1001 Smart Cities
🇺🇸 Philadelphia

Green Infrastructure Living Laboratory (GSI Performance Monitoring)

🤖 AI-generated summary · ◆ 11 sourced claims · 🔎 Last verified

This overview was generated with AI from the public sources listed below and checked against them before publication. It has not had a complete human fact-check — treat it as a starting point and follow the sources.

11 sourced claims on this page, none individually verified yet — turn on “Sources in the text” to see each one.

How this atlas is made · What “last verified” means · What “source-checked” means · The full record behind this page

Philadelphia has built over 600 green stormwater sites chasing a 2036 target — but only a handful of them actually report back with sensors telling anyone whether they work.

Outcome🔄 Ongoing
Evidence🏛️ Officialgrades the sourcing — this entry states no impact figure
what does this mean?The strongest source is the operator's or the city's own reporting — an official report, dataset or press release. It grades who did the looking — not how well the project went. All four grades →
Run byPhiladelphia Water Department + Drexel University Sustainable Water Resource Engineering Laboratory (Green Infrastructure Living Laboratory)
Scale🧪 Pilot

Part of 1001 Smart Cities — 1,167 documented projects · 🏙️ 6 more in Philadelphia · 💧 Water guide · 📡 Data & IoT projects

Philadelphia's Green City, Clean Waters program has built more than 2,800 green stormwater tools at nearly 800 sites since 2011, working toward a 2036 target — almost all of it pure construction (rain gardens, tree trenches, swales) with no sensor layer of its own. The exception is the Green Infrastructure Living Laboratory (GILL), a research partnership the Philadelphia Water Department runs with Drexel University's Sustainable Water Resource Engineering Laboratory: low-cost, low-power wireless sensors on a limited set of sites, including a large rainwater cistern at Drexel's recreation center and campus rain gardens, log soil moisture, water level and climate data in real time and feed back into PWD's own design guidance and policy. In one documented case the monitoring caught a performance flaw at the Drexel cistern before significant performance loss occurred.

Live 📅 since 2017

🎓 Lesson

The atlas's no-pure-concrete test cuts both ways here: the vast majority of Philadelphia's stormwater program is genuinely unsensored construction, but a small, real monitoring layer exists alongside it and deserves to be judged on its own modest scale rather than borrowing credibility from the hundreds of unmonitored sites, or being dismissed because most of the program is concrete.

📡 Data & IoTWaterSensors & IoT

Sources

↗ GovTech — Real-Time Data Helps Philadelphia Improve Green DesignPublished 12 December 2018Describes GILL sensor network, Drexel partnership, use of data in PWD design guidance, and the caught-flaw anecdote at the Drexel cistern
↗ Bressler Group — Smart Cities: An IoT Solution for Philly's Green Stormwater InfrastructureDescribes the wireless sensor network approach and LoRaWAN evaluation
↗ Philadelphia Water Department — Green City, Clean Waters25-year program scope, 2036 'greened acres' target, confirms the underlying program is a construction plan
Show your work What this page rests on and what it can’t tell you · all 11 claims with their sources · the forensic record

Evidence Passport · public beta 11 addressable claims, 3 source dossiers, one permanent baseline. The passport is unreviewed — an AI-assisted structural migration, not a human or expert endorsement. Every revision keeps a permanent copy under revision history.

Inspect the claims, one by one — verbatim text, sources and caveats for all 11

The text below is copied verbatim from the published record. Each claim names the source dossiers that carry it; caveats stay attached to the claim they qualify.

Claim 1 clm-3ba32dbd22d50695 quantitative
Philadelphia's Green City, Clean Waters program has built more than 2,800 green stormwater tools at nearly 800 sites since 2011
Published field
snippet · verbatim
Mapping
mapped · no interpretation or interpolation added by this passport
What the mapping says
The Philadelphia Water Department's own programme page dates the start of Green City, Clean Waters to 2011 -- "The effort officially began in 2011" -- and reports its build-out under "A decade of progress": "We've installed more than 2,800 green tools... ...at nearly 800 sites throughout the city...". More than 600 sites is therefore comfortably within what the operator reports.
Caveat
The utility's own figure is nearly 800 sites, holding more than 2,800 individual green tools. No listed source states the number 600, so the entry is quoting a conservative figure rather than the operator's current one.

Sources carrying this claim

  1. Philadelphia Water Department — Green City, Clean Waters
Claim 2 clm-a2ca95801e6640b5 quantitative
working toward a 2036 target
Published field
snippet · verbatim
Mapping
mapped · no interpretation or interpolation added by this passport
What the mapping says
The utility names 2036 as the programme's deadline: "The effort officially began in 2011 and Philadelphia is scheduled to meet pollution reduction goals by 2036, in accordance with our Long Term Control Plan."
Caveat
The page describes the 2036 milestone as the deadline for meeting pollution-reduction goals under the Long Term Control Plan. It does not express that target as an area of greened land.

Sources carrying this claim

  1. Philadelphia Water Department — Green City, Clean Waters
Claim 3 clm-3ed3e556d4c30f62 descriptive
almost all of it pure construction (rain gardens, tree trenches, swales) with no sensor layer of its own
Published field
snippet · verbatim
Mapping
mapped · no interpretation or interpolation added by this passport
What the mapping says
The utility describes the programme entirely in terms of built green tools and the plants and soil that do the work: "Green stormwater infrastructure, also known as GSI or green tools, reduce overflows by decreasing how much runoff gets into sewers. Stormwater is soaked up by plants and soil and evaporates into the air, or is released into sewers more slowly." Rain gardens, tree trenches, swales, stone trenches and basins appear across the page; sensors, data and monitoring appear nowhere on it.
Caveat
Stormwater planters are not among the tool types this page names. That the programme has no sensor layer is inferred from the operator page's silence on monitoring rather than stated by any source.

Sources carrying this claim

  1. Philadelphia Water Department — Green City, Clean Waters
Claim 4 clm-78524b79a3d51e36 descriptive
The exception is the Green Infrastructure Living Laboratory (GILL), a research partnership the Philadelphia Water Department runs with Drexel University's Sustainable Water Resource Engineering Laboratory
Published field
snippet · verbatim
Mapping
mapped · no interpretation or interpolation added by this passport
What the mapping says
Drexel researcher Karly Soldner describes the make-up of the project: "The Green Infrastructure Living Laboratory (GILL) is composed of graduate students and researchers from Drexel University's Sustainable Water Resource Engineering Laboratory and engineers from the Philadelphia Water Department." Two PWD engineers, Stephen White and Matthew Fritch, speak for the utility in the same interview.
Caveat
The source presents GILL as a joint effort housed in Drexel's laboratory rather than something the water department runs. The utility's own Green City, Clean Waters page does not mention GILL at all.

Sources carrying this claim

  1. GovTech — Real-Time Data Helps Philadelphia Improve Green Design
Claim 5 clm-ba6846862a89750d descriptive
low-cost, low-power wireless sensors on a limited set of sites
Published field
snippet · verbatim
Mapping
mapped · no interpretation or interpolation added by this passport
What the mapping says
PWD engineer Matthew Fritch says: "We have developed low-cost and low-power sensor networks to collect environmental data from green infrastructure in real time." The team reports tracking each device's "battery levels and connectivity strengths" and being "still evaluating LoRaWAN networks", a wireless standard. The Bressler Group post, cited in this entry for the wireless-network description, can no longer be retrieved: the address returns a not-found page and the company's site now redirects to a successor firm.
Caveat
The interview establishes low cost, low power and radio connectivity, but the explicit description of a wireless sensor network rests on the design consultancy's post, which is no longer online. No listed source gives the number of monitored sites; the team says only that it can "expand to more sites as the project grows".

Sources carrying this claim

  1. GovTech — Real-Time Data Helps Philadelphia Improve Green Design
  2. Bressler Group — Smart Cities: An IoT Solution for Philly's Green Stormwater Infrastructure
Claim 6 clm-ed9015b14ff0a7be descriptive
including a large rainwater cistern at Drexel's recreation center and campus rain gardens
Published field
snippet · verbatim
Mapping
mapped · no interpretation or interpolation added by this passport
What the mapping says
Drexel researcher Babak K. Roodsari: "we have been monitoring water levels inside one of the largest cisterns in Philadelphia, located at Drexel University's recreation center", elsewhere given as an "8,000-cubic-foot rainwater-harvesting cistern". Karly Soldner names cisterns and rain gardens as the two types the project focuses on, and the article shows a rain garden site at Drexel University and "a smaller on-campus rain garden".
Caveat
Monitoring is not confined to the Drexel campus: the same article pictures devices at a public rain garden in a traffic triangle, at a public playground and at a city-owned site.

Sources carrying this claim

  1. GovTech — Real-Time Data Helps Philadelphia Improve Green Design
Claim 7 clm-531ffe4ce318cbc9 descriptive
log soil moisture, water level and climate data in real time
Published field
snippet · verbatim
Mapping
mapped · no interpretation or interpolation added by this passport
What the mapping says
Drexel researcher Ziwen Yu lists exactly these quantities: "The climate data we collect includes temperature, precipitation, relative humidity and air pressure. We also collect on-site hydrology data to observe fluctuations in soil moisture, water level or unit weight." PWD engineer Matthew Fritch describes the networks as collecting "environmental data from green infrastructure in real time".
Caveat
Real time is the participants' own description of the collection. The article gives no reporting interval and no independent check of how continuously the devices actually deliver.

Sources carrying this claim

  1. GovTech — Real-Time Data Helps Philadelphia Improve Green Design
Claim 8 clm-72789fbbe5153c46 descriptive
feed back into PWD's own design guidance and policy
Published field
snippet · verbatim
Mapping
mapped · no interpretation or interpolation added by this passport
What the mapping says
PWD engineer Stephen White: "We can take the outcomes of experiments and monitoring and plug them into design guidance and policy. Monitoring data collected by the GILL team from a water reuse cistern at Drexel is a great example. We will use that case study as guidance for designers at PWD." His colleague Matthew Fritch adds that GILL's data "can serve as a constant feedback loop to the Water Department's green stormwater infrastructure design team".
Caveat
Both engineers speak in the future and the conditional: the case study "will" be used as guidance, and the data "can serve" as a feedback loop. No listed source names a design standard or a policy that has been changed as a result.

Sources carrying this claim

  1. GovTech — Real-Time Data Helps Philadelphia Improve Green Design
Claim 9 clm-2d8a51241f936986 descriptive
In one documented case the monitoring caught a performance flaw at the Drexel cistern
Published field
snippet · verbatim
Mapping
mapped · no interpretation or interpolation added by this passport
What the mapping says
Two separate statements in the interview bear on this. PWD engineer Stephen White: "We've even used observations from GILL to offer guidance to Drexel's facilities management on an underperforming site. We caught the flaw before significant performance loss occurred." And, on the cistern specifically, Drexel researcher Babak K. Roodsari reports that "the leakage rate from the cistern is nearly equal to the toilet flush use at the center. This means that the available storage could serve two or three times the number of visitors if the leaks were repaired."
Caveat
The passage merges two findings. The engineer's account of catching a flaw refers to an unnamed underperforming site at Drexel, not to the recreation-centre cistern; the cistern finding reported in the same interview is a leakage rate roughly equal to the building's toilet-flush use.

Sources carrying this claim

  1. GovTech — Real-Time Data Helps Philadelphia Improve Green Design
Claim 10 clm-034bcb03d25dc37f descriptive
the vast majority of Philadelphia's stormwater program is genuinely unsensored construction
Published field
lesson · verbatim
Mapping
mapped · no interpretation or interpolation added by this passport
What the mapping says
The operator's programme page reports the scale of the built work -- "We've installed more than 2,800 green tools... ...at nearly 800 sites throughout the city..." -- and describes those tools purely as plants, soil and pipework. Sensors, data and monitoring do not appear anywhere on the page.
Caveat
This is a comparison between a reported build-out of roughly 800 sites and a research project whose site count no source gives. That the rest is unsensored follows from the operator page's silence on monitoring rather than from a stated figure.

Sources carrying this claim

  1. Philadelphia Water Department — Green City, Clean Waters
Claim 11 clm-c2145acc561273bc descriptive
a small, real monitoring layer exists alongside it
Published field
lesson · verbatim
Mapping
mapped · no interpretation or interpolation added by this passport
What the mapping says
The interview documents a working monitoring effort rather than a plan: "Our goal is to collect real-time data on green infrastructure systems using low-cost sensors that will eventually inform improvements to green infrastructure design", with a year of results already reported from the Drexel recreation-centre cistern and devices deployed at rain garden sites.
Caveat
The source gives no count of instrumented sites, so how small the layer is cannot be read off it; the team says only that it can "expand to more sites as the project grows".

Sources carrying this claim

  1. GovTech — Real-Time Data Helps Philadelphia Improve Green Design
Forensic record — source dossiers, gaps, hashes and the exact revision this page renders

This layer records what is known about each source, what is still missing, and the exact snapshot this page is rendering. A missing date, archive or hash stays visible as missing.

unreviewed Revision 2026-08-22-evidence-baseline effective 2026-08-02 · created 2026-08-22

Awaiting operator and domain-expert review; publication of this revision implies neither.

sha256:e8d0ef0ddaf1b7a4b9a86468c618a38fb3b3c39df2a210cac669b4ee52b9b662
Revision history → Permanent version link → Machine-readable record → Evidence Constitution →
11
of 11 claims mapped
3
source dossiers
1
publication dates recorded
0
archives linked
0
exact locators
0
content captures hashed

Governance facts carried by the record

Operator
Philadelphia Water Department + Drexel University Sustainable Water Resource Engineering Laboratory (Green Infrastructure Living Laboratory)
Actor types
utility, research
Funding model
public
Funding description
Not recorded
Cost
Not recorded
Ownership
Not recorded
Decision rights
Not recorded
Exit conditions
Not recorded

3 source dossiers

GovTech — Real-Time Data Helps Philadelphia Improve Green Design govtech.com · 7 linked claims

Open original source ↗

Stable source ID
src-94e9068d19ddfa1e
Publisher
Name not classified · govtech.com
Type / language
web-page · language not classified
Published
2018-12-12
Updated
Not recorded
Source last checked
No source-level check date
Record last verified
2026-08-02
Dossier created
2026-08-22
Retrieved copy
No local capture recorded
Archive
No archived copy linked
Content hash
No captured content hash
Locator
Open the recorded source note

Describes GILL sensor network, Drexel partnership, use of data in PWD design guidance, and the caught-flaw anecdote at the Drexel cistern

Descriptive only — not page/paragraph exact
Claims linked
Bressler Group — Smart Cities: An IoT Solution for Philly's Green Stormwater Infrastructure bresslergroup.com · 1 linked claim

Open original source ↗

Stable source ID
src-4657846d6156498d
Publisher
Name not classified · bresslergroup.com
Type / language
web-page · language not classified
Published
Not recorded
Updated
Not recorded
Source last checked
No source-level check date
Record last verified
2026-08-02
Dossier created
2026-08-22
Retrieved copy
No local capture recorded
Archive
No archived copy linked
Content hash
No captured content hash
Locator
Open the recorded source note

Describes the wireless sensor network approach and LoRaWAN evaluation

Descriptive only — not page/paragraph exact
Claims linked
Philadelphia Water Department — Green City, Clean Waters water.phila.gov · 4 linked claims

Open original source ↗

Stable source ID
src-556277a7f027a533
Publisher
Name not classified · water.phila.gov
Type / language
web-page · language not classified
Published
Not recorded
Updated
Not recorded
Source last checked
No source-level check date
Record last verified
2026-08-02
Dossier created
2026-08-22
Retrieved copy
No local capture recorded
Archive
No archived copy linked
Content hash
No captured content hash
Locator
Open the recorded source note

25-year program scope, 2036 'greened acres' target, confirms the underlying program is a construction plan

Descriptive only — not page/paragraph exact
Claims linked
Known limits of this passport
  • Publisher names and source languages have not yet been classified; domains are recorded without guessing.
  • Existing source notes are descriptive locators, not page- or paragraph-exact citations.
  • A missing archive, publication date or content hash is shown as null rather than inferred.
  • The project-level evidence grade ranks the strongest source in the entry; it is not a truth score for every claim.

Continue exploring

Compare this project

🇺🇸 DC Water's Clean Rivers Tunnels & the Consent Decree Behind Them · Washington D.C. Opposite fix, same problem: DC built deep tunnels with real flow-metering; Philadelphia went green, with only a small sensor lab. 🇺🇸 TARP: Chicago's Deep Tunnel & Reservoir System · Chicago Where Chicago metered a 110-mile gray-infrastructure tunnel, Philadelphia went green — only a fraction of its sites carry sensors. 🇩🇪 Hamburg Heavy Rain Map & Severity Index · Hamburg Both pair a mostly unsensored public-works program with a genuinely instrumented layer feeding real design decisions back.

Explore the wider context

📟 A Reading Is Not a Decision📖 District metering area (DMA)📖 Non-revenue water (NRW)📖 Prepaid metering
📎 Cite this project

1001 Smart Cities (2026). “Green Infrastructure Living Laboratory (GSI Performance Monitoring)” — Philadelphia, United States. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/philadelphia-gsi-performance-monitoring/ (last verified 2026-08-02). Data: CC BY 4.0.

The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.

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