing, it seeks to become America’s most sustainable city. Abstract Philadelphia has embarked on a major green infrastructure investment program in its pursuit to become America’s most sustainable city. Its Green City Clean Waters (GCCW) Program seeks to integrate water resources management into the socioeconomic fabric of the City. It is the centerpiece of a larger City effort to promote sustainability. Through a municipal investment of over $2 billion and an innovative stormwater billing program, the GCCW expects to transform the City of 1.6 million into a vibrant, green and sustainable one. The impetus for the GCCW Program was a regulatory requirement to address a combined sewer overflow (CSO) problem. Similar to many other old American cities, Philadelphia’s sewers carry both stormwater and wastewater to wastewater treatment facilities and they quickly overload during storms and pollute area streams. In 2009 the GCCW program was launched. While it includes a mix of traditional measures and green infrastructure, about $1.1 billion of the $2 billion is targeted towards green stormwater infrastructure and $0.125 billion towards stream corridor restoration and preservation. The City estimates that an additional $2 billion in green infrastructure will be constructed on private properties over the next 20 years by businesses and other large land owners in response to its stormwater regulations. The critical feature of the new program is its pursuit of sustainability. GCCW seeks to green about one-third of the City’s combined sewer system area’s impervious cover, restore 15 miles of streams, and capture 80-85% of CSO volumes by 2030. The City conducted a triple bottom line analysis of economic, environmental, and social benefits of the program and found that they will transform the City in ways not possible with the traditional approach, e.g., improve property values, create recreation acreage and open space, reduce heat related fatalities, absorb CO2 emissions, and restore critical habitat. Keywords Green Infrastructure, Stormwater Management, Sustainability Case Study presented on the ISOCARP Congress 2011: LIVEABLE CITIES: URBANISING WORLD, Meeting the Challenge   Click to open the full paper as pdf document   Click to send an email to the author(s) of this paper