Bringing long-buried streams to light a part of urban renewal in Vancouver
Part of CBC's The Early Edition new column about urban design and city living 'About Here'
You might be familiar with False Creek, but underneath the city of Vancouver are dozens of streams and creeks, buried long ago and diverted through a network of pipes.
Now, some of these streams are making a comeback.
Still Creek, which runs through Burnaby and into East Vancouver, is one such example, said Uytae Lee, a columnist with CBC's The Early Edition. Parts of it were buried and now parts of it are being restored.
"Streams such as Still Creek and others like it were once considered a nuisance," Lee told CBC's Stephen Quinn.
"They would often get in the way of road construction or buildings ... They were also these dumping grounds for garbage, so there was really this incentive to bury them and that's kind of just what happened."
Environmental benefits
Lee says the process of uncovering long-buried streams — called daylighting — can have environmental benefits that go beyond becoming a natural habitat for wildlife or park space for humans.
Currently, the city's sewer systems collect rainwater through a system of drainage pipes. This mixes with raw sewage and the collective product ends up at the waste treatment centre, where it is treated and released into the ocean.
The problem is, rainwater does not need to be treated in the same way as sewage, and during storms, the volume of rainwater entering the sewer system can overwhelm water treatment plants and cause major problems.
Uncovered streams can help absorb rainwater, and take it back to the ocean in a much more efficient — and natural — manner.
"We're sort of finally realizing that nature has a lot more value than we often give it credit for and that you know our concrete and engineered solutions often kind of suck compared to them," Lee said.
"In the future I think we'll be seeing more and more city planners, engineers and architects sort of work with and learn from nature instead of well burying it underground."
To learn more about Vancouver's stream network and the process of daylighting, watch the video below:
Uytae Lee uses his background in urban design to rethink the city in a column with CBC's The Early Edition.