Private Gardens at Lindevang Street

15 garden owners on Lindevang Road have chosen to establish rain gardens, which receive water from their own rooftops. The rain gutters were disconnected from the combined sewer system, in which they priviously discharged the roof’s runoff. When it rains, one can follow the path of the water through open gutters into ditches, rain gardens trenches and soakaways (dry wells). As a result, the houses at Lindevang Road  now contribute with much less water to combined sewer system.

The rainwater solutions in the gardens are a combination of rain gardens, soakaways (drywells) and differetn forms of lawn-covered trenches and ditches. All rooftop rainwater is managed locally via infiltration and evaporation.

The garden projects were realized in the period between autumn 2011 and autumn 2012.

The intention of the project has been to relieve the common sewer system and minimize the risk of flooding by managing rainwater locally. In addition, the intention has been to develop and test elegant and effective local rainwater solutions in practice, and gain experience with everything from citizen dialogue over authority processing to the construction process. There has been a great focus on collaborating with the residents, in part to achieve personal solutions and in part, so that the residents can be ambassadors for local rainwater solutions.

The project started with an infiltration test in five gardens as well as several inspections of the individual gardens to determine the possibilities for infiltration elements. During the inspections the project leaders also conducted interviews with the individual residents to map out the residents’ wishes for their own gardens.

In gardens, where the residents were willing to establish local infiltration solutions, and where it was technically possible, the necessary infiltration permits were applied for and the construction works were initiated. The individual projects were partly financed by a scheme, offered by the local water utility company. The scheme creates incentives for local rainwater management, by providing a grant, which is equivalent to the connection fee for newly built homes.

The local solutions consist of individual elements, which are connected to each other in a chain like way. Rain gutters lead into transport gutters on the ground, which then connect to an infiltration element – for instance a rain garden or a soakaway (dry well). In case of heavy rain, additional capacity is provided by grass ditches, trenches or lowered plains, which only serve as backup systems during rare events with extreme amounts of rain. In situations where the space on the individual ground was insufficient, overflow canals to the street were established.