In this fourth workshop in the Can We Rehydrate California? series, Rosey Jencks and David McConville explained how Los Angeles County's Safe Clean Water Program provides over hundreds of millions of dollars a year in funding to projects that help make LA county more able to soak up rain by taxing property owners on their impermeable surfaces.
Then David McConville gave us a tour of the freely available Living Infrastructure Field Kit, a recently released community mapping and co-design platform developed by Spherical and Accelerate Resilience L.A. to help communities and individuals access that funding (rather than all of it going to large engineering companies.)
Throughout, David, Rosey, and I pieced together the evolving stories of our individual work with land and water, and how our work has intersected with the larger question: Can We Rehydrate California?
Scroll down for relevant links that were posted in the chat during the live workshop.
Rosey Jencks is Brown and Caldwell's National Specialty Leader in Stormwater and Nature Based Solutions. She specializes in urban watershed planning, resiliency and stormwater management. Prior to joining BC, Rosey served as a program manager at San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (SFPUC), where she provided strategic direction to local practices and supported regional and local initiatives that advanced innovation in the field. She was responsible for overseeing the award-winning Living Machine at the SFPUC headquarters -- the first building-scale sewage treatment system in San Francisco. Also, at SFPUC, Rosey led the Urban Watershed Assessment, a multi-disciplinary watershed and collection system planning project focused on integrated flood management, combined sewer overflow reduction, and integration of stormwater management in urban design and city policies. Rosey holds a MA in Environmental Planning from UC Berkeley.
David McConville is co-founder of Spherical, an Oakland-based integrative research and strategic design studio. Along with Accelerate Resilience L.A. they have developed the freely available Living Infrastructure Field Kit, a recently released community mapping and co-design platform initially tailored to Los Angeles County and tailored towards LA’s Safe Clean Water Program. This innovative tool merges visualization technology with community engagement to tackle watershed health, bioregional understanding, and climate resilience. The Field Kit reveals connections between infrastructure systems while facilitating collaborative design processes among stakeholders, municipal agencies, and community-based organizations. David holds a PhD in art and technology from the University of Plymouth.
Below are some links David, Rosey and others shared in the chat during the workshop:
Timeline from Rosey:
2010s
TreePeople, LA Stormcatcher,
Rosey and David following the New Water Paradigm
Attending talks by Walter Jehne and Didi Pershouse during Rehydrate California tour in 2018
Emergence of Measure W + SCWP
2020s
Safe, Clean Water Program
The Living Infrastructure Field Kit
LINKS
Article on project: https://treepeople.org/resource/second-nature-adapting-l-a-s-landscape-for-sustainable-living/
Map of LA county projects: https://portal.safecleanwaterla.org/scw-reporting/map
Home page of Field Kit: https://livinginfrastructure.org/
To sign in to Field Kit: https://la.livinginfrastructure.org/signup?workshopToken=84e76551-2fab-4d61-8b83-7a2fde694dfb
On Beavers doing better work than humans:
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/beaver-dam-czech-republic
Lots of work on beavers being done by the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center WATER Institute: https://oaec.org/our-work/projects-and-partnerships/water-institute/
More on work being done in the Owens Valley:
https://walking-water.org/
Some background:
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