As Irvine‘s Great Park aspires to be an innovative urban park second to none, the city is planning ahead to make sustainability at its core.
“This is a beautiful park. This is meant to be a park for everyone,” said Sean O’Malley, the managing principal of SWA Group’s Laguna Beach studio, which is in charge of planning the next phase of the Great Park development.
The city, O’Malley said, has to be careful in how it chooses the material for the park to ensure it’s doing its part in terms of sustainability. In the case of Great Park, that looks like carbon reduction in terms of how materials used at the park are made, how they’re shipped and how they can absorb carbon at the park, said O’Malley.
So he’s proposed taking a five-pronged approach to a sustainability plan: planting, water, materiality, energy and maintenance.
Trees and mixed shrubs native to California are a big part of that plan.
Residents and visitors of Great Park can expect to see a forest of California native trees — mainly the native valley oak and coast live oak, which O’Malley said do “wonderful jobs of sequestering carbon” — when work is completed in the next 10 years or so.
Water recycling will also be one of the park’s key features. The planned north and south lakes in the 1,300-acre Great Park project will be a mixture of both recycled water and stormwater, O’Malley said.
And even if there’s a drought, city manager Oliver Chi said, there will be enough water to keep the lakes at the planned level.
“We generate so much recycled water that the (Irvine Ranch Water District) is now undertaking the Syphon Reservoir Improvement Project in order to store more of that water,” he said. “Given that we are looking to draw from a reusable source, at this point, all our modeling indicates we should be in really good shape … given that we’re not pulling from the local groundwater source.”
Ducks, fish and geese will also be part of the lake, Chi…
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