Darebin City Council has committed becoming a water sensitive city through its Watershed – Towards a Water Sensitive City Strategy and the accompanying Implementation Plan.
As part of the Priority Stormwater Projects for a Water Sensitive Darebin project E2Designlab was engaged to identify and prioritise stormwater treatment projects and harvesting and reuse schemes across multiple scales (i.e. precinct and streetscape). Adapting our already proven assets prioritisation framework, developed, refined and applied across other municipalities (including Hume, Geelong, Brimbank, Hobsons Bay and Mornington Peninsula) an assessment of all opportunities of multifunctional assets designed to deliver treated stormwater for reuse, potable water savings, stormwater runoff and pollutant load reductions were undertaken at a high level to short list based on their benefit cost ratio. More rigours assessment of the short-listed opportunities took into consideration other social, biodiversity and amenity values that could not be monetarised to identify several priority projects to take through to detailed concept design. Focus was placed on identifying sites that where the best ‘value for money’ based on a consideration of costs, benefits and project risks. The short-listed prioritised projects have subsequently been used to calculate a price for councils stormwater offsets scheme.
