Revitalizing Urban Neighborhoods by Adopting Green Infrastructure: The Case of Washington DC

The concept of Green Infrastructure (GI), or using the natural processes of evapotranspiration and infiltration to manage stormwater runoff close to where rain falls is a popular concept among urbanists. In addition to providing the ecosystem services of flood management, GI realizes other goals of increasing urban livability, through mitigating urban heat island effect, providing community amenity, purifying air, and even reducing crime. At the same time, GI has been shown to be primarily driven by federal-level stormwater management regulations to make expensive improvements to aging infrastructure. GI is one way that cities may achieve this goal more efficiently. In this paper, I trace the history of stormwater infrastructure regulation and urban sustainability in the US, how this national context influenced local policy in Washington DC neighborhoods. In addition to the popular narrative that GI can spur neighborhood revitalization, I identify the market-driven urban processes that determine GI locations in already revitalizing neighborhoods. Using an overlay analysis of these factors—centrally-driven planning processes, distributed voluntary participation and distributed development patterns—I show how different neighborhoods throughout the District are likely to have different distributions of Green Infrastructure adoption rates, with areas experiencing high re-investment showing the highest levels of probable GI adoption.