Greening America's capital cities (Switchboard)

Greening America's capital cities (Switchboard)

Switchboard
(1/30/2013 1:03 PM, Kaid Benfield)

The federal Environmental Protection Agency sponsors an innovative planning program designed to help bring more green infrastructure and green building practices to our country's state capitals, making them simultaneously more environmentally resilient and more beautiful.

Implemented with EPA's cohorts in the federal Partnership for Sustainable Communities - the Departments of Transportation and Housing and Urban Development - Greening America's Capitals launched in 2010 and thus far has been selecting five capitals each year for design assistance.

The program is not very well known but deserves to be.

The idea is that these particularly prominent communities are inevitably ambassadors of a sort for their respective states and for other cities.

Elected representatives and their staffs - leaders, by definition - from all across their states work at least part-time every year in the capital cities.

I'm in the Connecticut capital of Hartford this week.

While researching the local facts to prepare myself, I discovered that Hartford had been one of the five initial cities selected for the Greening America's Capitals program.

The report of the planning generated for Hartford is, in my opinion, outstanding.

"This report provides Hartford with a new vision for Capitol Avenue that highlights existing assets and fills in missing gaps along the mile-long area of focus and into the surrounding neighborhoods. This comprehensive vision includes seven design concepts that together work to improve underused properties, integrate green infrastructure into streets and parking lots, and create new parks and public spaces. Green infrastructure is defined as working landscapes-such as bioswales, rain gardens, and bioretention meadows-that mimic natural systems by absorbing stormwater back into the ground, using trees and other vegetation to convert it to water vapor, and using rain barrels or cisterns to capture and reuse stormwater."

"The designs offered in this report address goals identified in a public workshop, including linking nearby neighborhoods and destinations to one another, better managing stormwater, improving the pedestrian environment, and stimulating future redevelopment. The city of Hartford can use the designs proposed in this report, as well as the next steps provided, to begin to revitalize the Capitol Avenue corridor."