This article was originally published on Kevin Klinkenberg’s blog, The Messy City. It is shared here with permission. All images for this piece were provided by the author, unless otherwise indicated.

There’s an old story (old by now, I guess) we used to tell in presentations and discussions about urban planning and design. We could take a photo of something particularly silly or hard to explain in the built environment, like a man-eating storm water inlet. It could also be something like a roadway that was obviously over-designed with only traffic flow in mind. And we’d then talk about how so much of our built environment today is the way it is because we have too many specialists and not enough generalists. That is, we have lots and lots of smart people working in silos, but very few people who can see the “big picture” and be able to work toward it effectively.

Most of my career, I’ve actually strived to be a high-quality generalist. I’ve endeavored to learn just enough in all the various fields that touch the built environment, so I can work toward much more successful, beautiful, and walkable places, overall. That’s the path I’ve chosen.

I’m not going to lie: it’s a weird career path. And it’s almost impossible to explain to anyone outside my tiny world.

But wait, doesn’t this generalist thing go against the whole modern notion of division of labor, technical expertise, and ruthless efficiency? Well yeah, it actually does.

The question many of us in the world of urban design ask is, “What actually gets us better places for humans?” That’s the debate and discussion we have had for 40 years, as the New Urbanism movement has evolved. What exactly is the proper role for specialists, or special expertise; what is the role for a “generalist”—someone who knows a little bit about a lot of things; and how, when, and where do they interact?

That all sounds VERY academic, I admit it. And in fact, a lot of discussion of these things gets very wonky and nerdy very quickly. But let’s talk about a real-world application that’s a pet peeve of mine.

Rain Gardens.

Yes, rain gardens.

The concept of a rain garden is something that sounds as wholesome as Mom and apple pie. Let’s take some land, preferably some extra asphalt that’s not used, and turn it into a “garden” of native plants and some extra drainage features. It’ll capture some rain and storm water runoff, “clean” it up a bit, and have it drain naturally into the soil. Also, we should get some nice-looking native grasses and flowers that make the place look better. Sounds great!

Rain gardens, and their BMP (Best Management Practices) cousins, have been in widespread use for 20–30 years in some regions. So, we now have some longer-term experience with them. They’ve really come into play as there’s been increasing pressure to reduce storm water runoff into waterways, and to return more and better water underground. I’m not saying any of that is a bad idea. In fact, I think it’s generally a really good idea.

As always, though, the devil’s in the details. Or God is in the details. I can never remember which.

Most good ideas start out as a localized response to a localized problem. Once there’s a feeling that the solution works, there’s a rush to standardize and formalize it. That process then eventually moves up the ladder to large consulting firms and government agencies. The solutions become widespread, whether they make sense in a particular location or not. They inevitably become highly engineered and expensive, since now a lot more people are involved in the process. A new set of specialties evolve, each of which require certifications and degrees. Eventually, that good idea, which probably started out with a really small project by a group of volunteers or people with local knowledge, is now part of the machine of highly technical consulting and construction. This is the way of the modern administrative state.

Oh, and by the way, through all this we get really good at building things, but take little to no interest in management, nor long-term maintenance. We have lots of people excited to design and build (which I admit, is really exciting), and very few people excited to do the really important, but less sexy, work of making sure something works well for all the years afterwards.

So that brings me back to rain gardens.

Kevin, what could you possibly have against the lowly and lovely rain garden?

Let’s look at some local examples.

Last year, one of my organizations took a single intersection and portion of a street that had a lot of unnecessary asphalt, and endeavored to traffic calm and beautify it. We took a fairly simple approach that added some new lawn or planting bed areas, and shade trees. Here’s a look at the before and after shots.

We are still experimenting with all this. We had an idea of what the stormwater situation would be like before we built it, but we’re now adapting to some of the built reality. There’s a lot more water coming off the little parking lot nearby than we anticipated. There’s much less coming down one of the streets than we thought we’d see. Moreover, our initial ideas for drainage channels next to the curb don’t seem to be working great.

Still, we are generally very happy with the results. The new bump-outs (or curb extensions, in the lingo), have done several good things for us. They’ve shortened the crossing distance for pedestrians. They force drivers to pay more attention and slow down. The trees will also grow up and provide shade to the sidewalks and the street. The shade will beautify the area, but also make walking much more pleasant in the warm weather—a key to walk appeal. The new areas will be easy to maintain, since it’s nothing out of the ordinary for our CID maintenance crews. If the shrubs and perennials die off one day, it's just trees and grass to maintain—very easy!

Here's one other little tidbit: the trees will suck up a lot of rainwater. You heard that right. Trees can be very thirsty, and are efficient at soaking up rain. The leaves, the branches, the roots—they all love to drink it in. In fact, my landscape architect buddy who goes by StreetTrees on Twitter tells me they take in more water, more effectively, than a rain garden does.

As a comparison, here’s what we have in some other areas around my city:

You see fairly typical rain garden installations, ranging from fairly inexpensive to very elaborate. Sometimes they look pretty nice and are maintained. Most of the time, they are not maintained. We seem to have this idea that rain gardens are “set it and forget it.” But everything in a city, and I mean everything, needs care and maintenance. Plants of all kinds, even native plants, need attention. Trash collects. People destroy plants and sometimes steal them. Maintenance-free is not our reality. It takes humans. Even AI can’t handle it, though Chat-GPT may try to convince me otherwise.

Here's a not-often mentioned dirty secret: many rain gardens fail at what they’re intended to do, because they aren’t maintained. Or, I might say, they aren’t realistically maintainable. If a rain garden is in the midst of a large park or field, they really can exist without much care. But in an urban location, especially as part of a street or sidewalk design, they tend to clog up and fail.

Let’s get back to where I started, which is specialists versus generalists.

There’s a specialty that’s developed in recent years related to rain gardens and stormwater BMPs. There are some very smart people who work in this area. Just like civil engineers have detailed, technical expertise, so do people in this field.

But who is around to think of the big picture? I used to say in presentations that everything in an urban area needs to be multi-purpose, not single purpose. Much of the point of suburban-style design is to break every aspect of city life into single-purpose units. That was the whole idea of the scientific and technical approach to city planning that was pioneered in the 1920s. Cities can be carved up into little, individual pizza ingredients by land use; connected by roadways designed by engineers; and each aspect of infrastructure and life can be neatly sorted, categorized, and designed by its own certified expert. That works just fine for some people and some places. I’d argue they still break down when any complexity is introduced, but that’s a whole other discussion.

In cities, though, the pizza is made differently. Each slice has a little bit of everything all mixed together (which is very delicious, by the way). There’s no great way to discreetly separate all the specialties. In fact, it’s counterproductive to try and separate it all. Doing so has given us all the problems of the last 70 years.

Embracing holistic, generalist approaches, instead of highly technical, specialist approaches is the way.

On our little project, the trees and landscape design serve many purposes. Yes, they help with rainwater absorption and runoff. But they also provide shade when it’s needed, and beauty year round. The trees are far more effective at slowing down speeding drivers than an installation of native grasses. It’s easy to maintain, and inexpensive to build.

Here’s the final punchline: we spent about $50,000 for this entire effort. Our CID crews can very easily maintain it, because it’s simple and familiar. Another rain garden effort in our own city, for just one block, has an estimated price tag of $800,000. Yes, you read that right. The scope is slightly bigger than ours, but not that much. And the project still won’t have good street tree coverage when it’s all done, judging by what has been built adjacent to it.

That example is something I’d consider more extreme, but the same is true of some of the more mundane installations I see all over town. The underground drainage work and construction now common in many rain gardens is not inexpensive. Sometimes they are still connected to a storm water pipe in the street. It’s a very different approach than what we are trying—simple curb extensions with trees, grass, or plants, and that’s it.

The goal for urban design isn’t just solving single-variable problems. Everything is holistic. One thing affects another.

Traditional interventions can fail, too. And trees need to be nurtured and maintained. But it’s much more routine and common work for people to complete.

Rain gardens have their place. Native plants have their place. I’m not opposed to any of that. In fact, I’ve planted a native garden at my home. I’m very interested to see how it grows and evolves.

But far too often, we want to be clever and inventive, instead of just copying time-tested approaches that work. That’s the curse of professions that promote novelty over practicality. Most of our cities have limited funds and limited capacity to pull off effective interventions like this. What if we focused 90% of our efforts on what is proven to work, and accomplishes multiple goals? Maybe 10% of the time we can encourage some novel approach that competes for a professional award.

The goal, after all, isn’t one or two or three little improvements like these. It’s a hundred, or a thousand, in all our neighborhoods. We’d like to do many more traffic calming and beautification installations in our part of town. We’d like them to work for our key goals, and at the top of that list is making our neighborhoods more attractive for walking again.

*Simple, beautiful sidewalk landscaping.*

What this generalist sees as the path to accomplish that is inexpensive, attractive ideas that can scale. The goal isn’t to appeal to the National Society of Rain Gardens (yes, I made that up). For that matter, the focus also isn’t on what is best for civil engineers, or traffic engineers, or architects, or zoning attorneys, or fire departments, etc.

The goal is to find simple, time-tested, and attractive solutions that virtually any person or group can figure out how to implement themselves. Less rocket science, more bottom-up intuition.

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