The FARGO PROJECT

FARGO, NORTH DAKOTA

BLD developed the Ecological Stormwater Guidebook (ESG) for the City of Fargo. The ESG is a comprehensive set of guidelines to be utilized by the city, developers, and neighborhood groups to address the unusual challenges of Fargo's extensive stormwater infrastructure, including a large network of retention and detention basins that are used to capture excess runoff from storm and flood surges. 

The guidebook includes large scale ecological typologies that can be adapted to conditions either found or created within detention and/or retention basins. These typologies are generated from analogous situations found in postglacial landscapes and then adjusted to accommodate the general performance of the stormwater basins found in Fargo.

Potential design solutions related to access, program and ecological performance within the developed landscape typologies were developed to create a series of adaptive and resilient technological solutions. These solutions will be applied utilizing a customized decision matrix that acknowledges the unique conditions inherent to the infrastructural constraints of each site while maximizing performance and minimizing long-term maintenance.