Water sensitive parks and open spaces

High quality public open spaces typically require significant water demands for irrigation. There are a range of ways to design parks and open space to not only reduce imported water demands, but also provide other benefits such as amenity improvements, improved canopy growth, and integrated stormwater treatment and flood management. Common initiatives in open spaces include stormwater harvesting, wetlands, bioretention systems, ponds and detention basins.

The Hartfield Park Managed Aquifer Recharge project in the Shire of Kalumunda involves the recharge of an aquifer under controlled conditions in order to store water for
later abstraction for irrigation use.

A trial of irrigation of large areas of vegetation at Adelaide airport demonstrated significant reductions in local temperatures.

Greening the pipeline is a project that aims to celebrate and utilise the now disused Melbourne Outfall Sewer corridor which runs through western Melbourne. Gradual greening of the corridor and creation of pocket parks at crossing points is connecting communities and enhancing recreation.

The Gladstone East Shores Precinct is a major new recreational hub for the City of Gladstone located on the foreshore of Auckland Inlet. The integrated parkland design features an innovative application of ‘wicking bed’ technology to store locally harvested stormwater runoff for passive irrigation of a high use open lawn area.

A public parklands in the heart of Brisbane has implemented an alternative water supply scheme for irrigation and toilet flushing by utilising harvested stormwater and filtered backwash from pools and water features.

Transformation of a parklands area to a multi-functional landscape in Kunshan, China. The parklands include ecological wetlands that provide water quality treatment for the adjoining canal network, and provides storage of flood water when needed.

The Angus Creek stormwater harvesting and reuse scheme (the scheme) extracts flows from Angus Creek and harvests stormwater runoff from hard surfaces to irrigate the the Blacktown International Sportspark and neighbouring reserves, supplying up to 200ML of fit-for-purpose water each year.

Kunshan is a polder city (a piece of land in a low-lying area that has been reclaimed from a body of water by building dikes and drainage canals) with many canals and waterways which can have poor water quality in some areas.