The Dunbar/Spring neighborhood in Tucson, Arizona has transformed excessively wide, hot, exposed streets with speeding cut-through traffic and solar oven-like, barren walkways to comparative oases with road-narrowing, traffic-calming, water-harvesting, green infrastructure and path-/road-side rain gardens growing a native food forest of sheltering multi-use plants indigenous to the Tucson Basin.
Dozens of species of native song birds and other wildlife have returned to this regenerated habitat; neighbors harvest, process, and eat wild foods grown; many more people now walk, run, or bicycle; flooding is reduced; the local aquifer is recharged; toxins from the street are bio-remediated by vegetation and other soil life; carbon is sequestered; the heat-island effect is abated; and all has become much more comfortable and beautiful.
Our hope is this will inspire more such action, change, and further evolution everywhere.
See the full article at Dunbar/Spring Neighborhood Foresters.