As cities continue to expand, the issues of flood control and urban water quality have risen to the forefront of modern sustainability challenges. Green infrastructure— the use of nature-based solutions to target, treat, and store stormwater at its source— has emerged as a possible solution. While green infrastructure does offer multiple benefits for urban users, its performance is also highly variable. This dissertation addresses a key gap in the literature by explicitly addressing how uncertainty in environmental and anthropogenic factors affects green infrastructure performance at modular, systemic, and policy levels.
Three primary contributions are made by this research, using an underlying fragility function methodology. Firstly, an analysis of the impact of temporal and spatial variability on modular rain garden performance offers insights into challenges commonly faced by green infrastructure: clogging and maintenance, back-to-back rainfall, and variable urban soils. Building on these findings, the second contribution is the use of fragility functions to characterize green infrastructure performance within the context of an existing separated storm sewer network. A case study approach is used to analyze the effect of green infrastructure implementation at multiple spatial scales and configurations. Finally, an in-depth policy analysis incorporating game theory, environmental psychology, and environmental law evaluates how and why green infrastructure should be integrated into the existing urban policy landscape.
This research fills an important gap in the literature by offering a new perspective on green infrastructure performance, using an interdisciplinary, risk-based approach to analyze how green infrastructure can be better integrated into the urban landscape
