If someone is walking along St. George Street from Mount Pleasant to the False Creek Flats neighbourhood, they should be aware something is going on under their feet. No, it’s not the nearby Broadway SkyTrain extension. Nor is it a fault line. There’s a river underneath the street, subtly flowing without notice.
However, you’ll be noticing it soon.
A community initiative known as the St. George Rainway Project has been collaborating with the City of Vancouver and local stakeholders on the idea of “daylighting” a creek covered up by the street. This would bring the headwaters of te Statlew to the surface, reimagining a little creek into a new sustainable rainwater infrastructure. Vancouver has previously brought rivers once buried during the city’s development back to life in a process known as ‘daylighting.’ One of the ideas behind daylighting is that surface water can naturally infiltrate into groundwater, therefore reducing the burden on the storm sewer system. One such local success story is Still Creek, which went from basically a dumping ground to a fish-bearing stream.
However, unlike Still Creek, this Rainway would be running the path of a street – so what’s that going to be like?
What will the St. George Rainway look like?
At this point, it’s a series of detailed drawings or effusively artistic conceptualizations (like above).
Creating the St. George Rainway is partly inspired by the 2005 revitalization of the Cheonggyecheon River in Seoul, South Korea. The course of the river had been wholly covered by an 18-lane elevated highway which had played a role in the rapid development of Seoul, however at the end of the 1990s there was a new focus on restoring the river back to its former glory. The removal of the highway and subsequent renewal of the river added 16.3 hectares of green park space to the area and provided a new cultural venue. The river also boosted local property prices, with properties being priced 30 per cent higher than before.
The St. George Rainway Project imagined the proposed Rainway looking more natural, although that cannot always be accommodated with city streets.
Animation created by St. George Rainway Project
The direction the City is going is to re-allocate some street space to enhanced sidewalks to support more pedestrian and cyclist access from Kingsway to Great Northern Way. Traffic will likely be one-way in stretches. Another aspect of daylighting the creek is to create spots for people to gather or residents to sit outside in their own neighbourhood. This could also create some traffic calming for the surrounding area as the False Creek Flats neighbourhood is expected to grow in population and commercial business over the next few years. It had already been included in the Official Community Plan (OCP) for the Mount Pleasant Neighbourhood back in 2013, but consultations have only progressed to a point of finalizing design as of 2023.
Learn more about this proposal or follow its development at the City of Vancouver’s Shape Your City website.
