Flood Risk Management and Urban Spatial Planning

Dear Colleagues,

Given the conditions of global environmental change, as outlined in the fifth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, impacts of natural hazards on urban areas are manifesting worldwide. Expected impacts of climate change and the ongoing urbanization have led since the early 2000s to a growing attention for integrating the water system with the urban system. Although this new focus has led to inspiring new ideas, concepts, and visions, daily practice is far more stubborn. Too often, interventions in the urban fabric lead to nonsustainable flood risks, while water managers in turn again revert to exclusive civil technical protection measures. We suspect that this has much to do with the fact that both realms (FRM and USP) can be regarded as subsystems in a Luhmannian sense, whereby each has their own rules, experts, culture, and tools to tackle challenges in real life settings. There is a need for structural couplings between those subsystems in order to deal more profoundly with the challenges of the new climate era. Motives and objectives need to be aligned, networks need to be connected, and collective action needs to be organized. 

This Special Issue would like to contribute to the debate on how to enhance those structural couplings between the water and urban system by raising the following questions:

1. What are the deadlocks between the urban and water systems for structurally mitigating climate change in cities?
2. How can we unlock the potential of spatial planning to improve the resilience of our cities in the wake of climate change?
3. How can we communicate and report between these flood risk experts and spatial planners in a clear and understandable manner?

Linking the two realms is not an easy task and is currently confronted with several challenges that will be discussed in this Special Issue. Closing the gap between the water system and the urban system entails an institutional shift from the traditional approach, which uses mainly engineering and infrastructural measures, toward a more multileveled approach, with measures in the fields of natural conservation, crisis management, and social/financial recovery. The first topic of this Special Issue discusses the difficulties in applying this institutional shift, as the functional differentiating one has been common practice since several ages. Moreover, such a multileveled approach includes the support of new actors from the private and civic sector and generally advocates a shared responsibility over floods. Therefore, the second topic is focused on how to enhance the structural involvement and interaction of these new actors to the water system. This is also mostly situational and dependent on the location, the circumstances at the time, and the specific actor networking at hand. Finally, as spatial planning is an unfixed and dynamic realm, the circumstances that delineate the extent of potential flood hazards and territorial assets are constantly changing. Therefore, the third part of this Special Issue addresses the different methodologies of analysis and the risk assessment tools that are developed. As such, the topics of this Special Issue deal with the institutional aspect, the actor networking, and tools in order to explore the possible structural couplings.

Prof. Dr. Luuk Boelens
Dr. Hanne Glas
Dr. Peter Davids
Dr. Tom Goosse
Guest Editors

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• flood risk
• spatial planning
• natural hazards
• climate change
• water system
• risk assessment