Sustainable water management for urban regeneration

Deployable output (source availability) from water resources in north west England is predicted to decrease over the next 25 years. Alternative supply management strategies are planned to help avoid a deficit in the supply–demand balance within the region but have yet to be considered in detail. This paper assesses the contribution of such an alternative supply strategy at local level on the water resource supply–demand balance at regional level based on a proposed urban regeneration site in north west England. Various water conservation and reuse measures are investigated considering local and regional conditions and constraints. Four future scenarios are presented and used to describe how the future might be (rather than how it will be), to allow an assessment to be made of how current ‘sustainable solutions’ might cope whatever the future holds. The analysis determines the solution contributions under each future and indicates that some strategies will deliver their full intended benefits under scenarios least expected but most needed. It is recommended that to help reduce the regional supply–demand deficit and maximise system resilience to future change, a wide range of water demand management measures should be incorporated on this and other sites.

2007

The dominant process that characterises the rainfall/runoff behaviour of a forest catchment is retention. Any attempt to create sustainable urban landscapes must incorporate retention practices as widely as possible including roof gardens, rainwater tanks, in-ground ‘leaky’ devices, access to aquifers, etc. A consequence of this is the shift from equality of before-and-after Qpeak (sub-area development detention practice) to equality of Runoff Volume from the sub-area element as the criterion for sustainable urban development/re-development. This approach is illustrated for the case of a 60-unit residential sub-division. The result can be generalised to forest catchment development cases. The paper concludes with a review and rebuttal of objections raised against retention practice use in storm drainage on the grounds of impact on environmental flows and the consequences of storm successions.

2017

Environmental protection issues are often considered as a toll to be paid and not as a proactive development engine in urban planning. The issue of green areas needs to be re-interpreted as a real infrastructure, which is able to provide tangible benefits to the health and safety of citizens. These aspects represent fundamental issues of the applied research, which should explore methods and techniques able to provide the ecological concerns with the ability to operate efficiently. This paper aims to provide an answer to these questions focusing the attention on the greenery in the city and on one of its most important ecosystem services, which is mitigation of flooding events. The experimentation was carried out in an urban area, verifying, in quantitative terms, the role of the green, engineered with some SUDS, to mitigate the hydrological alteration that the urban development involves. Finally, two proposals have been presented to move from traditional planning based on normative...

Water Practice and Technology, 2016

In order to achieve a sustainable degree of water resources usage, new paradigms in urbanized basins planning must be adopted. Worldwide urbanized areas total population has overcome in 2010, its rural counterpart. While urbanization can be a powerful driver of sustainable development, as the higher population density enables governments to more easily deliver essential infrastructure and services in urban areas at relatively low cost per capita, these benefits do not materialize automatically and inevitably. Water bodies are usually severely hit and impaired by poorly planned urbanization. Old water resources planning paradigms must be abandoned and new ones, which include the connection of ‘green cities’ and their infrastructure with new modes of drainage and landscape planning and improved consideration of receiving waters, ought to be adopted. These must not only be environmentally and ecologically sound, but also functionally and aesthetically attractive to the public. New eco-...

A new paradigm of urban integrated urban water/stormwater/wastewater offers a promise of adequate amounts of clean water for all beneficial uses. This emerging paradigm is based on the premise that urban waters are the lifeline of cities and the focus of the movement towards more sustainable "green" cities. The concepts of the new sustainable urban water management systems and the triple bottom line (TBL) criteria by which their performance will be judged are summarized and outlined. The paradigm considers microscale green development concepts and links them with macroscale watershed management, water/stormwater/wastewater infrastructures and landscape preserving or mimicking nature. Urban water management of the future ecocities may be based on implementing interconnected semiautonomous water management clusters. In the sustainable urban development the macroscale TBL measures of sustainability must be considered. The new systems will combine sustainable water conservation and reuse infrastructure and ecologically and hydrologically functioning landscape. Concepts and fundamental building blocks of ecocities are presented and discussed.

Water Science & Technology

This paper presents the argument that the environmental, social and economic benefits of decentralised systems are such that they should present a serious alternative to centralised systems in existing and future planned urban developments. It will be shown that the combination of technical, social and regulatory factors that influenced the popularity of centralised systems has altered, and that decentralised systems should now be considered as well. The environmental, social and economic advantages and disadvantages of several sustainable watercycle case studies are examined and compared with centralised systems. The studies examined will go from large scale down to designs suitable for typical residential houses on standard urban blocks.

Proceedings of The 2nd World Sustainability Forum, 2012

Greywater (GW) recycling for non-potable uses such as toilet flushing is a management strategy to meet urban water demand with substantial water saving. This paper proposes a system that collects GW from residential buildings and recycles it for toilet flushing in both residential and office buildings. The total cost and water saving of standard sanitation technology were compared with 5 other options requiring less or no potable water use in toilets. Scenarios compare: no GW, individual GW, and shared GW systems with and without low-flush appliances. Typical residential and office buildings in urban mixed-use regeneration areas in the UK were used for these analyses. The results implied that constructed wetland treatment technology with standard appliances is more economically and environmentally viable than other scenarios. By increasing the water and wastewater OPEN ACCESS 2 price, shared GW systems with and without low-flush appliances were viable options within highly water efficient domestic and office buildings.

Water and Environment Journal, 2002

Partnership initiatives to address the problem of diffuse pollution from impermeable surface runoff within urban catchments are reviewed, with particular reference to mutual stakeholder duties and interests which are vested in the regulatory agencies, planning authorities, developers, water companies and highway agencies within the UK. The role of ‘sustainable urban‐drainage systems’within integrated catchment‐based approaches is considered in the context of the requirements of the EU Water Framework Directive and strategic river‐basin management planning.

Water and Environment Journal, 2010

Water-sensitive planning (WSP) is an approach to sustainable development that integrates water considerations into urban and regional planning. Following a literature survey and a condensed report of our 15 years of studies, the paper presents WSP's goals, domains, principles and practices and the paradigms that underpin them, with special attention to stormwater management. It encompasses all planning scales, from the building lot to the catchment area. The paper ends with suggested generic planning principles that evolved with the growth of WSP but are intended to also serve other domains of planning for sustainable development.

Water Research, 2019

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