Navigating a series of No's to successfully implement green infrastructure (GI) in a city without requirements: Establishing Sustainable Landscaping

The City of Minneapolis established a Green Infrastructure (GI) Program in response to calls from the community to incorporate GI throughout the city. The community asked for practices that improve the environment and mitigate the impacts of climate change, largely in response to transportation project outreach. The resulting program supports a shift in design to integrate stormwater management and greening into transportation projects. The inevitable resistance to change 'how we've always built roads' without clearly defined requirements, guidelines, training, and funding came from expected and unexpected places. This resistance uses a variety of justifications, including questioning the motives and function of GI, imbalanced performance and aesthetic expectations, project deadlines, funding, a gap in the maintenance program, among others. This resistance uses a variety of tactics, including procrastination, the promise of the next project, budget constraints, feasibility challenges, among others. The resistance can be sophisticated or novel making it harder to recognize as a 'no', but it is often repeated, until a response can be crafted. Yet, the city has successfully installed hundreds of GI facilities in the three years since the program began, garnering major community support, and providing community, air and water quality benefits throughout the city. In this presentation, we will introduce the first in a series of challenges the program has had to endure and transcend: incorporating sustainable landscaping. Sustainable Landscaping is a term borrowed to help define the difference between GI practices such as native plantings that do not directly treat stormwater (SL) from green stormwater infrastructure (GSI) that captures and treats stormwater. We will walk through the motivations and goals around sustainable landscaping, introduce the forms of resistance we faced, and then present the various techniques we used to overcome individual and programmatic resistance to successfully implement sustainable landscaping in projects throughout the city.