This is a great idea we could borrow from Anchorage:

For the 42nd year, the Anchorage Chamber is organizing its annual Citywide Cleanup campaign, one of Anchorage's largest community service events. This week-long program runs from May 1 to 8 and brings together local businesses, organizations, schools and the Municipality of Anchorage to rid the city’s streets and neighborhoods of collected trash. As a part of cleanup week, city landfills allow for free residential dumping for three days and homeowners are encouraged to use the free dump passes they receive each year to do some spring cleaning around their house. During Citywide Cleanup Week, local schools get involved in the Super Sweepers program, culminating with the family friendly Clean Sweep Celebration at Delaney Park Strip.

A climatologist from the University of South Africa (Unisa) has helped develop a system to harvest moisture from abundant mountain fog in a water-scarce region of the Eastern Cape, and communities there are already benefiting from it.  The project was successfully launched in Cabazane Village, in the rural Mount Ayliff area in the north of the province, in mid-March 2010 during the annual National Water Week.  The area, which falls in the picturesque Alfred Nzo district municipality, is bordered to the north by the mountain kingdom of Lesotho and much of the terrain is steep and remote, with very cold winters and mild summers. Fog is a frequent visitor and a ready source of clean water.

When is a park not just a park? When it’s also a water treatment facility.

The best example in this city is taking shape at Sherbourne and Queens Quay. These days, the site doesn’t look especially park-like; in fact, it’s a sea of mud as work crews pour concrete on the enormous channel that will run the full length of the site carrying clean water to Lake Ontario.

The as-yet-unnamed park is one of 14 public spaces already constructed under the aegis of Waterfront Toronto, the agency created in 2001 by the three levels of government to oversee revitalization of Toronto’s old harbour lands. From the start a decade ago, the organization’s strategy has been based on the proposition that if you build the infrastructure, they will come.

But Waterfront Toronto has taken the concept an important step further. As Sherbourne Park – its temporary name – will illustrate so dramatically, in this case, infrastructure won’t just make the area inhabitable, it will itself be inhabitable. This notion of using design to transform a public utility into a public amenity has never made more sense than now. It’s not new, of course, but the idea that everything we build in a city should do double- (even triple-) duty is one whose time has come.