Boldly inserting green infrastructure into the urban fabric.
We are a specialty design firm and national leader in green infrastructure with over 90 project examples realized throughout the United States.
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Urban Rain Design, a design studio founded in 2012 by nationally award-winning landscape architect Kevin Robert Perry, provides green infrastructure visioning, planning, and technical design/implementation assistance for communities throughout the United States. The firm collaborates with architects, engineers, landscape architects, and public/private agencies to develop elegant yet functional techniques to retrofit the urban fabric with sustainable stormwater management. Urban Rain Design's philosophy is to boldly use the landscape to not only manage stormwater, but to also create highly successful urban spaces. Kevin Robert Perry has the unparalleled visionary and technical expertise to walk through a project site and develop a full toolbox of green infrastructure design strategies. Ultimately, the firm aims to help build high-caliber green infrastructure projects with a strong degree of detail and functionality that exemplify how cities can transform gray space into green space. Urban Rain Design is a certified Small Business Enterprise (SBE) by the California Department of General Services.
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"We believe the landscape can be surgically inserted back into the built realm to help repair the effects of urbanization and create spaces that are attractive, distinctive, and economically vibrant."
Urban Rain Design promotes the design of compact, pedestrian-focused communities that also integrate functional landscape systems, often referred to as green infrastructure, to help heal the environmental impacts of urbanization. During the last century, the rapid build out of our communities, whether ultra-urban or suburban in form, have systematically displaced the natural landscape and the critical systems reliant on this landscape. The environmental, economic, and social/human health costs of this built pattern are only now being fully realized. Urban Rain Design is committed to helping reverse the negative environmental effects of urbanization and is excited to work with like-minded professionals to help communities create better places to work, play, and live.
Landscape Change + Climate Change = A Global Crisis
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We continue to urbanize the landscape at a rapid rate. This dramatic change from natural to urban results in the loss of natural landscape area and increased impervious surfaces that cannot absorb storm events. That, in turn, contributes to an increased urban heat island and less protection against storm surge and flooding. Much of our existing “gray” storm drainage infrastructure built during the last century is already breaking down and/or is undersized to handle the frequency and intensity of even “normal” storm events. Add to the equation that the world is rapidly feeling the effects of extreme weather events as a result of climate change, and we have a dire urgency and responsibility to respond with green infrastructure awareness, research, design preparedness, and disaster response.
Landscape change, a term developed by Kevin Robert Perry, studies the rapid alteration of the natural landscape when developing cities and towns resulting in loss of landscape cover, increased impervious area, and eventual impairment of natural hydrological systems. While climate change is still, amazingly, being debated at multiple levels, the effects of landscape change are quite tangible, measurable, recent, and have shown to have significant negative social, economic, and environmental consequences.
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The 2019 IPBES Assessment Summary for Policymakers report states "The rate of global change in nature during the last 50 years is unprecedented", and "The goals for conserving and sustainably using nature cannot be met by current trajectories." This is a sobering look into the future and a call to action for the design community.
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Urban Rain Design is committed to work with dedicated project partners and designers to study and develop innovative green infrastructure design solutions at a variety of built scales to combat the effects of both landscape change and climate change.