Making our city sponge-worthy
Not to show my age or my dirty mind or anything, but when I hear the word sponge I immediately think of Elaine in episode #119 of Seinfeld.
But today I am interested in even better sponges than that — the ones that turn urban parks into extraordinarily useful green infrastructure to absorb excess rainwater when those once-in-a-century storms keep hitting every few months.
Sponge parks are the subject of my Ottawa Citizen column and there is so much good to say about them – and other simple green infrastructure such as grassed tracks for trains/trams, bioswales, permeable paving, trees, and who knows what-all that I constantly find myself writing paragraphs consisting of just one long-ass sentence.
Montreal already has several sponge parks and is building more, while we in Ottawa ain’t got none. Which is about as unfair as it sounds. There’s Parc des gorilles, for instance. And also Parc Dickie-Moore because there has to be a hockey connection in there somewhere.
Parc Dickie-Moore (City of Montreal photos)
Parc Pierre-Dansereau in Outremont also looks very cool. The upcoming one in Verdun that will be able to hold, temporarily, over one million litres of water (that’s apparently 40% of an Olympic swimming pool) will be the size of 10 basketball courts.
Not all sponge parks have to be enormous. Sometimes you only have a little bit of space that can be transformed for the community, and it doesn’t have to hold astronomical amounts of rainwater to be worth the time and bother either. I trust you’re enjoying my little bit of green infrastructure rhyming poetry here.
Seriously, the beauty of those parks is that they are much more than a way to prevent flooding in nearby homes. They are used for playing, hanging out, reading, training, meeting neighbours, outdoor theatre, or providing the community with vegetable or pollinator gardens. If they are near a school they can be used to teach kids about bugs or just be a great place to go eat lunch when the weather is nice.
A sampling of other Montreal sponge parks.
Montreal has a climate very much like that of Ottawa, except of course for the urbanism and politics, both of which are much more advanced than our own. For a city that has declared a climate emergency, we’re not exactly rushing to deal with it. We should be. Sponge parks are such an easy, inexpensive and frankly awesome climate mitigating measure I don’t know why we’re not doing the exact opposite as Elaine and slapping them all over everywhere.
