Living Roofs in Integrated Urban Water Systems

Book excerpt: With the infrastructure to manage storm water threats in cities becoming increasingly expensive to build or repair, the design community needs to look at alternative approaches. Living roofs present an opportunity to compliment ground-level storm water control measures, contributing to a holistic, integrated urban water management system. This book offers tools to plan and design living roofs, in the context of effectively mitigating storm water. Quantitative tools for engineering calculations and qualitative discussion of potential influences and interactions of the design team and assembly elements are addressed.