The Low Impact Development (LID) approach has been implemented worldwide for managing stormwater quantity and quality within the context of land development, re-development, and retrofits within an existing development site. Since the inception of the concept in the 1990s, the application of LID has covered different land uses, spatial scales, and environmental objectives, leading to an expanded vision for applying and testing the LID approach. Recently, holistic methodologies and frameworks have linked land planning to key ecological landscapes larger than the previous site scale practice. This new emerging paradigm considers the watershed, subwatershed, and neighbourhood, in addition to the site scale, and consequently, recommends a landscape-based LID and broader Green Infrastructure (GI) solutions (Benedict and McMahon, 2002; Tzoulas et al, 2007; NRDC, 2011).
As part of the holistic understanding of land planning and environmental features and functions within the intended spatial scale, LID and GI measures have been designed and constructed as retrofit measures (i.e., measures implemented within existing development) and as measures implemented within new development areas. Under this new paradigm, the land planning context is linked to environmental objectives to provide end points for environmental conservation and restoration within an ecological landscape such as watersheds, subwatersheds, and stream corridors.
This paper presents three case studies for the design and construction of LID and GI measures within different land use contexts and for providing multiple environmental objectives.