On Tuesday, October 24th, Nitsch hosted a Client Seminar, Campus-Wide Stormwater Planning: An Implementable Approach to Strengthen Campus Resilience. This event – our first in-person client seminar since the pandemic – brought together speakers from MIT and Wellesley College to share case studies from their successful landscape-integrated stormwater plans.
The seminar kicked off with an overview of how a holistic stormwater plan can benefit a campus system, presented by Jennifer Johnson, PE, CFM, LEED AP, Nitsch’s Director of Resilience Planning & Design, and Nicole Holmes, PE, LEED AP BD+C, Nitsch’s Sustainability and Innovation Practice Lead. On a college campus, capital projects are often executed individually. This fragmented approach limits the ability to consider stormwater and landscape as a cohesive system to support a broader vision for campus resilience. Using lessons learned from colleges throughout the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic, Jenn and Nicole highlighted how campus-wide stormwater planning can support future development and help academic campuses adapt to the impacts of climate change.
Laura L. Tenny, RLA, ASLA, Senior Campus Planner in the MIT Office of Campus Planning, spoke about how MIT has leveraged landscape-integrated stormwater strategies on their urban campus. She shared the evolution of stormwater management on MIT’s campus over the past 20 years, and information about their ongoing work to transform their campus using green infrastructure.
Alvin Hung, RA, LEED AP, Assistant Director of Design in Wellesley College’s Facilities Management and Planning department, then spoke about how landscape-integrated stormwater strategies have been a priority on their 500-acre Olmstedian campus. He focused on the 2022 Science Hill Study as a case study to discuss how green infrastructure is driving resilience on campus.
The seminar wrapped up with a panel discussion with Nicole, Laura, Alvin, and Michelle Callahan, PE, LEED AP BD+C, a Project Manager in Nitsch’s civil engineering department. Amongst a number of other topics, they discussed how to drive implementation of plans, hurdles and successes with funding design and construction, varying scales of stormwater plans (i.e., campus, district, site), and municipal coordination.
Want to know more about campus stormwater plans?
Reach out to Director of Resilience Planning & Design, Jennifer Johnson, PE, CFM, LEED AP.