The top priorities for urban water sustainability include the provision of safe drinking water, wastewater handling for public health, and protection against flooding. However, rapidly aging infrastructure, population growth, and increasing urbanization call into question current urban water management strategies, especially in the fast-growing urban areas in Asia and Africa. We review innovative approaches in urban water management with the potential to provide locally adapted, resource-efficient alternative solutions. Promising examples include new concepts for stormwater drainage, increased water productivity, distributed or on-site treatment of wastewater, source separation of human waste, and institutional and organizational reforms. We conclude that there is an urgent need for major transdisciplinary efforts in research, policy, and practice to develop alternatives with implications for cities and aquatic ecosystems alike.

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/352/6288/928.full.pdf

Emerging solutions to the water challenges of an urbanizing world

Performance and implementation of low impact development - A review.

The role of trees in urban stormwater management

Urban pluvial flooding and stormwater management: A contemporary review of China’s challenges and “sponge cities” strategy

Waterlogging is one of the major water issues in most cities of China and directly restricts their urbanization processes. The construction of Sponge City is an effective approach to solving the urban water issues, particularly for the waterlogging. In this study, both the urban issues emerged at the stage of rapid urbanization in China and the demands as well as problems of Sponge City construction related with the water issues were investigated, and the opportunities and challenges for the Sponge City construction in the future were also proposed. It was found that the current stormwater management focused on the construction of gray infrastructures (e.g., drainage network and water tank) based on the fast discharge idea, which was costly and hard to catch up with the rapid expansion of city and its impervious surface, while green infrastructures (e.g., river, lake and wetland) were ignored. Moreover, the current construction of Sponge City was still limited to low impacted development (LID) approach which was concentrated on source control measures without consideration of the critical functions of surrounding landscapes (i.e., mountain, river, wetland, forest, farmland and lake), while application of the integrated urban water system approach and its supported technologies including municipal engineering, urban hydrology, environmental science, social science and ecoscape were relatively weak and needed to be improved. Besides, the lack of special Sponge City plan and demonstration area was also a considerable problem. In this paper, some perspectives on Good Sponge City Construction were proposed such as the point that idea of urban plan and construction should conform to the integral and systematic view of sustainable urban development. Therefore, both the basic theoretical research and the basic infrastructure construction such as monitoring system, drainage facility and demonstration area should be strengthened, meanwhile, the reformation and innovation in the urban water management system and the education system should also be urgently performed. The study was expected to provide a deeper thinking for the current Sponge City construction in China and to give some of suggestions for the future directions to urban plan and construction, as well as urban hydrology discipline.

Opportunities and challenges of the Sponge City construction related to urban water issues in China

The management of urban stormwater has become increasingly complex over recent decades. Consequently, terminology describing the principles and practices of urban drainage has become increasingly diverse, increasing the potential for confusion and miscommunication. This paper documents the history, scope, application and underlying principles of terms used in urban drainage and provides recommendations for clear communication of these principles. Terminology evolves locally and thus has an important role in establishing awareness and credibility of new approaches and contains nuanced understandings of the principles that are applied locally to address specific problems. Despite the understandable desire to have a ‘uniform set of terminology’, such a concept is flawed, ignoring the fact that terms reflect locally shared understanding. The local development of terminology thus has an important role in advancing the profession, but authors should facilitate communication between disciplines and between regio...

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/1573062X.2014.916314

Gilles Rivard

Papers

SUDS, LID, BMPs, WSUD and more – The evolution and application of terminology surrounding urban drainage